PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTION1

Some especially stimulating works of paleontologists on Evolution have appeared within the past few years, two of the most recent being the great two volume "Evolution Emerging " (Gregory, 1951) and a compact little work entitled "The Dilemma of the Paleontologist, " (Case, 1951). Certain points of disagreement among evolutionary paleontologists are due to a lack of precise definitions, others to just the opposite, the attempt to make hard, fast and inflexible definitions which might be mathematically exact but cannot be maintained. Pronouncements of various "laws " are being increasingly questioned. It is becoming clear that certain of the so-called Laws of Evolution are, as usually stated, only broad generalizations and not laws at all. One effort of this paper is to examine and restate some of these generalizations, and attempt to restate them in such a way as to take care of the various exceptions that plague the evolutionist. In this effort I have attempted to tell something of the limitations of the fiel