“There seems to be a striking commonality between all major transitions in the evolution of life. In each new class of biological objects, the principal types emerge abruptly, and intermediate grades (e.g., intermediates between the precellular stage of evolution and prokaryotic cells or between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells), typically, cannot be identified.”
—Eugene V. Koonin

The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Biology Direct 2007, 2:21
http://www.biology-direct.com
/content/2/1/21

Reviewer's report 1
W. Ford Doolittle, Dalhousie University
“Evolutionary scenarios are an artform. They usefully exercise the brain, causing us to look at old data in new ways and stimulating us to collect new data. They do not have to be true!”

Exchange between W. Ford Doolittle and author Eugene V Koonin in regard to Koonin’s hypothesis, “The ancient Virus World and evolution of cells”
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/1/1/29

"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is
not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that
carriesthe same validity as a bedtime story - amusing,
perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."
—Henry Gee

Ardent Evolutionist, Dr. Henry Gee, Senior Editor, Biological Sciences for the journal Nature as written in his book,In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 126-127.

"The 'modern evolutionary synthesis' convinced most biologists that natural selection was the only directive influence on adaptive evolution. Today, however, dissatisfaction with the synthesis is widespread, and creationists and antidarwinians are multiplying. The central problem with the synthesis is its failure to show (or to provide distinct signs) that natural selection of random mutations could account for observed levels of adaptation."
—Egbert G. Leigh, Jr.

Biologist at Smithsonian Institute, in The Modern Synthesis, Ronald Fisher and Creationism, in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 14, No. 12, pp. 495-498, December 1999, p. 495.

 "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some
of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment,
a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set
of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
—Richard Lewontin

Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University, evolutionary geneticist, Billions and billions of Demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.

“Today's computational tools use sequence similarity, assuming that genes with similar sequences indicate common ancestry …
But Durand's tests showed that this assumption often does not hold. Her team found disturbing results when they compared sequence similarity to their Neighborhood Correlation method in evaluating the 20 gene families with established histories. The sequence similarity method actually yielded false ancestral associations and missed true ancestral relationships.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2008/05/08051520
5640.htm