“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.

"Evolution is promoted by its pratitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint—and Mr. [sic] Gish is but one of many to make it—the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today…"
"…Evolution therefore came into being as a kind
of secular ideology,
an explicit substitute
for Christianity."
–Michael Ruse

Previous professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada, How Evolution Became a Religion: Creationists Correct? National Post, pp. B1, B3, B7, May 13, 2000. (Ruse was the leading anti-creationist philosopher whose (flawed) arguments seemed to convince the biased judge to rule against the Arkanses 'balanced treatment' (of creation and evolution in schools) bill in 1981/2. At the trial, he and the other anti-creationists loftily dismissed the claim that evolution was an anti-god religion.)
http://www.answersingenesis.org/
home/area/Tools/Quotes/ruse.
asp?vPrint=1