“The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.”

— Carl Sagan , book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 29

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Carl Sagan 365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change", p. 182
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Galileo's Dream

Source: Galileo's Dream (2009), Ch. 13, p. 295

“Geology at first seems inconsistent with the authority of the Mosaic record.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 389
Context: Geology at first seems inconsistent with the authority of the Mosaic record. A storm of unreasoning indignation rises against its teachers. In time, its truths, being found quite irresistible, are admitted, and mankind continue to regard the Scriptures with the same respect as before. So also with several other sciences.