“An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

— Stephen Jay Gould , book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 60

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

Ilsa J. Bick (1957) American writer

Source: Drowning Instinct

“Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.”

Alice Hoffman book The Ice Queen

Source: The Ice Queen

“When science shall have effectually demonstrated to us the origin of matter, and proved the fallacy of the occultists and old philosophers who held (as their descendants now hold) that matter is but one of the correlations of spirit, then will the world of skeptics have a right to reject the old Wisdom, or throw the charge of obscenity in the teeth of the old religions.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XV

“The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.”

Marina Warner (1946) writer and mythographer

Source: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

“They say Archaeopteryx is proof for evolution. You got one here on the table, Brother, Archaeopteryx? Whenever you buy a bag of dinosaurs, they almost always stick one of these in there. Archaeopteryx. Wow. And this somehow gets the impression to the kids, "Wow, we've got proof that dinosaurs turned to birds. Here's one here with feathers on it." They're lying. It's still in the textbooks, I mean today, about Archaeopteryx. And it's been proven years ago, Archaeopteryx was just a bird, a perching bird. Alan Feduccia, who believes in evolution, says it's not a missing link. It had the right features for flight. All the features of the brain were for flight, okay? Archaeopteryx means "ancient wing," and he had claws on his wings. Well, that's kind of unusual, okay. But twelve birds today have claws on their wings. There is the swan, the ibis, the hoatzin… several birds have claws. They say, "Well, he had teeth in his beak." Well, not many birds have teeth, some do. There's the hummingbird that has teeth in his beak. But most birds don't have teeth, I agree. Actually, some mammals have teeth, some don't. Some birds have teeth, some don't. Some fish have teeth, some don't. Some of you have teeth, some don't, okay? Missing link!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

“It is only a plain tale of plain people told in the plain dialect of a plain old woman.”

Eliza Calvert Hall (1856–1935) American author, women's rights advocate and suffragist

Hall, Eliza Calvert (1910). "Introduction". Sally Ann's Experience. Illustrated by G. Patrick Nelson, Theodore Brown Hapgood. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. pp. v - xii. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ugAZAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA50&dq=aunt+jane+of+kentucky&ots=Oaz4lMOoks&sig=_ET0k7b6BWOlRwCqW5Qja3baNvg#v=onepage&q=Introduction&f=false.
Lida Obenchain's description of her then famous story Sally Ann's Experience.

“Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do.”

Jimmy Carr (1972) British comedian and humourist

Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (September 21, 2006) Only Joking: What's So Funny About Making People Laugh?, Gotham, ISBN 1592402356, p. 3.

“Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

“Dull as a twice-told tale.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

A Night Piece (c. 1761)

“I nearly always wear almost the very same things. But I alter the combinations slightly.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: THE VALUE OF HUMAN DIGNITY: Brunello Cucinelli’s Vision for a Better World https://gearpatrol.com/2018/12/20/brunello-cucinelli-interview/ John Zientek, Gear Patrol, December 20, 2018

“An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

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