Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?

Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.

Words Change Their Meanings, Just As Organisms Evolve. We Would Impose An Enormous Burden On Our Economy If We Insisted On Payment In Cattle Every Time We Identified A Bonus As A Pecuniary Advantage (from The Latin Pecus , Or Cattle, A Verbal Fossil From A Former Commercial Reality).

Results Rarely Specify Their Causes Unambiguously. If We Have No Direct Evidence Of Fossils Or Human Chronicles, If We Are Forced To Infer A Process Only From Its Modern Results, Then We Are Usually Stymied Or Reduced To Speculation About Probabilities. For Many Roads Lead To Almost Any Rome.

Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.

Odd Arrangements And Funny Solutions Are The Proof Of Evolution - Paths That A Sensible God Would Never Tread But That A Natural Process, Constrained By History, Follows Perforce.