British paleontologist (1933–1998)
Colin Patterson FRS (1933–1998), was a British palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London from 1962 to his official retirement in 1993 who specialised in fossil fish and systematics, advocating the transformed cladistics school.
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Alternative Names:
C. Patterson
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Just as pre-Darwinian biology was carried out by people whose faith was in the Creator and His plan, post-Darwinian biology is being carried out by people whose faith is in, almost, the deity of Darwin. They've seen their task as to elaborate his theory and to fill the gaps in it, to fill the trunk and twigs of the tree. But it seems to me that theoretical framework has very little impace on the actual progress of the work in biological research. In a way some aspects of Darwinism seems to me to have held back the progress of science.
It seemed obvious to [Darwin] that, if his theory of evolution [were] correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it, since each stratum should contain links between the species of earlier and later strata, and if sufficient fossils were collected, it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor descendent sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not so in Darwin’s time, and today, after more than another hundred years of assiduous fossil collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps.