The difficulties and objections may be classed under the following heads: ... Secondly, is it possible that an animal having, for instance, the structure and habits of a bat, could have been formed by the modification of some other animal with widely different habits and structure? Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, an organ of trifling importance, such as the tail of a giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and, on the other hand, an organ so wonderful as the eye? (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter VI, “Difficulties of the Theory.”)
No one has ever produced a [new] species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question. (Colin Patterson, “Cladistics,” BBC, Interview with Brian, Peter Franz, 4 March 1982.)
In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations have turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology. (Arthur Koestler, Janus : A Summing Up, Vintage Books, 1978, p.185)
The “evolution in action” of J. Huxley and other biologists is simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries! Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of the genome, does not imply evolution, and we have tangible proof of this in many panchronic species. (Pierre Paul Grassé, Evolution On Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Information, Academic Press, January, 1978)