Because of the apparent frailty of their bodies, and the ability of many of them to fly, insects are thought of being rarely found as fossils.

Having always been intrigued by historical geology with its eras of hundreds of millions of years, I was interested to know to what extent it could be, and has been, tested by experiment. Some years ago, I renewed my studies on the subject, paying particular attention to the principles of stratigraphy which are used to obtain a relative chronology from superposition of strata.

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists of all time, described the "gulf" that logically separates the concrete world of hard objects on the one hand from the abstract world of ideas on the other. He wrote:

It is now almost two decades since the then Assistant Chief Geologist
of the US Geological Survey, Dr. G. Brent Dalrymple, described
polonium radiohalos as "a very tiny mystery."¹ An expert
geochronologist, Dalrymple was being cross-examined in the Federal

Evolutionary theory emphasizes the "survival of the fittest," and the idea that progress comes through elimination of less-fit organisms. This idea has been used to justify an ethic of selfishness by saying that selfish behavior has produced great evolutionary progress.