“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we waited for tonight’s session to begin I read to Jane a letter I’ve just written to a prominent biologist. I’m asking his help in obtaining source material for the visual “evidence” for evolution — showing the forms involved, say, as little by little the descendants of the reptile changed into the bird. By evidence in this case I mean drawings, based upon the best scientific assumptions as to what all of those intermediate creatures must have looked like. I also wanted estimates as to how they survived for so many millennia while the changes took place. As far as I’ve been able to learn, no such transitional fossils have been found, like the discrete forms of reptiles and birds that have been discovered, so I decided to search out the next best thing: the visual representations as to what they must have looked like. But what good were the developing stages of a wing, I wondered, and how many uncounted generations of reptiles-turning-into-birds had to carry those appendages, before a fully-formed bird was finally hatched that could fly? Would nature do things that way?

(“I’m a professional artist,” I wrote to the scientist, “and at times have been puzzled enough by questions about evolution to consider making my own series of drawings that would show the transformation from reptile to bird, for instance, just to see if I could do it convincingly…. But each time I start visualizing the results, I end up with two notions: First, that as I work with those intermediate forms I’ll become involved with myth and fantasy, rather than ‘fact.’ Just how did reptiles change into birds? What kind of intermediate forms were there? Second, the idea of my drawings makes me think that others must have done it already, not once but many times. So what I really want to ask you for are references to later textbooks, that are more clear and precise than those I have on the origin of major new species. I’m especially interested in visual data….”