In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould took the scientific world by storm with
his paper on punctuated equilibrium, written with Niles Eldredge.
Challenging a core assumption of Darwin's theory of evolution, it
launched the career of one of the most influential evolutionary
biologists of our time--perhaps the best known since Darwin.
Now, thirty-five years later, and five years after his untimely
death, "Punctuated Equilibrium" (originally published as the
central chapter of Gould's masterwork, "The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory") offers his only book-length testament on an
idea he fiercely promoted, repeatedly refined, and tirelessly
defended. Punctuated equilibrium holds that the great majority of
species originate in geological moments (punctuations) and persist
in stasis. The idea was hotly debated because it forced biologists
to rethink entrenched ideas about evolutionary patterns and
processes. But as Gould shows here in his typically exhaustive
coverage, the idea has become the foundation of a new view of
hierarchical selection and macroevolution.
What emerges strikingly from this book is that punctuated
equilibrium represents a much broader paradigm about the nature of
change--a worldview that may be judged as a distinctive and
important movement within recent intellectual history. Indeed we
may now be living within a punctuation, and our awareness of what
this means may be the enduring legacy of one of America's
best-loved scientists.
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