Niles Eldredge - Punctuated Equilibrium

"Niles Eldredge is a curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and codiscoverer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium—a milestone in evolutionary theory. His numerous books on evolution include Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (Wiley, 1995), The Triumph of Evolution . . . And the Failure of Creationism (Freeman, 2000), Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene (Norton, 2004), and most recently Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (Norton, 2005), which he wrote to accompany the exhibit “Darwin,” which he curated at the American Museum of Natural History." Virginia Quarterly Review 2006

This is a well-written and interesting "confession" - highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the times and background of Charles Darwin's theory. I find it intriguing that Niles Eldredge gives so much importance to Creationism that he has published a book on the subject in 2000.

What caught my attention in this article is a quote from a book written by Gaylord Simpson who was his predecessor as Curator of  Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. It describes nicely the tension between those professionals who are studying history of life through fossils and those who use genetics and DNA for the task. (When I noticed this while studying Cambrian fossil evidence of early life I separated the lines of inquiry and opened this blog.)

Quote begins
Indeed, had I read the introduction to my distinguished predecessor George Gaylord Simpson’s famous 1944 book Tempo and Mode in Evolution, I might have seen that paleontology was a decidedly rocky road for walking the evolutionary walk. Simpson had wryly encapsulated the tension between geneticists and paleontologists when he wrote:

Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a person who shut himself in a room, pulled down the shades, watched small flies disporting themselves in bottles, and thought that he was studying nature. A pursuit so removed from the realities of life, they said, had no signficance for the true biologist.

On the other hand, the geneticists said that paleontology had no further contributions to make to biology, that its only point had been the completed demonstration of the truth of evolution, and that it was a subject too purely descriptive to merit the name “science.” The paleontologist, they believed, is like a man who undertakes to study the principles of the internal combustion engine by standing on a street corner and watching the motor cars whiz by. G. G. Simpson,Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), xvVirginia Quarterly Review 2006

But there is more!

Curators Niles and George got into troubles not only with other professionals with that punctuated equilibrium but also with Creationists:

The creationists of the day got into the act as well.

In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian ministers during the 1980 presidential campaign, that evolution “is a theory, a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed.” The creationist who managed to get to Reagan’s handlers later bragged to me that those scientists in question were none other than Gould and me. [huh...]

The syllogism ran something like this:
(1) Darwin said that evolution is slow, steady, and gradual;
(2) some scientists say that evolution consists of rapid bursts of change interrupting vastly longer periods of evolutionary stagnation; ergo,
(3) some scientists don’t follow Darwin, meaning
(4) some scientists oppose evolution.

Then, as now, at least in the public domain, “Darwin” is code for “evolution.” The two are virtual synonyms.
Virginia Quarterly Review 2006

Punctuated equilibrium - Paleontologist's view
Let me quote a bit more from his text with repeated recommendation to readers of this blog to read it all at the source - it is very readable:

I take being called anti-Darwinian very personally. It has always hurt, for I have always thought of myself as more or less a knee-jerk neo-Darwinian, someone who thinks the basic mechanism underlying evolutionary change, including the origin, modification, and maintenance of adaptations, resides squarely in the domain of natural selection.

And I have always felt that, with one or two major exceptions, my version of how the evolutionary process works lines up very well with Darwin’s. Take natural selection, for example: I see natural selection just as Darwin originally did—as the statistical effect that relative success in the economic sphere (obtaining energy resources, warding off predators and disease, etc.) has on an organism’s success in reproducing.

This conservative view contrasts strongly with the modern tendency to see natural selection as a matter of competition among genes to leave copies of themselves to the next generation—a position I take to be hopelessly teleological, obfuscating the real interactive dynamics of economic and reproductive organismic behavior driving the evolutionary process. [huh...]

But, of course, there are those sticking points: Darwin (or so the cartoon version of him goes) enjoined us to expect evolution for the most part to be slow, steady, and gradual—whereas to me the fossil record screams loudly that such, for the most part, is not the case
Virginia Quarterly Review 2006

I must confess that I like the personal, fun and simultaneously very serious way this die-hard Darwinist by Natural Selection Niles Eldredge takes things.