American Decades
Gould, Stephen Jay 1941-
PALEONTOLOGIST AND AUTHOR
Background.
Born in New York City on 10 September 1941, Gould was from an early age intrigued by dinosaurs and fossils. He received his B.A. from Antioch College in 1963 and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967. That same year he began his illustrious career as a teacher at Harvard University.
Punctuated Equilibrium.
In 1972 Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge produced a paper, "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism," in which they challenged the theory of phyletic gradualism, which contends that species evolve gradually over long periods of time. Gould and Eldredge argued that new species arise over a relatively short period of geologic time through rapid change in small groups of species. They promoted their view after noting the paucity of transitional varieties of animals found in the fossil record.
Creationism versus Evolution.
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1980's Science and Technology
