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The Paleobiological Revolution – Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology - Chicago Scholarship Online
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The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology

David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse

Abstract

Paleontology has long had a troubled relationship with evolutionary biology. Suffering from a reputation as a second-tier science and conjuring images of fossil collectors and amateurs who dig up bones, it was marginalized even by Darwin himself, who worried that incompleteness in the fossil record would be used against his theory of evolution. But with the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontolo ... More

Keywords: paleontology, evolutionary biology, Darwin, fossil record, theory of evolution, George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2009 Print ISBN-13: 9780226748610
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226748597.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

David Sepkoski, editor

Michael Ruse, editor

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Paleontology at the High Table

David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse

I Major Innovations in Paleobiology

Chapter One The Emergence of Paleobiology

David Sepkoski

Chapter Two The Fossil Record: Biological or Geological Signal?

Michael J. Benton

Chapter Three Biogeography and Evolution in the Early Paleozoic

Richard A. Fortey

Chapter Four The Discovery of Conodont Anatomy and Its Importance for Understanding the Early History of Vertebrates

Richard J. Aldridge and Derek E. G. Briggs

Chapter Five Emergence of Precambrian Paleobiology: A New Field of Science

J. William Schopf

Chapter Six Dinosaurs at the Table

John R. Horner

Chapter Seven Ladders, Bushes, Punctuations, and Clades: Hominid Paleobiology in the Late Twentieth Century

Tim D. White

Chapter Eight Punctuated Equilibria and Speciation: What Does It Mean to Be a Darwinian?

Patricia Primehouse

Chapter Nine Molecular Evolution vis-à-vis Paleontology

Francisco J. Ayala

II The Historical and Conceptual Significance of Recent Paleontology

Chapter Ten Beyond Detective Work: Empirical Testing in Paleontology

Derek Turner

Chapter Eleven Taxic Paleobiology and the Pursuit of a Unified Evolutionary Theory

Todd A. Grantham

Chapter Twelve Ideas in Dinosaur Paleontology: Resonating to Social and Political Context

David E. Fastovsky

Chapter Thirteen Reg Sprigg and the Discovery of the Ediacara Fauna in South Australia: Its Approach to the High Table

Susan Turner and David Oldroyd

Chapter Fourteen The Morphological Tradition in German Paleontology: Otto Jaekel, Walter Zimmermann, and Otto Schmdewolf

Manfred D. Laubichler and Karl J. Niklas

Chapter Fifteen “Radical” or “Conservative”? The Origin and Early Reception of Punctuated Equilibrium

David Sepkoski

Chapter Sixteen The Shape of Evolution: The MBL Model and Clade Shape

John Huss

Chapter Seventeen Ritual Patricide: Why Stephen Jay Gould Assassinated George Gaylord Simpson

Joe Cain

Chapter Eighteen The Consensus That Changed the Paleobiological World

Arnold I. Miller

III Reflections on Recent Paleobiology

Chapter Nineteen The Infusion of Biology into Paleontological Research

James W. Valentine

Chapter Twenty From Empirical Paleoecology to Evolutionary Paleobiology: A Personal Journey

Richard Bambach

Chapter Twenty-One Intellectual Evolution Across an Academic Landscape

Rebecca Z. German

Chapter Twenty-Two The Problem of Punctuational Speciation and Trends in the Fossil Record

Anthony Hallam

Chapter Twenty-Three Punctuated Equilibrium versus Community Evolution

Arthur J. Boucot

Chapter Twenty-Four An Interview with David M. Raup

Edited by David Sepkoski and David M. Raup

Chapter Twenty-Five Paleontology in the Twenty-first Century

David Jablonski

Chapter Twenty-Six Punctuations and Paradigms: Has Paleobiology Been through a Paradigm Shift?

Michael Ruse

End Matter

Contributors

Index