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The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology
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, paleontology 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, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies.
This incredible ascendance of this once-maligned science to the vanguard of a field is chronicled in The Paleobiological Revolution. Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.
584 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
David Sepkoski
8 books8 followersDavid Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books, most recently Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
November 3, 2022
Though not its exclusive topic, this book could reasonably be characterised as: the field of paleontology considers the legacy of Stephen Jay Gould, its justly most famous advocate, who nevertheless promoted the importance of his own theories, it appears, well beyond their worth.
His is an interesting legacy, to be sure. The journal Paleobiology, also a topic of the book, was founded in part and edited by SJG and had a huge influence on maturation of the field. SJG's own wide-ranging monthly essays in Natural History, collected into many books, are fascinating and widely popular and often covered paleontological topics. His continued advocacy for the field inspired many both inside and outside of science to take a closer look. And yes, pluralistic approaches to evolutionary explanation are required, and are richly pursued now in every area.
Yet his specific contributions to theory are confused, poorly circumscribed, and remain beyond recovery. Think of exaptation, a term which is easy to describe but quite difficult to apply with any sort of certainty in practice, and which doesn't add further insight in any event; nearly any feature had previous exposure to selection as something else. Slotting punctuational speciation and stasis, sans straw men, alongside other mechanisms might have been fine, though there's still the metaphysical nature of stasis -- again, easy to describe, difficult to come up with a consistent mechanism. Claiming PE's primacy while simultaneously mischaracterising GG Simpson's legacy and views over time is ridiculous. And unnecessary. As this volume shows, PE certainly stimulated interest in macroevolutionary models; but this has resulted in a lot of wasted effort as well expended on a macroevolutionary model that should never have claimed to be comprehensive. And unfortunately, PE has, like the spandrels paper, had an outsized effect on views of evolution from outside of biology, due to Gould's rhetorical strengths and positioning as overthrowing a prevailing dogma, with an audience of readers unequipped to judge its (agenda-filled) merits.
While not all chapters hit, all are useful. A variety of perspectives presented in a variety of ways. Joe Cain's chapter on SJG's "ritual patricide" of GGS is particularly good on the non-science parts, and includes the text of a 1980 Q&A with Simpson about PE.
Read George Gaylord Simpson's Tempo and Mode in Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution and try to find what the heck SJG is talking about, that a 'hardening' of adaptationism happened from the first to the second. GGS goes to great trouble to be nuanced throughout, more so than in Tempo and Mode which was itself quite nuanced. The final section in MFE on quantum evolution is short, but contra SJG's characterisation in his obituary of GGS written for the journal Evolution and repeated elsewhere, it is not made into an afterthought; GGS writes there that it is short because much of the material covering speciation and macroevolution is covered in previous chapters with more nuance and more broadly.
His is an interesting legacy, to be sure. The journal Paleobiology, also a topic of the book, was founded in part and edited by SJG and had a huge influence on maturation of the field. SJG's own wide-ranging monthly essays in Natural History, collected into many books, are fascinating and widely popular and often covered paleontological topics. His continued advocacy for the field inspired many both inside and outside of science to take a closer look. And yes, pluralistic approaches to evolutionary explanation are required, and are richly pursued now in every area.
Yet his specific contributions to theory are confused, poorly circumscribed, and remain beyond recovery. Think of exaptation, a term which is easy to describe but quite difficult to apply with any sort of certainty in practice, and which doesn't add further insight in any event; nearly any feature had previous exposure to selection as something else. Slotting punctuational speciation and stasis, sans straw men, alongside other mechanisms might have been fine, though there's still the metaphysical nature of stasis -- again, easy to describe, difficult to come up with a consistent mechanism. Claiming PE's primacy while simultaneously mischaracterising GG Simpson's legacy and views over time is ridiculous. And unnecessary. As this volume shows, PE certainly stimulated interest in macroevolutionary models; but this has resulted in a lot of wasted effort as well expended on a macroevolutionary model that should never have claimed to be comprehensive. And unfortunately, PE has, like the spandrels paper, had an outsized effect on views of evolution from outside of biology, due to Gould's rhetorical strengths and positioning as overthrowing a prevailing dogma, with an audience of readers unequipped to judge its (agenda-filled) merits.
While not all chapters hit, all are useful. A variety of perspectives presented in a variety of ways. Joe Cain's chapter on SJG's "ritual patricide" of GGS is particularly good on the non-science parts, and includes the text of a 1980 Q&A with Simpson about PE.
Read George Gaylord Simpson's Tempo and Mode in Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution and try to find what the heck SJG is talking about, that a 'hardening' of adaptationism happened from the first to the second. GGS goes to great trouble to be nuanced throughout, more so than in Tempo and Mode which was itself quite nuanced. The final section in MFE on quantum evolution is short, but contra SJG's characterisation in his obituary of GGS written for the journal Evolution and repeated elsewhere, it is not made into an afterthought; GGS writes there that it is short because much of the material covering speciation and macroevolution is covered in previous chapters with more nuance and more broadly.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review