Sigmund Freud Often Remarked That Great Revolutions

I Would Rather Label The Whole Enterprise Of Setting A Biological Value Upon Groups For What It Is: Irrelevant, Intellectually Unsound, And Highly Injurious.

An Old Paleontological In Joke Proclaims That Mammalian Evolution Is A Tale Told By Teeth Mating To Produce Slightly Altered Descendant Teeth.

I Was Lucky To Wander Into Evolutionary Theory, One Of The Most Exciting And Important Of All Scientific Fields. I Had Never Heard Of It When I Started At A Rather Tender Age; I Was Simply Awed By Dinosaurs. I Thought Paleontologists Spent Their Lives Digging Up Bones And Putting Them Together, Never Venturing Beyond The Momentous Issue Of What Connects To What. Then I Discovered Evolutionary Theory. Ever Since Then, The Duality Of Natural History-richness In Particularities And Potential Union In Underlying Explanation-has Propelled Me.

We Who Revel In Nature's Diversity And Feel Instructed By Every Animal Tend To Brand Homo Sapiens As The Greatest Catastrophe Since The Cretaceous Extinction.

The Theory Of Punctuated Equilibrium, Proposed By Niles Eldredge And Myself, Is Not, As So Often Misunderstood, A Radical Claim For Truly Sudden Change, But A Recognition That Ordinary Processes Of Speciation, Properly Conceived As Glacially Slow By The Standard Of Our Own Life-span, Do Not Resolve Into Geological Time As Long Sequences Of Insensibly Graded Intermediates (the Traditional, Or Gradualistic, View), But As Geologically "sudden" Origins At Single Bedding Planes.