Stephen Jay Gould Quotes:
Ocupation: Paleontologist
Life: September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002
Birthday: September 10
Death: May 20
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.
source: "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, pp. 2 - 3, 1987.
topic: Views, Long, Misunderstood, Speciation, Sudden Change, Geological Time, Bedding, Traditional
