The Pattern of Evolution by Niles Eldredge

From the Publisher

From one of the world's most accomplished scientific thinkers comes a fascinating exploration of the way we investigate and understand the connections between the living and nonliving worlds.

Publishers Weekly

In these rich, dense, stimulating essays, Eldredge (Life in the Balance), curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, improvises on Darwin by sketching a grand, sweeping, ecologically based theory that links biological evolution to physical events in the earth's history. He maintains that the driving force of evolution is global mass extinctions of a majority of species, which paves the way for the advent of new species that inhabit and rebuild disrupted ecosystems. What caused these extinctions? Eldredge goes beyond the usual culprits--rapid global cooling, periodic ice ages, catastrophic meteor collisions--by also citing plate tectonics, shifts in the earth's crust causing dramatic changes in oceanic circulation and global climate. In a sense, his theory fleshes out the notion of "punctuated equilibria" he developed with Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, which holds that evolution proceeds episodically, in relatively short spasms that "punctuate" monotonous eons where nothing much happens. Mixing scientific adventure (the author's search for the Taita falcon, one of the world's rarest birds, near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe) and freewheeling speculations on geology, paleontology, genetics and evolutionary theory, these elegant essays explore how the recognition of patterns in nature--by Darwin, Linnaeus, geologist James Hutton, continental-drift pioneer Alfred Wegener and others--often provides the key to scientific breakthroughs. A deep probe of how scientific advances emerge, the book touches upon current controversies as well, including the "snowball earth" theory of CIT geologist Joseph Kirschvink, which asserts that massive glaciers invaded the tropics just 600 million years ago, and that the earth's crust and upper mantle rotated as a shell 90 degrees, stirring the evolutionary pot. Author tour; rights: the Spieler Agency. (Nov.)

Booknews

Attempts to take the first steps towards a fuller understanding of the process of evolution. Complaining that simple reliance on the competition to reproduce fails to explain cross-genealogical patterns in the history of life, the author looks at the history of evolutionary thought and argues that geological and other events are intricately linked to how species developed over time. Finally, he contends that his insight shows how science itself needs to reintegrate for a full understanding of the universe around us. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

The American Biology Teacher

This book [represents] an approachable summary and acts as an introduction to many important concepts (both historic and current) in evolutionary theory.

What People Are Saying

Ian Tattersall
[Eldredge] uses his unparalleled gifts of synthesis to weave together an extraordinary diversity of information into a single coherent theory of the evolution of the biosphere. . . Rarely does one have the pleasure of reading a book that one can truly call significant, but this one is such... This smoothly flowing and highly readable book is for everyone interested in how the living world fits together and how it got to be the way it is (Ian Tattersall is Curator, Deptartment of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History).

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents