Steven J. Gould

Stephen Jay Gould
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002) was a New York-born American paleontologist and writer of popular science. Born Jewish, he did not formally practice any organized religion.
With Niles Eldredge he proposed in 1972 the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly in comparatively brief periods of environmental stress, separated by longer periods of evolutionary stability. According to Gould, this overthrew a key tenet of neo-Darwinism; according to most evolutionary biolo…