980 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
continues to strike me as viscerally eerie—that I felt something significant lurking
in the short section on trends (1972, pp. 111-112) that Eldredge had written. I
somehow knew that this section included the most important claim in the paper,
but I just couldn't articulate why. Second, I never imagined that the paper would
generate any readership beyond the small profession of paleontology.
Two incidents reinforce my memory of modest expectations. My father, a
brilliant and self-taught man who never had much opportunity for formal education
and therefore grasped the logic of arguments far better than the sociological
realities of the academy, got excited when he read the 1972 paper in manuscript,
and said to me: "this is terrific; this will really make a splash; this will change
things." I replied with mild cynicism, and with the distinctive haughtiness of an
"overwise" youngster who views his parents as naive, that such a hope could not be
fulfilled because so few scientists ever bother to read papers carefully, or to mull
over the implications of an argument not rooted exclusively in graphs and tables.
As a second example, my former thesis advisor John Imbrie stopped to
congratulate me on my "well argued non-Neo-Darwinian argument about
paleontology and evolution" after my original oral presentation in 1971.1
appreciated the praise, but remained mystified by why he thought that an argument
for operational paleobiology, based on proper scaling of allopatric speciation,
could be viewed as theoretically iconoclastic as well.
The early history of punctuated equilibrium unfolded in a fairly conventional
manner for ideas that "catch on" within a field. The debate remained pretty much
restricted to paleontology (and largely pursued in the new journal founded by the
Paleontological Society to publish research in the growing field of evolutionary
studies—Paleobiology). Theoretical implications received an airing, but most
discussion, to our pride and delight, arose from empirical and quantitative studies
done explicitly to test the rival claims of gradualism vs. punctuation and stasis in
data-rich fossil sequences. Most important were the critical studies of Gingerich
(1974,1976) on putative gradualism in Tertiary mammalian sequences from the
western United States. In any case, our hopes for a fruitful unleashing of empirical
studies based on new respect for the power and adequacy of the fossil record were
surely fulfilled.
Enough data, argument, and misconception as well had accumulated by the
summer of 1976 that Eldredge and I decided to write a retrospective and follow-
up—a longer article dedicated mostly to the detailed analysis of published data,
and appearing in Paleobiology under the title: "Punctuated equilibria: the tempo
and mode of evolution reconsidered" (Gould and Eldredge, 1977). Meanwhile, we
couldn't fail to note that the arguments of punctuated equilibrium, substantially
aided by the support and extension of our colleague S. M. Stanley in a widely
discussed PNAS article of 1975 that introduced the term "species selection" in a
modern context (and developed the implications that I had been unable to articulate
from our original section on evolutionary trends), were now beginning to attract
attention in the larger