CHAPTER NINE
Punctuated Equilibrium
and the Validation of
Macroevolutionary TheoryWhat Every Paleontologist Knows
An Introductory Example
If Hugh Falconer (1808-1865) had not died before writing his major and synthetic
works, he might be remembered today as perhaps the greatest vertebrate
paleontologist of the late 19th century. Falconer went to India in 1830 as a surgeon
for the East India Company, but spent most of his time as a naturalist in two very
different realms. In 1832, he became superintendent of the botanical garden at
Saharanpur, at the base of the Siwaliks, a "foothill" range of the Himalayas. There
he played a major role in fostering the cultivation of Indian tea, but he also
collected and described one of the most famous and important of all fossil faunas,
the Tertiary mammalian remains of the Siwalik Hills. Broken health forced a return
to England in 1842, where he worked for several years on the collection of Indian
fossils at the British Museum. He then returned to India, this time as professor of
botany at Calcutta Medical College, but declining health forced his permanent
repatriation to England in 1855. During the last decade of his life, Falconer studied
the late Tertiary and Quaternary mammals of Europe and North America,
particularly the history of fossil elephants.
Colleagues revered Falconer for his prodigious memory, his gargantuan
capacity for work, and his inexhaustible attention to the minutest details. Darwin,
as discussed in Chapter 1 (pp. 1-6), held immense respect for Falconer, and
invested much hope and trepidation in the prospect that such a master of detail
might be persuaded about the probable truth of evolution.
Among all his observations and general conclusions, Falconer took greatest
interest in the stability he observed in species of fossil vertebrates, often through
long geological periods, and across such maximal changes of environment as the
recent glacial ages. Falconer, of course, began with the usual assumption that such
stability implied creation and permanence of species. Darwin included him among
the great paleontologists who supported such a view. Noting the strength of this
opposition to evolution, Darwin wrote
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