Stephen Jay Gould.

Stephen Jay Gould was born in New York City in 1941. At the age of five, he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The displays of dinosaur eggs, bones, and mounted skeletons provided a foundation for his later interest and research in the science of paleontology; the study of fossils and ancient life forms. Gould completed his primary and secondary education in New York City schools. At Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, he earned an A.B. degree in 1963. In 1967, he earned a Ph.D. degree in paleontology at Columbia University and accepted a position as professor of geology at Harvard University; in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gould supported Charles Darwin's hypothesis of evolution but did not see smooth transitions from one species to another. He became an outspoken critic of uniformitarianism--the doctrine that geophysical agents have been more or less constant over geologic time. In 1972, Gould and Niles Eldredge published a paper on the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium postulates that evolution occurs at irregular intervals of time: long periods with little change in species, followed by bursts of species transformation. This is the opposite of Darwin's theory that evolution is a gradual, smooth progression. Some paleontologists labeled these bursts of transformation and speciation as "little creations." Gould and Eldredge offered their theory as an alternative to Darwin's theory of natural selection. They argue that gradualism exists but that punctuated equilibrium is demonstrated frequently in the fossil record. INSET: Stephen Jay Gould.