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 …showed first 75 words of 1126 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1126 total…have already been shown incorrect. However, the ultimate theme of the book is still being debated among evolutionary thinkers today. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory of evolution which postulates that changes such as speciation can occur very quickly, with long periods of little change (equilibria) in between. This theory explains the evolutionary patterns of species as observed in the fossil record, particularly the relatively sudden appearance of new species in a geologically short time period.