The Experts below are selected from a list of 276 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
David Sepkoski - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
the unfinished synthesis Paleontology and evolutionary biology in the 20th century
Journal of the History of Biology, 2019Co-Authors: David SepkoskiAbstract:In the received view of the history of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, Paleontology was given a prominent role in evolutionary biology thanks to the significant influence of paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson on both the institutional and conceptual development of the Synthesis. Simpson's 1944 Tempo and Mode in Evolution is considered a classic of Synthesis-era biology, and Simpson often remarked on the influence of other major Synthesis figures - such as Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky - on his developing thought. Why, then, did paleontologists of the 1970s and 1980s - Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, David M. Raup, Steven Stanley, and others - so frequently complain that Paleontology remained marginalized within evolutionary biology? This essay considers three linked questions: first, were paleontologists genuinely welcomed into the Synthetic project during its initial stages? Second, was the initial promise of the role for Paleontology realized during the decades between 1950 and 1980, when the Synthesis supposedly "hardened" to an "orthodoxy"? And third, did the period of organized dissent and opposition to this orthodoxy by paleontologists during the 1970s and 1980s bring about a long-delayed completion to the Modern Synthesis, or rather does it highlight the wider failure of any such unified Darwinian evolutionary consensus?
-
Paleontology at the “high table”? Popularization and disciplinary status in recent Paleontology
Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, 2013Co-Authors: David SepkoskiAbstract:This paper examines the way in which paleontologists used “popular books” to call for a broader “expanded synthesis” of evolutionary biology. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of influential paleontologists, including Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, David Raup, Steven Stanley, and others, aggressively promoted a new theoretical, evolutionary approach to the fossil record as an important revision of the existing synthetic view of Darwinism. This work had a transformative effect within the discipline of Paleontology. However, by the 1980s, paleontologists began making their case to a wider audience, both within evolutionary biology, and to the general public. Many of their books—for example, Eldredge’s provocatively-titled Unfinished Synthesis—explicitly argued that the received synthetic view of Darwinian evolution was incomplete, and that paleontological contributions such as punctuated equilibria, the hierarchical model of macroevolution, and the study of mass extinction dynamics offered a substantial corrective to evolutionary theory. This paper argues that books—far from being “mere popularizations” of scientific ideas—played an important role in disciplinary debates surrounding evolutionary theory during the 1980s, and in particular that paleontologists like Gould and Eldredge self-consciously adopted the book format because of the importance of that genre in the history of evolutionary biology.
-
towards a natural history of data evolving practices and epistemologies of data in Paleontology 1800 2000
Journal of the History of Biology, 2013Co-Authors: David SepkoskiAbstract:The fossil record is Paleontology’s great resource, telling us virtually everything we know about the past history of life. This record, which has been accumulating since the beginning of Paleontology as a professional discipline in the early nineteenth century, is a collection of objects. The fossil record exists literally, in the specimen drawers where fossils are kept, and figuratively, in the illustrations and records of fossils compiled in paleontological atlases and compendia. However, as has become increasingly clear since the later twentieth century, the fossil record is also a record of data. Paleontologists now routinely abstract information from the physical fossil record to construct databases that serve as the basis for quantitative analysis of patterns in the history of life. What is the significance of this distinction? While it is often assumed that the orientation towards treating the fossil record as a record of data is an innovation of the computer age, it turns out that nineteenth century Paleontology was substantially “data driven.” This paper traces the evolution of data practices and analyses in Paleontology, primarily through examination of the compendia in which the fossil record has been recorded over the past 200 years. I argue that the transition towards conceptualizing the fossil record as a record of data began long before the emergence of the technologies associated with modern databases (such as digital computers and modern statistical methods). I will also argue that this history reveals how new forms of visual representation were associated with the transition from seeing the fossil record as a record of objects to one of data or information, which allowed paleontologists to make new visual arguments about their data. While these practices and techniques have become increasingly sophisticated in recent decades, I will show that their basic methodology was in place over a century ago, and that, in a sense, Paleontology has always been a “data driven” science.
-
The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology - The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology
2009Co-Authors: David Sepkoski, Michael RuseAbstract:Paleontology has long had a troubled relationship with evolutionary biology. Suffering from a reputation as a second-tier science and conjuring images of fossil collectors and amateurs who dig up bones, Paleontology was marginalized even by Darwin himself, who worried that incompleteness in the fossil record would be used against his theory of evolution. But with the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, Paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. This incredible ascendance of this once-maligned science to the vanguard of a field is chronicled in "The Paleobiological Revolution". Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.
-
the paleobiological revolution essays on the growth of modern Paleontology
2009Co-Authors: David Sepkoski, Michael RuseAbstract:Paleontology has long had a troubled relationship with evolutionary biology. Suffering from a reputation as a second-tier science and conjuring images of fossil collectors and amateurs who dig up bones, Paleontology was marginalized even by Darwin himself, who worried that incompleteness in the fossil record would be used against his theory of evolution. But with the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, Paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. This incredible ascendance of this once-maligned science to the vanguard of a field is chronicled in "The Paleobiological Revolution". Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.
Conrad C. Labandeira - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
THE TRANSFORMATION OF Paleontology AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Evolution, 2010Co-Authors: Conrad C. LabandeiraAbstract:Review of: Sepkoski, D., and M. Ruse 2009. The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology. University of Chicago Press. 568 pp., ISBN: 978-0-226-74861-0. Cloth. $65.00. In 1984 English geneticist John Maynard Smith summarized the state of affairs of Paleontology and whether it had achieved sufficient epistemological status that it could be seated at the proverbial “high table” of evolutionary biology. The stimulus for this assessment was a series of Tanner lectures provided by Stephen J. Gould at Cambridge University that extended into current evolutionary theory the relevance of punctuated equilibrium and a hierarchical context for evolutionary levels of selection. Maynard Smith’s initial worry was, beginning with George G. Simpson’s contribution to the modern synthesis in 1944, that the paleontologist did not “. . . propose novel mechanisms of his own.” From Maynard Smith’s account of the lectures and ensuing panel discussion, it is clear that considerable ferment was afoot. At the end, Maynard Smith pronounced the lectures “entertaining and stimulating” and welcomed long-missing paleontologists to the “high table” of evolutionary biology. Twenty-five years later, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse have edited a stimulating and eminently readable, historical account of the revolution in Paleontology and the emergence of the field that became known as paleobiology. From 1970 to 1985, a major conceptual transition began in Paleontology that has diversified into almost every subfield of evolutionary and ecological and biology that can be informed by the fossil record. This transformation is discussed from various vantage points by the scientists that participated in the transformation as well as historians and philosophers of science who have delved into this most intriguing and consequential period of Paleontology. As Sepkoski puts it in the introductory chapter to the volume, “. . . it is widely acknowledged that something important happened to Paleontology in the last few decades, and the chapters that make up this volume will tell versions of that story from a variety of perspectives.” The following 26 chapters are organized into three principal themes. Part 1, “Major Innovations in Paleontology,” presents nine accounts from various perspectives of the debates in Paleontology at the beginning of the transformation, beginning with Sepkoski’s chapter that is a historical introduction to what follows. Sepkoski documents the early twentieth-century subordination of paleobiology to geology and its widespread perception as a utilitarian discipline whose singular purpose was to provide time and environmental context to economic stratigraphy, certainly in North America. In Europe, with the work of Austrian Othenio Abel (1912), the case was made for the incorporation of biology into Paleontology, ostensibly to test Darwin’s ideas in the Origin, but also to suggest that the independent phenomenology of the fossil record may provide new theoretical insights into evolutionary patterns not available to biology. This torch was acquired by Simpson, who was influenced by Abel’s ideas, untranslated
Richard R. Behringer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY ENRICHES Paleontology
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2012Co-Authors: J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Richard R. BehringerAbstract:ABSTRACT Paleontology provides information about the history of morphological transformations, whereas developmental biology provides information about how such transformations happen at a mechanistic level. As such, developmental evidence enriches Paleontology in formulating and assessing hypotheses of homology, character definition, and character independence, as well as providing insights into patterns of heterochrony, evolvability of features, and explanations for differential rates of evolution. The focus of this article is to review a series of case studies that illustrate how our understanding of Paleontology is enriched by data generated by developmental biologists. The integration of paleontological and developmental data leads to a greater understanding of evolution than either of these sciences could have reached alone. Our case studies range from fish to mammals and involve somite and vertebral formation, limb loss, hand and foot patterning, and tooth formation.
J. G. M. Thewissen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY ENRICHES Paleontology
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2012Co-Authors: J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Richard R. BehringerAbstract:ABSTRACT Paleontology provides information about the history of morphological transformations, whereas developmental biology provides information about how such transformations happen at a mechanistic level. As such, developmental evidence enriches Paleontology in formulating and assessing hypotheses of homology, character definition, and character independence, as well as providing insights into patterns of heterochrony, evolvability of features, and explanations for differential rates of evolution. The focus of this article is to review a series of case studies that illustrate how our understanding of Paleontology is enriched by data generated by developmental biologists. The integration of paleontological and developmental data leads to a greater understanding of evolution than either of these sciences could have reached alone. Our case studies range from fish to mammals and involve somite and vertebral formation, limb loss, hand and foot patterning, and tooth formation.
Lisa Noelle Cooper - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY ENRICHES Paleontology
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2012Co-Authors: J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Richard R. BehringerAbstract:ABSTRACT Paleontology provides information about the history of morphological transformations, whereas developmental biology provides information about how such transformations happen at a mechanistic level. As such, developmental evidence enriches Paleontology in formulating and assessing hypotheses of homology, character definition, and character independence, as well as providing insights into patterns of heterochrony, evolvability of features, and explanations for differential rates of evolution. The focus of this article is to review a series of case studies that illustrate how our understanding of Paleontology is enriched by data generated by developmental biologists. The integration of paleontological and developmental data leads to a greater understanding of evolution than either of these sciences could have reached alone. Our case studies range from fish to mammals and involve somite and vertebral formation, limb loss, hand and foot patterning, and tooth formation.
