Punc Eq Pioneer Founds Father & Son Evo-Journal
Who made Newsmakers in Science March 2,1 but Niles Eldredge and his son Greg. Eldredge the dad (you can distinguish the two in the photo by beard color) started the “punctuated equilibrium” evolution revolution in 1972 with Stephen Jay Gould. The two paleontologists angered many other evolutionists by making it public that the fossil record was systematically lacking transitional forms of the kind traditional evolutionary theory required. They opted for a theory that evolution proceeded in fits and starts, leaving little fossil evidence of its action.
Now Niles and Greg are starting a new quarterly journal, Outreach and Education in Evolution, to begin this fall. The news snippet included the following anecdote:
A favorite family story relates to a class visit to the 2005 Darwin exhibit Niles curated. Seeing a case displaying various mammalian skeletons, one student was particularly impressed by the hand of a chimp. “That’s it, I believe the whole thing,” the student exclaimed.
The ID blog Uncommon Descent calls this “keeping the world safe for evolution.”
1Newsmakers, Science Volume 315, Number 5816, Issue of 02 March 2007.
Chief Niles succeeded in sending the young brave on a successful vision quest. The student at the museum was slain in the spirit of Charlie (05/09/2006, 01/20/2004), fell to the ground writhing in ecstatic visions, and his inventive imagination was awakened (01/17/2007). The missing links Eldredge could not produce will now appear magically in the mind’s eye of his new convert, a kind of fossil factory in his head. And now, the tribe will have a new journal to train more shamans, so that they can steer a growing crop of novices into the inner recesses of the cave (02/16/2007 commentary). This will help to perpetuate the vision quest known as pilgrim’s regress.