THE TRANSFORMATION OF PALEONTOLOGY AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

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