Eldredge, Niles 1943-

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Eldredge, Niles 1943-

PERSONAL: Born August 25, 1943, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Robert L. (an accountant) and Eleanor R. (a homemaker) Eldredge; married Michelle J. Wycoff, June 6, 1964; children: Douglas R., Gregory C. Education: Columbia University, A.B. (summa cum laude), 1965, Ph.D., 1969. Hobbies and other interests: Birding, collecting trumpets and coronets.

ADDRESSES: Home—Ridgewood, NJ. Office—Richard Gilder Graduate School at American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th St., New York, NY 10024. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Paleontologist. Columbia University, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor, 1969-74, associate professor of geology, 1974-81; Department of Invertebrate Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, assistant curator, 1969-74, associate curator of invertebrate paleontology, 1974-79, curator, 1979—; City University of New York, New York, NY, adjunct professor of biology, 1972—, adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences, 1992—. Biodiversity Foundation for Africa, trustee.

MEMBER: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Paleontological Society, Palaeontological Association, Society for the Study of Evolution, Society of Systematic Zoology.

AWARDS, HONORS: Schuchert Award, Paleontological Society, 1979; Lappe Award, Hastings Center, 1997; President’s Citation Award, American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2007.

WRITINGS:

(With Harold B. Rollins and Judith Spiller) Gastropoda and Monoplacophora of the Solsville Member (Middle Devonian, Marcellus Formation) in the Chenango Valley, New York State, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1971.

Systematics and Evolution of Phacops rana (Green, 1832) and Phacops Iowensis Delo, 1935 (Trilobita) from the Middle Devonian of North America, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1972.

Systematics of Lower and Lower Middle Devonian Species of the Trilobite Phacops Emmrich in North America, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1973.

Revision of the Suborder Synziph Osurina (Chelicerata, Merostomata): With Remarks on Merostome Phylogeny, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Roy E. Plotnick) Revision of the Pseudoniscine Marostome Genus Cyamocephalus Currie, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Joel Cracraft) Phylogenetic Analysis and Paleontology: Proceedings of a Symposium Entitled, “Phylogenetic Models,” Convened at the North American Paleontological Convention II, Lawrence, Kansas, August 8, 1977, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1979.

(With Joel Cracraft) Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process: Method and Theory in Comparative Biology, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

(With Leonardo Braniesa) Calmoniid Trilobites of the Lower Devonian Scaphiocoelia Zone of Bolivia: With Remarks on Related Species, American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), 1980.

(With Ian Tattersall) The Myths of Human Evolution, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism, Washington Square Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor, with Steven M. Stanley) Living Fossils, Springer Verlag (New York, NY), 1984.

Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1985.

Unfinished Synthesis: Biological Hierarchies and Modern Evolutionary Thought, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Life Pulse: Episodes from the Story of the Fossil Record, illustrations by Lisa C. Heilman Lomauro and photographs by Sidney S. Horenstein, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1987.

The Natural History Reader in Evolution, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1989.

(With Douglas and Gregory Eldredge) The Fossil Factory: A Kid’s Guide to Digging up Dinosaurs, Exploring Evolution, and Finding Fossils, illustrations by True Kelley and Steve Lindblom, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1989.

Fossils: The Evolution and Extinction of Species, photographs by Murray Alcosser and introduction by Stephen Jay Gould, Abrams (New York, NY), 1991.

The Miner’s Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor) Systematics, Ecology, and the Biodiversity Crisis, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Marjorie Grene) Interactions: The Biological Context of Social Systems, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, Wiley (New York, NY), 1995.

Dominion, Holt (New York, NY), 1995.

Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis, illustrations by Patricia Wynne, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

The Pattern of Evolution, W.H. Freeman (San Francisco, CA), 1999.

The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creationism, W.H. Freeman (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Life on Earth: An Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Ecology, and Evolution, ABC-Clio (Santa Barbara, CA), 2002.

Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with Elisabeth Vrba) Macroevolution: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency; Essays in Honor of Stephen Jay Gould, Paleontological Society (Lawrence, KS), 2005.

Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, Norton (New York, NY), 2005.

Coeditor of Systematic Zoology, 1973-76. Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Evolution, New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Nature.

SIDELIGHTS: Niles Eldredge is a paleontologist best known for a theory he developed with fellow paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called punctuated equilibrium, an evolutionary theory that challenged Darwinian gradualism and changed the way scientists interpret the fossil record. A curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Eldredge has used the fossil record to improve current theories of evolution, and he has applied some of these theories to better understanding the problems faced by living species. He has been a staunch opponent of the so-called “scientific creationism” movement, and he remains a prolific author. “I have devoted my entire career to effecting a better fit between evolutionary theory and the fossil record,” Eldredge stated on the American Museum of Natural History Web site. “In recent years, I have focused on the mass extinctions of the geological past and their implications for understanding the modern biodiversity crisis and future human ecological and evolutionary prospects.”

As a young boy growing up in the northern suburbs of New York, Eldredge would sometimes venture into the city and visit the American Museum of Natural History. “That was definitely formative, no question about it,” he told John Spizzirri in an interview quoted in Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present. Having done well in Latin in high school, Eldredge planned to study classics when he entered Columbia University in 1961; he intended to become a lawyer but discovered himself increasingly fascinated with academic research.

Eldredge met his future wife, Michelle J. Wycoff, at Columbia University; she introduced Eldredge to various members of the anthropology department, and he began taking courses in this subject. His participation in an ethnographic study turned his attention toward evolution. In the summer of 1963, he served as a trainee with anthropologists studying in a Brazilian fishing village, and he began collecting invertebrate fossils from the surrounding reef. The experience “ended my quest to study evolution through anthropology,” Eldredge stated in a Virginia Quarterly Review essay. “I was far more taken with the Pleistocene fossils embedded in the sandstone that formed the protective cove for the fishing boats. By summer’s end I was determined to become a paleontologist.” After taking courses in paleontology and geology the following semester, El-dredge recalled in his book Fossils: The Evolution and Extinction of Species, how he then “embarked on a lifetime career of trying to make some sense of the fossil record of the history of life.” On June 6, 1964, he married Wycoff, with whom he would have two sons. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1965.

While still an undergraduate, Eldredge met Stephen Jay Gould, who was then a graduate student two years his senior. They both shared an interest in scrutinizing the fossil record of invertebrates at the species level. By the time Eldredge began graduate studies at Columbia University, his interest in invertebrate paleontology had turned to the Paleozoic era, and it was from this era that he chose the subject for his Ph.D. thesis: trilobites. Trilobites lived between 530 and 245 million years ago and represent one of the earliest groups of arthropods. Fossil evidence has been collected from all over the world that establishes that they existed in a diverse range of environments over an extremely long period of time.

After receiving his Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University in 1969, Eldredge assumed the post of adjunct assistant professor in Columbia’s geology department, while simultaneously holding a position as an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s department of invertebrate paleontology. By 1971 his work on Paleozoic invertebrates had led to a rethinking of the evolutionary process. As Eldredge recalled in the Virginia Quarterly Review, “I had pulled the fat out of the fire … by saying that not only my little group of trilobites but most species in the history of life showed great stability for most of their histories; I then said that the idea of geographic speciation—as championed by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and the systematist Ernst Mayr (writing after Dobzhansky but somehow receiving most of the credit)—could account for the fact that evolution seems to occur relatively rapidly as new species split off from their long stable ancestors.”

Eldredge published his theory in the journal Evolution. Frustrated that he could find no evolutionary changes in his trilobites despite their wide distribution over time and space, Eldredge conducted a more detailed examination of his specimens. “Then I started noticing these very slight patterns of differences between the eyes in different populations,” he told Spizzirri. “I looked at these in terms of where they were distributed on a map, and how they were distributed in time, and saw that there were these great periods of stability that were interrupted at varying intervals by small, but definitive change, and the change seemed to be concentrated at these short intervals.” The following year, Gould contributed to Eldredge’s hypothesis. Republished in the collection Models in Paleobiology, their theory of “punctuated equilibrium” seemed to contradict certain fundamental elements of Darwinian evolution. “Our paper seemed to annoy virtually everyone—starting with Tom Schopf, the editor of the collection of essays in which it appeared,” Eldredge wrote in his Virginia Quarterly Review essay. “It just seemed too anti-Darwinian: the denial of natural selection’s inexorably changing entire species through time was too much for Darwinians—geneticists and even paleontologists—to take. To be sure, some paleontologists came up to us and, looking furtively around, admitted sotto voce that their own data showed similar patterns of stability ‘punctuated’ by sudden events of evolutionary change.”

Darwin argued that evolution was gradual and continuous, but his concept of a gradual progression of species over time was often marred by gaps in the fossil record, although he believed these would eventually be filled by later research. In the early 1940s, the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson suggested that these gaps were not necessarily the result of a poor fossil record and speculated that evidence of continuous evolution might never be found. He went on to delineate the circumstances in which abrupt changes could occur, but he limited the scope of his research to the larger groups, like whales and bats, because he believed that specific species, the individual constituents of groups, were not important to this process. Eldredge and Gould redefined Simpson’s theories by concentrating on species, and they were able to incorporate aspects of speciation theories that suggested that the branching off, or budding, of lineages served as the primary mechanism for abrupt change. In the theory proposed by Eldredge and Gould, change is only abrupt relative to geological time and the long history of evolution. “Most anatomical change in the fossil record,” Eldredge told Neil A. Campbell in the American Biology Teacher, “seems to be concentrated in relatively brief bursts punctuating longer periods of relative stability.” The theory of punctuated equilibrium initially met with mixed reviews and still has its opponents, though leading evolutionary biologists tend to agree that stasis plays an integral role in the process of evolution.

As an extension of his work on species, Eldredge began to look at the hierarchical relationships of living systems, working to define the interactive nature of organisms and their environments within successively larger systems. “Large scale entities—ecosystems, species, social systems—are real entities in and of themselves composed of parts,” Eldredge explained to Spizzirri. “Just like organisms are composed of parts and organisms are parts of populations, populations are parts of these larger-scale systems.”

In the early 1980s, Eldredge unwillingly became the subject of controversy over scientific creationism. Creationist leader Luther Sunderland co-opted the theory of punctuated equilibrium and, using the ideas of stasis and gaps in the fossil record, claimed it could disprove evolution. After conducting an interview with Eldredge under the guise of being a consultant for the New York State Board of Regents, Sunderland apparently referred to Eldredge as an advocate for the simultaneous teaching of evolution and creationism in the classroom. Embarrassed and angry, Eldredge wrote an article for the New Republic, denouncing claims of scientific creationism as bad science, if even science at all. He later expanded the article into the book The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism. “I take being called anti-Darwinian very personally,” Eldredge stated in the Virginia Quarterly Review. “It has always hurt, for I have always thought of myself as more or less a knee-jerk neo-Darwinian, someone who thinks the basic mechanism underlying evolutionary change, including the origin, modification, and maintenance of adaptations, resides squarely in the domain of natural selection. And I have always felt that, with one or two major exceptions, my version of how the evolutionary process works lines up very well with Darwin’s.”

In a later work, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, Eldredge examines the dispute between the “ultra-Darwinists,” who view natural selection as the most important mechanism of evolution, and the “naturalists,” who advocate a pluralistic approach to evolutionary biology. “Eldredge emphasises the difference between the two tendencies concerning levels of explanation,” observed New Statesman & Society contributor Marek Kohn. “The ultra-Darwinians argue that reductionism works; that the key forces of evolution can be observed by looking at the level of the genes. The naturalists consider one simply cannot ignore species and ecosystems as factors in evolutionary equations.” In Reinventing Darwin, remarked Kohn, Eldredge “gigives a player’s account of the ‘debate at the High Table’: the disputations among the Darwinian elite.”

Eldredge’s ideas on evolutionary theory are also expressed in his books The Pattern of Evolution and The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creation-ism. In what a Publishers Weekly contributor called a collection of “rich, dense, stimulating essays,” The Pattern of Evolution further develops Eldredge and Gould’s ideas of punctuated equilibrium as the author explains how environmental fluxes caused by everything from temperature changes to plate tectonics have an impact on species. The Triumph of Evolution is a kind of follow-up to Eldredge’s earlier book The Monkey Business. In his 2000 update of his argument for evolution and against creationism, Eldredge once again illustrates how fossil evidence bears witness to evolutionary processes, and then he proceeds to debunk the creationists by pointing out the faulty logic of their arguments and their misunderstanding of biology. However, he also stresses that science and religion should not be mutually exclusive; instead, they should work together to help people preserve life on our planet. “Readers of all kinds will appreciate his energetic exposition,” concluded a Publishers Weekly critic.

Eldredge examines genetic determinism in Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, a work “sure to inspire heated debate among scientists and nonscientists alike,” remarked Gilbert Taylor in Booklist. Addressing the theory that sexual competition drives evolution, popularized in the 1970s by British biologist Richard Dawkins and later by American sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, Eldredge argues that a combination of reproductive, economic, cultural, and environmental forces helps ensure an organism’s survival. “There’s no question that genes are active in the sense that they’re the instructions for building an organism’s body,” Eldredge told Ron Hogan in a Publishers Weekly interview. “But when you go from generation to generation, the genes that survive, the combinations of genes that survive, the frequencies of genes that survive, reflect the fate of the organisms that carried them. How well they did economically, how well they ‘worked’ as combinations of features that enabled organisms to make a living.”

According to New York Times Book Review contributor Robert J. Richards, Eldredge “regards the purpose of life to be neither the generation of the higher animals nor the spread of one’s genes; rather, it’s economics.” Richards noted that the author “defines economics as energy transfer and flow throughout an ecological system,” and added, “All organisms live in intersecting ecological systems through which energy flows and is transformed. Eldredge glides from this abstract notion to a somewhat more concrete meaning of economics when he declares that in Darwin’s conception, the struggle for existence indicated the effort to secure energy resources—food—not the attempt to produce offspring.” Why We Do It garnered strong reviews. A contributor in Science News described Eldredge as “a candid, no-punches-pulled interpreter of the core ideas of evolutionary biology,” and a Publishers Weekly critic noted that “his insightful thesis that genes alone do not govern human behavior is bound to provoke controversy in the evolutionary biology world.”

Complementary to Eldredge’s books focusing on evolution are his works that argue for the importance of conservation of the world’s biodiversity. Eldredge asserts that sustaining the overall biomass of the earth is important to the health of the planet and of human beings. The problem, however, is that humans have failed to recognize that they are still a part of the world’s ecosystems. People view themselves as separate from their environment because, through such things as agriculture, they have managed to carve out their own living spaces apparently independent of the environments around them.

Eldredge has also elaborated on this viewpoint in such books as The Miner’s Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction, Dominion, and Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis. “The Miner’s Canary,” wrote Norman Myers in BioScience, “is a powerfully impassioned plea for awareness—awareness of what we are doing, of what the consequences will be, and of what we can still do to reduce the biotic holocaust ahead.” As background, Eldredge discusses in detail the five previous mass extinctions that the earth has undergone and what their consequences have been. The current extinction pattern, however, is unique in that human beings have not only the capacity to destroy but also the ability to save the world’s rich collection of species. “In this sense,”concluded Myers, “Eldredge’s book, while asserting the sheer destructiveness of our activities, is profoundly optimistic.” In Dominion the author similarly emphasizes that Homo sapiens are the first “global species,” and that, therefore, the entire world is our ecosystem and we must take care to preserve it. Life in the Balance further discusses how the planet is currently undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history, with literally hundreds of thousands of species disappearing each year. Library Journal contributor Gloria Maxwell called it a “compelling book” that will “inform, alarm, and recruit” people to action. Eldredge also served as the editor of Life on Earth: An Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Ecology, and Evolution. The two-volume set explores such topics as botany, ecotourism, evolution, and the ethics of conservation. A contributor in Booklist praised the work’s “activist perspective and conversational style” and called the encyclopedia an “accessible source.”

Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, a companion volume to a major exhibition on the life and works of Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History, draws on Darwin’s own writings to depict his growth as an evolutionary biologist. Robert Dorit, writing in American Scientist, called the work “a provocative contribution to Darwin scholarship. In it, Eldredge makes a compelling case that Darwin boarded the Beagle a traditional creationist and disembarked a committed materialist. Eldredge also traces the philosophical transformation that metamorphosed Darwin the methodical observer/experimentalist into Darwin the model of a modern major scientist.” Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor commented that the author “expresses unabashed admiration for Darwin’s intellect and successfully encapsulates his revolutionary ideas for the widest audience,” and a critic in Publishers Weekly remarked that Eldredge “conveys his great admiration for his subject in a straightforward manner that will enlighten dedicated science readers.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Notable Scientists: From 1900 to the Present, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

American Biology Teacher, May, 1990, Neil A. Campbell, interview with Niles Eldredge, pp. 264-267.

American Scientist, March 1, 2006, Robert Dorit, “Darwin on Display,” p. 178.

Audubon, July-August, 1998, Verlyn Klinkenborg, review of Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis, p. 118.

BioScience, February, 1990, Arthur J. Boucot and Peter S. Dawson, review of Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, p. 144; July-August, 1992, Norman Myers, review of The Miner’s Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction, p. 556; October, 1993, Kentwood D. Wells, review of Interactions: The Biological Context of Social Systems, p. 646; October, 2007, Larry D. Martin, “Paying Gould Tribute,” review of Macroevolution: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency; Essays in Honor of Stephen Jay Gould, p. 796.

Booklist, May 15, 2003, review of Life on Earth: An Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Ecology, and Evolution, p. 1700; March 15, 2004, Gilbert Taylor, review of Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, p. 1245; November 1, 2005, Gilbert Taylor, review of Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, p. 9.

Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, October, 2006, Martin H. Levinson, review of Darwin, p. 458.

Human Biology, February, 1994, Jack Kelso, review of Interactions, p. 163.

Lancet, March 4, 2006, Joel E. Cohen, “The Evolution of a Great Mind: The Life and Work of Darwin,” review of Darwin, p. 721.

Library Journal, May 15, 1998, Gloria Maxwell, review of Life in the Balance, p. 108; June 1, 2000, Lloyd Davidson and Seeley G. Mudd, review of The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creationism, p. 185; November 15, 2005, Walter L. Cressler, review of Darwin, p. 92.

New Statesman & Society, July 14, 1995, Marek Kohn, review of Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, p. 34.

New York Times Book Review, June 20, 2004, Robert J. Richards, “Sex and the Single Cell,” review of Why We Do It, p. 19.

Publishers Weekly, February 23, 1990, Diane Roback, review of The Fossil Factory: A Kid’s Guide to Digging up Dinosaurs, Exploring Evolution, and Finding Fossils, p. 219; August 21, 1995, review of Dominion, p. 55; October 19, 1998, review of The Pattern of Evolution, p. 63; May 15, 2000, review of The Triumph of Evolution, p. 105; March 1, 2004, review of Why We Do It, p. 57, and “Whose Genes Are You Calling Selfish, Dr. Dawkins?,” interview with Niles Eldredge, p. 8; September 19, 2005, review of Darwin, p. 55.

Science, November 16, 1984, David B. Wake, review of Living Fossils, p. 826.

Science News, July 17, 2004, review of Why We Do It, p. 47.

SciTech Book News, March, 2006, review of Darwin.

Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2001, James C. Sullivan, “A Gentle Guide through the Evolution/Creationism Issue,” p. 53.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 2006, Niles El-dredge, “Confessions of a Darwinist,” pp. 32-53.