Abstract
Niles Eldredge is a curator in the Department of Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History. With Stephen Jay Gould, he formulated the theory of punctuated equilibria in the early 70s. Based on observations of fossil distributions in the geologic column, Eldredge and Gould concluded that the dominant pattern of evolution is long periods of stasis interrupted by brief periods of rapid evolutionary change. While the punctuated equilibria model appeared to fit the geological data better than the gradualism of conventional Darwinism, it was not received with great enthusiasm by the evolutionary biology community.