Steven M. Stanley

From EvoWiki

Steven M. Stanley, Professor of Paleontology at The University of Hawaii at Manoa, along with Niles Eldredge and S. J. Gould, has been one of the principal advocates of punctuational rate in evolution. He elaborated punctuated equilibrium prior to Gould, in 1975, and presented further research on the matter in 1981 and 1982. Stanley has also been a proponent of species selection, an idea championed by S. J. Gould, and for these reasons, has drawn sharp criticism from other evolutionary biologists. His interpretation of the vertebrate fossil record as displaying a punctuational nature has been severely questioned by the work of Philip Gingerich (1980, 1982, 1983) and Robert Carroll (1988). Stanley's arguments that the process of punctuated equilibrium is inconsistent with the neodarwinian paradigm of gradualistic evolution, has been most effectively challenged by Mayr (1982).

Stanley summarized his arguments in his 1981 tome, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species.