TY - JOUR
AU - Eldredge, Niles
AB - Syst. Zool., 34(l):102-103, 1985 Extinctions.—Matthew H. Nitecki (ed.). 1984. Uni- There is a rich assortment of causal mechanisms versity of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, for extinction presented in this volume—a potpourri vii + 354 pp. $30.00 hardbound, $16.00 paperback. that Raup (this volume) claims is "off-scale," and in- dicative of "a change from dominantly gradualist in- terpretations of natural phenomena to those that em- phasize strongly chaotic events"—a view hardly In welcoming paleontology back to the "high ta- ble" of evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith supported by the other papers in this book. I was recently opined that, of all that the fossil record has further disturbed by Raup's characterization of to tell us of the history of life, multiple episodes of "gradual" a few pages earlier: "The pace of extinc- extinction of varying degrees of severity will prove tion is also subject to considerable uncertainty. On to be most valuable in reshaping our very image of the one hand we have a view of extinction as a rather slow, gradual process that capitalizes on very slight evolution. Whatever the outcome of Maynard Smith's prophecy, there is no doubt that extinction captures advantages of one species over another 
TI - Reviews
JO - Systematic Biology
DO - 10.1093/sysbio/34.1.102
DA - 1985-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/reviews-s3zuHg7rsb
SP - 102
EP - 103
VL - 34
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -