Paleobiology as an evolutionary discipline

PODGORNY IRINA

Metascience

Springer

Lugar: Dordrecht; Año: 2013 vol. 22 p. 1 - 3

0815-0796

In this book, David Sepkoski proposes to analyze the development of paleobiology, a subfield of paleontology, over the 40 years between 1945 and 1985. He presents the story about how a small and influential group of American-based scientists solved the paradox that, according to Sepkoski, had marginalized paleontology from the ‘‘high table’’ of evolutionary biology. Throughout his book, Sepkoski refers to what he calls ‘‘Darwin’s dilemma’’: Charles Darwin’s recognition of the imperfections of the fossil or geological record. Rather than a reliable transcription of the history of the world, the fossil record was like a book imperfectly preserved—a history that could be read and recomposed only in and through some of its incompletely remaining pages. Despite the fact that fossils provided information about the patterns and processes of evolution, certain circles in twentieth-century evolutionary biology considered paleontology as a ‘‘merely descriptive’’ discipline. The problem of how to use the fossil record to produce reliable information persisted through the late twentieth century and lasted until the group analyzed in Sepkoski’s book succeeded in reinventing the field by focusing on the large-scale quantitative analysis of patterns in the history of life.