Listen to this articleWho said the following about the fossil record:
The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1) Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; Morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2) Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”
I will post the answer tomorrow and bump this back to the top of the page. I will give you a hint: This one is a shocker. Would anyone care to take a guess?
Answer: The late Harvard paleontologist and ardent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould.
He saw the evidence did not point to a gradual development and transition as Darwinian evolution supposed, so he formulated the punctuated equilibria theory to explain the lack of transitional forms. The PE theory better fits the observed evidence, but Gould had no natural mechanism to explain this.
