Stephen Jay Gould's Hierarchical Alternative to Neodarwinism

This paper will examine the historical significance of Stephen Jay Gould’s hierarchical “expansion” of Darwinism, focusing on the development of these ideas during the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a larger program to establish “paleobiology” as an autonomous subdiscipline of evolutionary biology. The talk will explore the success of Gould's program, and the extent to which paleobiology has become oriented around questions of macroevolutionary hierarchy as a result.