Niles Eldredge

Niles Eldredge is a curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and codiscoverer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium—a milestone in evolutionary theory. His numerous books on evolution include Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (Wiley, 1995), The Triumph of Evolution . . . And the Failure of Creationism (Freeman, 2000), Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene (Norton, 2004), and most recently Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (Norton, 2005), which he wrote to accompany the exhibit “Darwin,” which he curated at the American Museum of Natural History.

Published in VQR

• Confessions of a Darwinist, Spring 2006