"Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life" with Niles Eldredge
Author, paleontologist, and Charles Darwin biographer Niles Eldredge, Ph.D., will open the 2009-10 Speaker Series at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, on Thursday, September 24.
His discussion, “Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life,” is free and open to the public. It begins at 7:30 p.m. in the McGarvey Commons of the college’s Reed Union Building.
A curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City since 1969, Eldredge specializes in the evolution of trilobites, extinct arthropods that lived between 535 and 245 million years ago. By studying patterns repeated in the history of life, Eldredge has helped to refine science’s thinking about the evolutionary process, challenging Charles Darwin’s belief that evolution occurs only gradually. In 1972, he and colleague Stephen Jay Gould formed the “punctuated equilibria” theory of evolution, asserting that change occurs in dramatic spurts bookended by long periods of inactivity.
Eldredge later developed a hierarchical vision of evolutionary and ecological systems after analyzing the relationship between global extinctions of the geologic past and our present-day diversity crisis, as well as the general relationship between extinction and evolution. In his book The Pattern of Evolution he outlined his comprehensive theory (nicknamed “the sloshing bucket”) that describes how environmental change governs the evolutionary process.
Eldredge has written twenty-three books, most recently Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, Life on Earth: An Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution, and The Triumph of Evolution…And the Failure of Creationism. He also wrote Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, the companion book to the American Museum of Natural History’s major Darwin exhibit, which Eldredge curated. After opening in New York in 2005, the exhibit traveled to Boston, Toronto and Chicago before arriving at the Natural History Museum in London to become part of the celebration surrounding this year’s 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.
An amateur jazz trumpeter and avid collector of 19th century cornets, Eldredge has combined his personal and professional passions by turning his evolutionary approach to the examination of his 500 cornets, comparing historical patterns in the instrument’s deliberate design and material changes (along with its decline in cultural popularity) to the biological evolution of trilobites.
Niles Eldredge’s Speaker Series event is sponsored by the School of Science at Penn State Behrend, the Student Activity Fee, the Division of Student Affairs, and the Harriet Behrend Ninow Memorial Lecture Series Fund.
Upcoming fall semester speakers are branding and marketing expert John Moore on Tuesday, October 20, and PostSecret.com founder Frank Warren on Thursday, December 10. For more information about Penn State Behrend’s annual Speaker Series, contact the Office of Student Activities.