stephen jay gould

Anthropology Lessons from Metal Magazines: A Variation in a Series

This Guy is Metal, but not from Wino.

This Guy is Metal, but not from Wino.

 

Perusing Metal Maniacs, I happened upon the band Wino’s new release, Punctuated Equilibrium (check them out on myspace)! My minor in college was in anthropology and it really should have been my major, but I was too lazy and cheap to go back and take all the pre-requisite stuff. In my evolutionary theory class, punctuated equilibrium was well discussed. Stephen Jay Gould and the lesser known Niles Eldredge (good link to Gould’s work here), beyond coining the phrase, developed largely the most radical variation on Darwin’s theory of natural selection and specifically, the idea of gradualism (although since then, I think other stuff has come about in the field. I was in college, um, 20 years ago). I read so many xeroxed papers that Gould wrote in obscure academic anthropology journals! He was supposed to come speak once to our class- he didn’t, though. I thought he was rad. And I think Wino is rad. Here’s a brief description of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, taken from Wikipedia, but it explains the theory well enough: READ MORE >

Web Hype / 17 Comments
March 11th, 2009 / 8:22 am