On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature. The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen Jay Gould had given at Cambridge, and Gould considered it “the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received.” Smith wrote;

The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups.

In the last ten years, however, this situation has changed by the work of a group of palaeontologists, of whom Gould has been a leading figure.