I have been thoroughly enjoying my copy of The Paleobiological Revolution (edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse), so much so that it has inspired me to get to work on some new academic papers. I will post a review of the book sometime this weekend, but here is a quote that is going to be very important to my discussion from G.G. Simpson’s 1944 masterpiece Tempo and Mode in Evolution:

The attempted synthesis of paleontology and genetics, an essential part of the present study, may be particularly surprising and possibly hazardous. Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a person who shut himself in a room, pulled down the shades, watched small flies disporting themselves in