Tempo and Mode in Evolution

Tempo and Mode in Evolution is a 1944 book by the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. Simpson was instrumental in the integration of paleontology into the modern evolutionary synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and genetics.

Simpson demonstrated that the microevolution of population genetics was sufficient to explain the macroevolution observed in paleontology.

Simpson divided evolution into tempo and mode. "Tempo", has to do with "evolutionary rates…, their acceleration and deceleration, the conditions of exceptionally slow or rapid evolutions, and phenomena suggestive of inertia and momentum." "Mode" involves "the study of the way, manner, or pattern of evolution, a study in which tempo is a basic factor, but which embraces considerably more than tempo'

Fifty years after its publication, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a book entitled Tempo and Mode in Evolution: Genetics and Paleontology 50 Years After Simpson edited by Walter M. Fitch and Francisco J. Ayala and including work by Ayala, W. Ford Doolittle , and Stephen Jay Gould.

References

• Tempo and Mode in Evolution, (1944) Columbia University Press , New York, 237 p
• Tempo and Mode in Evolution: Genetics and Paleontology 50 Years After Simpson (1995) ISBN 0-309-05191-6

External links

• http://www.geology.buffalo.edu/sprg/tempo.htm
• Tempo and Mode in Evolution: Genetics and Paleontology 50 Years After Simpson
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/06/2/l_062_02.html