Paleobiological Revolution, History of

Variously lauded and maligned, the paleobiological revolution marked a shift within evolutionary biology in the 1960s and 1970s. Paleobiology – as much a movement as a discipline – called for revolutionary integration among fields marginalized by the Modern Synthesis. Paleobiology, evo-devo and genomics merged further to produce a pluralistic Darwinian Synthesis in which natural selection, though critical for adaptation, is not the main force responsible for patterning the history of life on earth or many aspects of the morphology of organisms. Such patterns arise within a rich matrix of stochastic factors in ecology, mass extinction, and the nature and structure of variation.