[Paleopsych] NYT: Norman Newell, 96, Scientist Who Studied Dying Species, Has Died

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Norman Newell, 96, Scientist Who Studied Dying Species, Has Died 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/23/obituaries/23newell.html

    By [1]JEREMY PEARCE

    Dr. Norman D. Newell, an influential paleontologist who challenged
    opponents of evolutionary theory and helped shape theories explaining
    the mass extinctions of species, died on Monday at his home in Leonia,
    N.J., his family said. He was 96.

    In a wide-ranging career that included scholarship, fieldwork and
    popular writing, he taught at Columbia and spent four decades as a
    curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in
    Manhattan.

    Dr. Newell pursued his interests in the evolution of living and fossil
    bivalve mollusks, the formation and ecology of coral reefs and the
    geological history of the Peruvian Andes. His work on mass extinctions
    began in the 1950's, when he began to look at the disappearance of
    certain clams and other mollusks from the fossil record in Texas.

    He compared clams to other marine invertebrates in the Upper Paleozoic
    and Early Mesozoic periods - about 245 million years ago - and
    eventually concluded that the extinctions were a result of changes in
    sea levels and a fatal retreat of warm and shallow seas. Although
    other scientists had been aware of the marine extinctions, Dr. Newell
    was an early and dedicated investigator of their causes and the
    conditions surrounding them.

    Dr. Niles Eldredge, a curator in the division of paleontology at the
    American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and Dr. Stephen Jay
    Gould, the essayist and Harvard paleontologist who died in 2002, were
    students of Dr. Newell's at Columbia. In the 1970's, they developed
    the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolution, which is the notion
    that transitions in species take place periodically, during intense
    periods of activity and not necessarily as part of a steady and
    gradual process.

    Dr. Eldredge said yesterday that Dr. Newell became "a voice crying in
    the wilderness" in explaining the evolutionary importance of mass
    extinctions "at a time when no one else in the field was talking about
    them."

    "Now, increasingly in evolutionary thinking," he added, "we recognize
    that extinction triggers what happens with the history of life, and is
    part and parcel with the evolution of life." In 1947, Dr. Newell led
    an expedition to the Peruvian Andes, near a region that he had
    previously helped to map, to collect marine fossils from elevations
    above 10,000 feet.

    In 1952, he led a group of scientists from the Museum of Natural
    History to study South Pacific atolls that were formed by coral reefs.
    The group landed on the atoll of Raroia, where Dr. Newell examined the
    ecology and sedimentation of reef systems.

    In later studies of coral reefs in the Bahamas in the 1960's, Dr.
    Newell brought "the study of fossils into the realm of ecology and
    managed to reconstruct what they were like in living communities," Dr.
    John Imbrie, emeritus professor of paleo-oceanography at Brown
    University, said yesterday.

    Later in his career, Dr. Newell contributed to the public debate
    pitting theories of creationism against evolution. His 1982 book
    "Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?" was intended for a popular
    audience and became "a ringing defense of Darwinian evolution that
    makes it very clear that nobody in science disagrees that man has
    evolved," Dr. Eldredge said.

    Dr. Newell continued to study extinction and proposed that the earth
    in the late 20th century was experiencing "one of the greatest of all
    mass extinctions." He attributed the losses of hundreds of species to
    ecological disturbances caused by humans. Indeed, a 1987 paper written
    by Dr. Newell and a museum colleague, Dr. Leslie Marcus, found a
    nearly direct correlation between an increase in world population and
    increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

    The paper was published in Palaios, a journal of the Society of
    Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, and found that emissions
    of carbon dioxide were "almost wholly dependent on human activities
    with only very minor contributions from natural causes."

    Norman Dennis Newell was born in Chicago. He received his bachelor's
    and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in
    geology from Yale.

    He taught at the University of Wisconsin before 1945, when he joined
    the Museum of Natural History, where he remained for the rest of his
    career. He was named a curator emeritus in 1977.

    Dr. Newell was president of the Society for the Study of Evolution in
    1949. He was elected president of the Paleontological Society in 1960
    and 1961. In 1978 he was awarded the American Museum of Natural
    History's Gold Medal for Achievement in Science.

    He is survived by his wife, the former Gillian Wormall.

References

    1. 
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=JEREMY%20PEARCE&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=JEREMY%20PEARCE&inline=nyt-per