NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Niles Eldredge's Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species from the Nineteenth Century Through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2015). The preview consists of the introduction, in which Eldredge explains "my entire narrative is about the development of a natural causal explanation for the origin of the species of the modern fauna and the addition of the phenomenon of adaptation generated by natural selection."
A member of NCSE's Advisory Council and a recipient of NCSE's Friend of Darwin award in 2011, Eldredge is a paleontologist formerly on the curatorial staff of the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of many books, including The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creationism (W. H. Freeman, 2000), Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (W. W. Norton, 2005), and Extinction and Evolution (Firefly, 2014), and was a founding coeditor of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach.