The eminent American Harvard professor Steven J. Gould (paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science) upset the evolutionary apple cart in spectacular fashion when he offered his honest and expert assessment of the fossil record. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology . . . [T]o preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study. Gould’s atheistic ideology wouldn’t allow him to accept the concept of Genesis creation (and the corresponding biblical flood) as the far better explanation of the fossil record. So, he gave up on a gradualist theory of evolution in favor of what he and colleague Niles Eldredge (also a well-known and respected biologist and paleontologist) referred to as “punctuated equilibrium.” Which was really just a rebranding of the older “hopeful monster hypothesis”.