Who is Stephen Jay Gould from The Blind Watchmaker and what is their importance?

Stephen Jay Gould is an American paleontologist who is a prolific writer and whose book The Panda's Thumb is praised by Dawkins. He and his colleague Niles Eldridge proposed a theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972. This theory and their writings have been seized on by the media as being opposed to neoDarwinian theory. Dawkins spends much effort in proving that this theory is actually in conformance with classical Darwinian theory. His main criticism is that Gould and Eldridge have succumbed to the allure of the media and allowed distortions of their ideas to be popularized without any successful refutation on their part.