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The idea that evolution isn't a gradual process of improvement but rather more like a dynamic system, is fairly widely accepted and essentially originates with
by joe_the_user 2y ago
The idea that evolution isn't a gradual process of improvement but rather more like a dynamic system, is fairly widely accepted and essentially originates with Stephan Jay Gould.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
- wjnc 2y agoThese people did 40 years of fieldwork to prove the point. ‘Beak of the finch’ by Jonathan Wiener is a very readable story about their work.
- skybrian 2y agoI'm not sure that's fair summary. It doesn't seem like they ruled out gradual evolution? Perhaps I'm misremembering Gould. From the Wikipedia article: > Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated, how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas like saltationism, quantum evolution, and mass extinction. But it in any case, I don't think they were talking about the 40-year scale. The fossil record doesn't allow paleontologists to see things at so fine-grained a scale.