I'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

I'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.