tgamble

"...we have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."

(Eldredge, Niles, [Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History], "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p144) [

Is Niles really saying that paleotologists have knowingly lied? Or is the quote out of context? Thanks.

Hastur

Niles is one of the men who came up with Punctuated Equilibirum.

It sounds like he's saying that paleontologists 'went along' with classic Darwinian gradualism despite knowing that it wasn't complete in explaining what they saw because they lacked a better model.

bluefugue

...yet this presupposes that gradualism and punk eek are mutually exclusive, which I have never understood. Punk eek is not, AFAIK, a theory of saltationism. Those "brief" periods of extreme adaptive change would presumably still number in the tens of thousands of years at least, which is too small to be resolved easily in the geologic record. All "gradualism" means is that it would be improbable for complex morphological changes to spring up overnight; it doesn't require a constant rate of change throughout time, and I doubt anybody, from Darwin on up, thought that it did.

Yes, this is all parroted from Dawkins' chapter "Puncturing Punctuationism," but it makes damn good sense to me.