Upcoming Punctuated Equilibria Quote Mines
January 5, 2025 at 7:16 am
(This post was last modified: January 5, 2025 at 8:11 am by Lucian.)
I am reading a book recently released by Bruce L. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge called Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paelontology, and Stephen Jay Gould. There are a few passages in their chapter that deals with punctuated equilibria that I bet will be ripped out of context and used in future Young Earth Creationist and ID material. Here are just a couple
Page 26: “Ah the stony silence of fossil species that didn’t change much throughout their history”. The next sentence though is “\the way out was realizing that there are changes, marked changes that lead to new species, themselves going on to become stable hallmarks of descendent species, showing up laterally (geographically). That’s “punctuated equilibria”…”
Page 27: “The incompleteness of the fossil record cannot explain stasis; incompleteness was used to explain away the absence of gradual change and the seeming suddenness of change between species sometimes preserved in the fossil record. But an incomplete fossil record just means that there is even more stasis than we’re in fact seeing” then further on “Species or their parts are always changing or always moving, yet overall species don’t seem to “get anywhere”…”. Just a tiny bit on though on the same page “Notable scientists like Mark Pagel and Chris Vendetti from the University of Reading in England have shown that modifications of the genome do fit the punk eek pattern, with molecular changes concentrated at speciation events, such that molecules mirror morphology”
Here is a recent paper I was pointed to that has Niles Eldridge as a co-author and deals with punctuated equilibria focussing though on evolutionary systems rather than the fossil record (punctuated evolution is the term they use for this) so that the above quotes can be further put in the context of Eldridge’s more academic work
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.12731
I am sure there will be other quote mine worthy statements in this book and will happily add them to this thread as I find them if there is any interest
Page 26: “Ah the stony silence of fossil species that didn’t change much throughout their history”. The next sentence though is “\the way out was realizing that there are changes, marked changes that lead to new species, themselves going on to become stable hallmarks of descendent species, showing up laterally (geographically). That’s “punctuated equilibria”…”
Page 27: “The incompleteness of the fossil record cannot explain stasis; incompleteness was used to explain away the absence of gradual change and the seeming suddenness of change between species sometimes preserved in the fossil record. But an incomplete fossil record just means that there is even more stasis than we’re in fact seeing” then further on “Species or their parts are always changing or always moving, yet overall species don’t seem to “get anywhere”…”. Just a tiny bit on though on the same page “Notable scientists like Mark Pagel and Chris Vendetti from the University of Reading in England have shown that modifications of the genome do fit the punk eek pattern, with molecular changes concentrated at speciation events, such that molecules mirror morphology”
Here is a recent paper I was pointed to that has Niles Eldridge as a co-author and deals with punctuated equilibria focussing though on evolutionary systems rather than the fossil record (punctuated evolution is the term they use for this) so that the above quotes can be further put in the context of Eldridge’s more academic work
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.12731
I am sure there will be other quote mine worthy statements in this book and will happily add them to this thread as I find them if there is any interest
