Quotes from The Structure of Evolutionary Theory — Stephen Jay Gould
1941–2002 United States
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3 quotes
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus, or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)