Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evolution is a myth? Please explain:

"Gould is famous for "punctuated equilibrium"---the theory that tries to reconcile Neo-Darwinism with the decidedly anti-Darwinian fossil record. "Punk-eek" doesn't work either, but its hilariously funny watching the intellectual contortions neo-Darwinian fundamentalists have to go through to try to reconcile their theory with the disconfirming evidence." - Tarquin

Ridiculous. Punctuated equilibrium merely asserts that there are periods of high pressure for rapid change within certain species, such as relatively sudden changes in the environment. "Rapid change" must be understood in terms of geological time scales, i.e., still very long periods of time.

In other words, it asserts that most major changes occur within a geologically short time scale, and that in between those periods are long periods of a relative absence of change (slow or no change).

An example would be the sudden gigantism among many species of birds (along with the loss of the ability to fly) that occurred after the K-T Extinction Event. This occurred because of the sudden disappearance of all of the earth's mega fauna, i.e., all dinosaurs other than birds. This left a vacuum in terms of niches to be filled, so birds grew larger to fill them, and lost their flight because they adopted the roles of land mega fauna, which didn't require flight. This change in birds happened relatively quickly.