Abstract
In a paper entitled “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” Eldredge and Gould (1972) properly criticize the naive concepts held by most paleontologists with respect to the interpretation of data from the fossil record. The model or “picture” (Eldredge and Gould, 1972) of the mechanism explaining morphological change used by most paleontologists is that of gradual change within a character or complex of characters which is expressed as shifts in the mean and associated statistics along a time axis. This type of evolutionary change has been described and illustrated by many paleontologists, such as Trueman (1922, Fig. 5), Simpson (1953, p. 387), Kurten (1968, p. 239), and George (1971, p. 207). These authors and many others offer a picture of evolution as a progressive series of normal curves on a time axis in which there is a “long and insensibly graded chain of forms” (Eldredge and Gould, 1972). Basically, Eldredge and Gould (1972) criticize this simplistic model of paleontologists because it neither explains the important morphological stasis and gaps in the fossil record nor takes into consideration the major concept of modern systematics, the biological species concept.
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Hecht, M.K., Eldredge, N., Gould, S.J. (1974). Morphological Transformation, the Fossil Record, and the Mechanisms of Evolution: A Debate. In: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (eds) Evolutionary Biology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6944-2_8
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