Barkley Rosser: Punctuated Equilibrium is just placing an new buzzword on the common sense of of Gould’s field, paleontology. Even if very broadly correct, it is not the single biggest idea in evolutionary theory of the last half century, not is it in the top ten. You don’t find hints of it in Darwin and some others, you find it as essentially an implicit end of a continuum from completely uniform rates of change to completely discontinuous change. Most evolutionary biologists have assumed something closer to completely uniform change than Gould does, but he grossly exaggerates his differences from most biologists on this point.
Eliezer: As a general rule I would not recommend that you claim a paper or book as one of your all-time favorites if you last read it at a point in your life from which you have generally disowned your conclusions.
Barkley Rosser: Punctuated Equilibrium is just placing an new buzzword on the common sense of of Gould’s field, paleontology. Even if very broadly correct, it is not the single biggest idea in evolutionary theory of the last half century, not is it in the top ten. You don’t find hints of it in Darwin and some others, you find it as essentially an implicit end of a continuum from completely uniform rates of change to completely discontinuous change. Most evolutionary biologists have assumed something closer to completely uniform change than Gould does, but he grossly exaggerates his differences from most biologists on this point.
Eliezer: As a general rule I would not recommend that you claim a paper or book as one of your all-time favorites if you last read it at a point in your life from which you have generally disowned your conclusions.