Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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| Quote (Henry J @ Feb. 24 2009,21:52) | | Quote | | while Darwin and the other gradualists are falling to the wayside. |
A minor point, but Darwin wasn't a gradualist. He expected that most (or at least a lot of) evolution might be in bursts, and in small subsets of populations.
Henry |
What Darwin wasn't would be a phyletic gradualist, the category Gould invented for Darwin that included constant rates of change of entire populations over their full geographic extent, resulting in anagenetic speciation and not cladogenesis.
Darwin was a gradualist, someone who appreciates that the preponderance of evolutionary change occurs via populational processes and not saltational changes in one or a few individuals out of a population. Being a gradualist is something pretty much all of the modern biological community does, too.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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