778 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
microevolutionary views about speciation, then unfamiliar to the great majority of
working paleontologists, might help our profession to interpret the history of life
more adequately. (As a best testimony to this unfamiliarity, I note that most
paleontologists didn't even recognize the conceptual and terminological distinction
between "speciation" defined as a process of splitting, and the accumulation of
enough change by anagenesis to provoke the coining of a new Linnaean name for
an unbranched single population.)
In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very
conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or
mechanisms of speciation; punctuated equilibrium merely takes a standard
microevolutionary model and elucidates its expected expression when properly
scaled into geological time. This scaling, however, did provoke a radical
reinterpretation of paleontological data—for we argued that the literal appearance
of the fossil record, though conventionally dismissed as an artifact of imperfect
evidence, may actually be recording the workings of evolution as understood by
neontologists. * This empowering switch enabled paleontologists to cherish their
basic data as adequate and revealing, rather than pitifully fragmentary and
inevitably obfuscating. Paleontology could emerge from the intellectual sloth of
debarment from theoretical insight imposed by poor data—a self-generated torpor
that had confined the field to a descriptive role in documenting the actual pathways
of life's history. Paleontology could now take a deserved and active place among
the evolutionary sciences.
The major and persisting misunderstanding of punctuated equilibrium among
neontologists—a great frustration for us, and one that we have tried
*All professions maintain their parochialisms, and I trust that nonpaleontological
readers will forgive our major manifestation. We are paleontologists, so we need a name
to contrast ourselves with all you folks who study modern organisms in human or
ecological time. You therefore become neontologists. We do recognize the unbalanced
and parochial nature of this dichotomous division—much like my grandmother's parsing
of Homo sapiens into the two categories of 'Jews' and 'non-Jews.'