974 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
into oblivion along with the item itself), and race walking. I congratulate Webster's
on a better and more accurate definition than many professional colleagues have
misdevised for their denigrations. Webster's suggests: "a lineage of evolutionary
descent characterized by long periods of stability in characteristics of the organism
and short periods of rapid change during which new forms appear esp. from small
subpopulations of the ancestral form in restricted parts of its geographic range."
Punctuated equilibrium also occurs in most alphabetical compendia of scientific
terms and concepts, including the World Information Systems Almanac of Science
and Technology (Golob and Brus, 1990), The Penguin Dictionary of Biology
(Thain and Hickman, 1990), and the Oxford Dictionary of Natural History (Allaby,
1985).
As a further mark of general recognition, several novelists have made casual
references to punctuated equilibrium (in works for mass audiences, not arcana for
the literati). Stephen King mentions punctuated equilibrium in chapter 30, "Thayer
gets weird," of The Talisman. The celebrated English novelist John Fowles
included the following passage in his novel, A Maggot. (Fowles, a distinguished
amateur paleontologist himself, also created fiction's outstanding paleontologist,
the hero of his novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman): "This particular last day of
April falls in a year very nearly equidistant from 1689, the culmination of the
English Revolution, and 1789, the start of the French; in a sort of dozing solstitial
standstill, a stasis of the kind predicted by those today who see all evolution as a
punctuated equilibrium." In his 1982 crime novel, The Man at the Wheel, Michael
Kenyon doesn't cite the name, and does veer towards the common saltational
confusion, but presumably wrote this passage in the light of public discussion
about punctuated equilibrium. "Now there're biologists saying Darwin got it
wrong, or at any rate not wholly right, because evolution isn't slow, continuous
change, it's sudden bursts of change after millions of years of nothing, so if the
polar bear happened suddenly, why not the world?"
2. LISTING THE THEORY AS AN EVENT IN CHRONOLOGICAL
ACCOUNTS OF THE GROWTH OF 2OTH CENTURY KNOWLEDGE.
Isaac Asimov cited punctuated equilibrium among the seven events of world
science chosen to characterize 1972 in his book, Asimov's Chronology of Science
and Technology (1989). Rensberger (1986) included punctuated equilibrium in his
alphabetical compendium How the World Works: A Guide to Science's Greatest
Discoveries. In Our Times (Glennon, 1995), a lavishly illustrated "coffee table"
book on the cultural history of the 20th century used the Darwinian centennial of
1982 for discussing the strength of evolution (contra creation-ism) and the status of
the field. Among three "takes" to mark the year (evolution shared space with acid
rain and Madonna's first single recording, while a sidebar list of "new in 1982"
includes liposuction and Halcion sleeping pills), the column on evolution bears the
title "Darwin refined," and concentrates exclusively on punctuated equilibrium. In
a refreshing departure from common journalistic accounts, the epitome is both
incisive and generally accurate: "... The theory of punctuated equilibria reconciled
Darwinism with