Punctuated Equilibrium and the Validation of Macroevolutionary Theory 977
like being promoted from the seventh grade to the eighth. We would like
our lives to be an accumulation of skills and wisdom...
[But] people may go through the greatest changes in their lives in the
shortest chunks of time. I have known someone who, after years of
stagnation, raced through a decade of personal growth in the first year of a
new career. I have known others who experienced a generation's worth of
change in six post-divorce months. ..
We often underestimate the suddenness, even the randomness, of the
change itself. I suppose that our observations are no more colored than
Darwin's. We see gradual change, in part, because we go looking for it. We
find it because we need it. Our research into the past reflects our fear of the
future... Natural history is, as [Gould] puts it, "a series of plateaus
punctuated by rare and seminal events that shift systems from one level to
another." In that way, I suspect, people have a lot in common with rocks.Punctuated equilibrium has often been the explicit focus of scholarship in
distant fields (see pp. 952-967 for a technical discussion with extended examples; I
only mention the range of invocations here)—including a lead article by Gans
(1987) on "punctuated equilibria and political science" with five commentaries by
other scholars and a response by Gans in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences;
an analysis of my rhetorical style by Lyne and Howe (1986) in the Quarterly
Journal of Speech; and an exchange between Thompson (1983) and Stidd (1985)
in the journal Philosophy of Science. However, the general spread of punctuated
equilibrium into vernacular culture will not be best illustrated by such explicit
treatments (which may be read as didactic efforts to instruct), but rather by more
casual comments implying a shared context of presumed understanding before the
fact. I therefore present a partial and eclectic list, united only by the chancy
criterion that someone called the items to my attention:
- In economics, the distinguished columnist David Warsh used punctuated
equilibrium to illuminate episodic change and long plateaus in the history of
markets and prices ("What goes up sometimes levels off," Boston Globe, 1990, and
a good epitome for stasis vs. progressivism), and also to support the general
concept of punctuational change at all levels, in a defense of capitalism with the
ironic title "Redeeming Karl Marx" (Boston Globe, May 3, 1992). In a recent
bestselling book, The Future of Capitalism, MIT economist Lester Thurow
centered his argument upon two concepts borrowed from the evolutionary and
geological sciences—punctuated equilibrium and plate tectonics (see further
comment on pp. 964 - 966). - In political theory, the scholarly book of Carmines and Stimson (1989)
argues for an episodic model of change based on case studies of the New Deal and
race relations in America. "Dynamic evolutions," they write (1989, p. 157), "thus
represent the political equivalent of biology's punctuated equilibrium."