“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.”

—  Stephen Jay Gould, book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 778

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Stephen Jay Gould274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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“Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1009

“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically “sudden” origins at single bedding planes.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), pp. 2–3

“I did speak extensively — often quite critically — about the reviled work of Richard Goldschmidt, particularly about aspects of his thought that might merit a rehearing. This material has often been confused with punctuated equlibrium by people who miss the crucial issue of scaling, and therefore regard all statements about rapidity at any level as necessarily unitary, and necessarily flowing from punctuated equilibrium. In fact, as the long treatment in Chapter 5 of this book should make clear, my interest in Goldschmidt resides in issues bearing little relationship with punctuated equilibrium, but invested instead in developmental questions that prompted my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The two subjects, after all, are quite separate, and rooted in different scales of rapidity — hopeful monsters in genuine saltation, and punctuated equilibrium in macroevolutionary punctuation”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

produced by ordinary allopatric speciation
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1005

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“Economic theory is devoted to the study of equilibrium positions.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (1987)
Context: Economic theory is devoted to the study of equilibrium positions. The concept of equilibrium is very useful. It allows us to focus on the final outcome rather than the process that leads up to it. But the concept is also very deceptive. It has the aura of something empirical: since the adjustment process is supposed to lead to an equilibrium, an equilibrium position seems somehow implicit in our observations. That is not true. Equilibrium itself has rarely been observed in real life — market prices have a notorious habit of fluctuating.

“We have argued at some length in another place that the mechanical equilibrium model and the organismic homeostasis models of society that have underlain most modern sociological theory have outlived their usefulness”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society as a complex adaptive system (1968), p. 490.

“Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1001

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“Economic theory in general ignores processes which take time to occur, and instead assumes that everything occurs in equilibrium.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 8, Let's Do The Time Warp Again, p. 166

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“An important object of the Journal should be the publication of papers dealing with attempts at statistical verification of the laws of economic theory, and further the publication of papers dealing with the purely abstract problems of quantitative economics, such as problems in the quantitative definition of the fundamental concepts of economics and problems in the theory of economic equilibrium.
The term equilibrium theory is here interpreted as including both the classical equilibrium theory proceeding on the lines of Walras, Pareto, and Marshall, and the more general equilibrium theory which is now beginning to grow out of the classical equilibrium theory, partly through the influence of the modern study of economic statistics. Taken in this broad sense the equilibrium problems include virtually all those fundamental problems of production, circulation, distribution and consumption, which can be made the object of a quantitative study. More precisely: The equilibrium theory in the sense here used is a body of doctrines that treats all these problems from a certain point of view, which is contrasted on one side with the verbal treatment of economic problems and on the other side with the purely empirical-statistical approach to economic problems”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1927). as quoted in: Bjerkholt, Olav, and Duo Qin. A Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory: The Yale Lectures of Ragnar Frisch. Routledge, 2010: About "Oekonometrika"
1920

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“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

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“The equilibrium… in order to become static—should be steady, permanent, lasting. …This type of equilibrium… is… independent of any scale. A reduced model will show the same effects as the proper structure. Experiments on models are simple and… instrumental for understanding such structural problems.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

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