“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.”

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of…" by Stephen Jay Gould?
Stephen Jay Gould photo
Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

Related quotes

Stephen Hawking photo
James Howard Kunstler photo
Stephen Hawking photo

“Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.”

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.

Leonard Susskind photo

Related topics