Honk if you love…
From SJG, SET, pg 976:
"When the National Center for Science Education, America’s leading anti-creationist organization, put out two bumper stickers as sardonic comments upon the favored evangelical "Honk if you love Jesus," they chose "Honk if you love Darwin" and "Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium." (Niles Eldredge [co-author of Punc Eq with Gould] tells me that, in his car one day, he became frightened by a persistent honker; when he ventured a sheepish glance, fearing an encounter with a gun, or at least an upraised third finger, he noted only a smile on the other driver’s face, and a finger pointing downward to the bumper sticker.)"
I laughed so hard and so unexpectedly at this I think I scared the folks sharing the table at Tully’s with me. That’s saying something. They scare me.
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Punctuated equlibrium, in the original and strictest application of the theory, addresses the question of speciation by branching, the relative rate of speciation, the relative duration of the lineage, the morphological stasis of the lineage, and (most importantly) the frequency of this phenomenon in the fossil record.
However, the idea of rapid, punctuated change followed by comparatively long stasis has taken hold as a general theory of change in complex systems, and has been applied with staggering breadth across disciplines and human enterprises. So, looking for punctuated change in the fossil record of the Phanerozoic (Cambrian period to present) seems a pretty tame venture.
"Sheehan [in Kerr, 1994, pg. 29] divides the last 640 million years into six major faunal packages that he calls EEU’s, or Ecologic Evolutionary Units. Each lasts for 35 to 147 million years, and each ends at a mass extinction. The subsequent recovery periods for the units occupy only 3 to 8 million years."
Honk honk.
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