h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

From my interpretation of The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins doesn't seem hostile to the idea of punctuated equilibria - he says it's probably true - merely the way it was sold as more ground-breaking and revolutionary than it actually was.

But then, I'm no expert..

Yep, you're quite right, I'll take down the PE section until I've researched more.

Punctuated equilibrium makes perfect sense. Why should organisms who keep on evolving if they are already pretty-much adapted to their respective environments. The burst of evolutionary activity is associated with a sudden change in the organism's environment (e.g. the sudden, catastrophic and periodic climate changes we know have occurred). Only when evolution has that amount of raw material to work with it goes through explosive adaptation and speciation.

I think it is incorrect to see it as 'stasis' followed by rapid evolution. That's a bit black and white, and nothing in biology is like that. We know evolution is happening all around us all the time, just at a lesser rate. It's just that punctuated equilibrium refers to a notable 'burst' of evolutionary activity *relative* to other periods. Who says that evolution has to stay at a steady rate? It makes less sense to think like this in my humble opinion.