On the dynamics of evolutionary discontinuities (Q799530)

Certain views of biological evolution have returned to prominence which reflect aspects of 19th-century evolutionary saltationism. The basic concepts of recent saltationism, such as ''quantum evolution'', ''genetic revolution'', ''genetic transiliance'' and ''punctuational change'' have been introduced exclusively from the perspectives of modern synthetic theory. In this paper, it is argued that macroevolutionary discontinuities are not only consistent with the basic assumptions of gradualism but even predicted by the continuous-time models of population dynamics. In section 2, the evolution in secular time scales is presented. Various limits of the shifting-peak approach to evolutionary saltationism leave it worthwhile to reconsider the punctuated-equilibria model from the standpoint of population dynamics. Section 3 ''low-dimensional examples'' discusses a few well-known examples from competitive selection theory. For further analysis of the modes of long-term evolution the concept of fitness surface, or adaptive topography, is modified appropriately and the modes of evolution in adaptive topographies are given in section 4. The final discussion, in section 5, relates the present results to the details of \textit{S. J. Gould} and \textit{N. Eldredge}'s standpoint [Punctuated equilibria: Tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered. Paleobiology 3, 111-151 (1977)]. It is an actual overview paper in the field of mathematical biosciences.