I've been reading a compilation of Stephen Jay Gould's writings "The
Richness of Life". One of his recurrent themes is how we have a hard time
interpreting probability - he illustrates this with a discussion of hitting
streaks in baseball and "hot-hands" in basketball. He claims that although
psychological explanations are appealing ("when you're hot you're hot, when
you're not you're not") they aren't backed up by statistics. In baseball for
example, all hitting streaks have lain within a couple of standard
deviations of the length you'd expect purely from a consideration of their
lifetime batting average (BTW - Gould says there's one exception to this.
Prizes will be awarded if you can identify it!)So that's a rather long preamble to my actual question: is Gould's punctuated equilibrium real or (like Dawkins) do we really have an incremental "creeping" evolution that we only get to see very very occasional snapshots of in the fossil record? According to some erudite boffin on NPR yesterday (so it must be true) the fossil record contains considerably less than 1% of the estimated dinosaur species (not individuals!). If you observe creeping evolution at such a low sample rate, wouldn't that look like punctuated equilibrium? Robert
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