Punctuated Equilibrium

By the late 1960's, evolutionary scientists were at their wits end. The more evidence that was being thrown up by the fossil record, the less proof there was for the evolution of species. Leading evolutionist of the time, Stephen Jay Gould was particularly perturbed by these findings. It looked like the whole theory was unraveling before his eyes. The fossil record, instead of confirming evolution, was, more and more, confirming creationism. Creationism teaches that each creature was created by God "after it's own kind" - please read Genesis Chapter 1. And the fossil record, time after time, was revealing completed kinds, with an almost complete absence of anything that might be termed an intermediate kind. If evolution were true, there ought to be more examples of intermediate kinds than completed kinds, were it the case that, over and over again, kind after kind was evolving into other kinds over many millions of years.

The very discovery of the fossil record in the first place was a blow to evolutionary theory as the only real way that fossils could be trapped was through Catastrophism ie the sudden fossilization of living creatures and plants through either local or widespread, sudden catastrophic environmental changes. The challenge for Evolutionary Theory was to account for periodic catastrophies, whereas, of course, the Bible, written some three thousand years earlier gave a ready account for a widespread catastrophy, the Flood of Noah. So Catastrophism, formerly eschewed by evolutionists because of it's lending of strength to the Creationist cause, had to be embraced by evolutionists, once the facts backed them sufficiently into an intellectual corner.  When the fossil record began to throw more spanners in the evolutionary works, by not confirming the evolution of species, the weight of the facts "against" was beginning  to become quite a discouragement. Enter Stephen Jay Gould. In 1972, Gould along with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge proposed Punctuated Equilibrium as the "new improved" theory of evolution.

The idea was that history was dotted with multiple Catastrophies, each of which were short-lasting and during which all evolutionary species changes took place on a grand scale, accompanied co-incidentally by fossilization. Each Catastrophy was followed by a very long period of "equilibrium" during which little or no evolution occurred and, during which, fossilization was rare.

It was certainly an improvement to previous theory to move the goalposts in such an extraordinary way to better facilitate the facts that were predicted already by the Creation model without any need to modify Creationist Theory. The trouble with graphs similar to the above is that they are nothing more than a figment of creative imaginations as per Msrs Gould and Eldredge. It is what it is : a picture in a book with accompanying explanation. There was no new evidence that the change from one species to another ever occurred, no evidence that the idea of multiple Catastrophies with many millions of years between was historical. All that had been done was to accomodate the facts (which already readily fitted the Creation model) into a newer, more plausible picture for those either with a predisposition against the Creationist explanation of history, or who had never been taught to investigate it for themselves.

What Gould and Eldredge completely failed to explain was how Catastrophism facilitated species change in any way. Instead, they simply repeated the error of the Big Bang theory multipled times, in insisting that there was some validity or scientific basis to the idea that, in some nebulous way, environmental catastrophies can cause great beneficial leaps in DNA mutation, whereas all scientific experimentation we actually know of has concluded that DNA mutation is 99.9%, if not 100% negative in it's effects, even in controlled environments.

Mary Shelley was the first to propose the idea that by a completely unknown process, a sufficiently powerful, nay catastrophic, electrical charge, under the right circumstances, orchestrated by the right creative brain, could in fact result in life coming from dead tissue. Her resultant creation could even be termed to be a new species, if looking a little the worse for wear. The trouble is that Frankenstein's Monster is universally acknowledged in the Arts world as being a work of fiction. Nobody actually believes that the story she weaves is "doable", though there are always a few who keep trying, where tax-payer funding squeezes through the administrative cracks. Her book is not taught in Colleges the world over as fact. Whilst reruns of the original Boris Karloff interpretation do feature on our screens from time to time, it is sporadic and tends to be found on one of the Movie channels, not on Documentaries.

So the fact that, with evolutionary backs against the wall, Punctuated Equilibrium was delivered to the scientific world some forty years ago, has little bearing on the problems that evolutionists continue to face in building a working Model of Origins, that is either convincing or fact based. It is instead rather, an unswerving commitment to evolutionary philosophy that drives the train on.