What is "punctuationist"

Usage examples of "punctuationist".

I shall show that the answer is yes, and that the ranks of gradualists, in this second sense, include all sensible evolutionists, among them, when you look carefully at their beliefs, those that call themselves punctuationists.

The naming problem would arise even for punctuationists if literally every animal that had ever lived was preserved as a fossil, because the punctuationists are really gradualists when we come right down to detail.

According to the radical young punctuationists, the Israelites spent most of their time in 'stasis', not moving at all but camped, often for years at a time, in one place.

People who know nothing else of biblical scholarship remember just the one fact: that in the dark days before the punctuationists burst upon the scene, everybody else got it wrong.

Note that the publicity value of the punctuationists has nothing to do with the fact that they may be right.

It is because the punctuationists sell themselves as revolutionaries that they are listened to, not because they are right.

There is a highly advertised school of thought among evolutionary biologists whose proponents call themselves punctuationists, and they did invent the term 'gradualist' for their most influential predecessors.

Rather, it turns out to be Darwin's alleged belief in the constancy of rates of evolution that they and the other punctuationists object to.

The proper way to characterize the beliefs of punctuationists is: 'gradualistic, but with long periods of "stasis" (evolutionary stagnation) punctuating brief episodes of rapid gradual change'.

As I said, the one respect in which punctuationists do differ from other schools of Darwinism is in their strong emphasis on stasis as something positive: as an active resistance to evolutionary change rather than as, simply, absence of evolutionary change.

It is not surprising, then, that punctuationists tend to believe in a kind of natural selection at the species level, which they regard as analogous to Darwinian selection at the ordinary individual level.