China 
Africa 
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Principles of Biology
Published in Arthur T. Johnson, Biology for Engineers, 2019
At the other end of the spectrum are the punctuated equilibrium evolutionists, those who point to fossil evidence that demonstrates epochs in Earth’s history when new species appeared explosively fast (“evolution by jerks”). These proponents argue that differences between older and newer species are so vast that they are clearly distinguishable.
Surviving & Thriving in a Swiftly Evolving Professional Environment
Published in Charles Nelson, Gordon Nuttall, Managing Quality in Architecture, 2017
Charles Nelson, Gordon Nuttall
He says that evolutionary change, unlike cyclical change, is neither steady nor gradual, but is “a series of long, quiet plateaus studded with sudden bursts of massive evolutionary redirection … called punctuated equilibrium”.
Phoenix Rising
Published in Dawna L. Rhoades, Evolution of International Aviation, 2016
As Buffet pointed out, air travel has transformed the way we live and do business. It is itself in the process of transforming; it is becoming something new. A debate has raged in the fields of paleontology, genetics and evolutionary biology over whether change in living organisms takes place in a gradual, step-by-step manner or in periods of rapid, major change followed by stasis. The latter theory is called punctuated equilibrium (Gould and Eldredge, 1977). This theory has been adapted and applied to the evolution of technology (Tushman and Anderson, 1986) and to the lifecycle and evolution of organizations and their industries (Hannan and Freeman, 1984). The idea of punctuated equilibrium or discontinuous change has caught on in so many areas because it “seems to fit” the observed evidence. In other words, investigators in all of these fields have been unable to trace a slow, clear development from one form to the next. Instead, they see periods of relative stability and little change interrupted by sudden, radical alterations in form. In the evolutionary sciences, these periods of sudden change are usually connected to mass extinctions of older, existing life forms. In the areas of technology and organizations, startling innovations have arisen that make the technology and knowhow that came before obsolete. Think of the impact of the telephone on the telegraph or the airplane on the long-distance train system. For organizations, these periods of rapid change have been hardest on the firms of the prior age, firms that developed, grew, and adapted to life in another time. This is the traditional stockbrokerage coping in the new world of the internet or the corner bookseller competing with Amazon.com. The question in the minds of organizational theorists is whether these old age firms can change quickly enough to survive in the new age. If not, they will become the dinosaurs of this new age, dying out to make room for the newer, faster, smaller mammals. The fossil records show that dinosaurs had reached their maximum size not long before the meteor that changed everything. It is possible that the airline industry has entered just such a period of discontinuous change.
Innovation, value-neutrality and the question of politics: unmasking the rhetorical and ideological abuse of evolutionary theory
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2020
Certainly, in later writings, authors such as Nelson (1990, 194) have come to accept that ‘the process through which technical advance proceeds in capitalist economies differs in various obvious respects from evolutionary processes of biology’. But Nelson (ibid) also insists that ‘On reflection, some of the apparent differences may be more apparent than real. Thus technology occasionally makes “big jumps”’. This is inconsistent with traditional concepts of evolution in biology, but not with modern notions of punctuated equilibria. Also it is clear that innovation is far from a strictly random process; rather efforts to advance technology are carefully pointed in directions innovators believe to be feasible and potentially profitable. However, here again the difference with biological evolution may not be sharp if one recognises the possibility (as do contemporary biologists) that selection has operated on genes to make viable mutations are more likely than would be the case were mutation strictly random’. For Nelson (2004) the fact that the market process of advancing technological innovation remains evolutionary does not deny the importance of institutions and politics. This argument also appears in his 1993 edited volume on National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis and in his 1974 article ‘Intellectualising about the Moon-Ghetto Metaphor: A Study of the Current Malaise of Rational Analysis of Social Problems’. In both works Nelson argues that market institutions have emerged through a complex process that involved both technological advance and the political state. His argument seems to endorse ‘artificial selection’.