"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes."
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Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Book by Stephen Jay Gould, pp. 2 - 3, 1987.
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