Laurence Sterne's novels were "terribly be-dashed," one
punctuationist groused decades later; he was a regular "dashite," another moaned.
The difficulty faced by neo-Darwinian theory, and equally by
punctuationist variants of evolutionary theory, in generating any symbol system whatever is not merely to produce the symbol in the manner of a Xerox machine producing a copy of a page of text, but to produce a meaningful string of biological symbols arbitrarily and conventionally associated with their meanings.
88-90, 106, 110, 145) criticizes Niles Eldredge, Stephen Gould, and Steven Stanley's theory of punctuated equilibria at the level of species and genera, but comes across as an ardent
punctuationist for evolution above this level.
(96)
Punctuationists emphasize speciation over phyletic evolution, (97) and opposed the uniformitarianism (98) that assumes the natural processes operating in the past were the same as those that can be observed operating in the present.
