2023/11/14 by Michael J. O’Brien, Sergi Valverde, Salva Duran‐Nebreda +2 · 1 voice · 8 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Anthropology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Biology #Diversity (politics) #Ecology #Epistemology #Evolutionary biology #Evolutionary ecology #Evolutionary theory #Fossil Record #Geography #Human evolution #Humanity #Language and cultural evolution #Philosophy #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Punctuated equilibrium #Scale (ratio) #Sociocultural evolution #Sociology #Space (punctuation)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/evan.22009
published in Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews 33(1), e22009 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2023/11/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The theory of punctuated equilibrium (PE) was developed a little over 50 years ago to explain long-term, large-scale appearance and disappearance of species in the fossil record. A theory designed specifically for that purpose cannot be expected, out of the box, to be directly applicable to biocultural evolution, but in revised form, PE offers a promising approach to incorporating not only a wealth of recent empirical research on genetic, linguistic, and technological evolution but also large databases that document human biological and cultural diversity across time and space. Here we isolate the fundamental components of PE and propose which pieces, when reassembled or renamed, can be highly useful in evolutionary anthropology, especially as humanity faces abrupt ecological challenges on an increasingly larger scale.