I started a thread on catastrophic theory vs gradualism. Every day we turn on the news and see catastrophic conditions somewhere in the world. We know that Darwin got his gradualism from a geologist.
Which would be ironic, since the geologist (Lyell) was a uniformitarian, not a gradualist. Uniformitarians recognize that discontinuous events are part of the way the world works. Lyell was cognizant of floods and earthquakes, for example.
Uniformitarianism, also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity, is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.
Uniformitarianism - Wikipedia
It was actually atheist Elliot Gould that took science from gradualism back to punctuated equilibrium.
This guy?
No, this guy...
Stephan Gould was a professed agnostic, who once suggested that a god might have created us, because he wanted someone to share it with him.
And Darwin's inclination to gradualism was challenged almost immediately by his defender Thomas Huxley:
But Huxley argued that saltation or evolution by “jumps” better described the geological record with its abrupt appearance of most forms than the gradual change that Darwin advocated. On the eve of the publication of The Origin he cautioned Darwin, “You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly” (Nature does not make jumps) (November 23, 1859, LLTHH, 1, 189).
A Most Eminent Victorian: Thomas Henry Huxley
He is still alive and well. Gould's evolution theory that anything can happen has pretty much been falsified.
Do you have a source for Gould expressing that idea? I don't find it in his opus
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.
It has been shown that the laws remain consistant so anywhere you go in the universe things are going to function the same way they do here.
That's uniformitarianism.
You will end up with pretty much all the same results as we see in our world.
You'll see analogies. The same things, but from different stuff. For example, South America was isolated from other continents at a critical time, and so perissodactyls like horses never got there. But there evolved a species of lipotern that would have been mistaken for a horse by anyone not very familiar with horse anatomy.
New world and old world vultures look almost identical, but only new world vultures(not all of them) depend on smell rather than sight; old world vultures are evolved from raptors and new world vultures evolved from the group that includes storks.
Kangaroos filled the niche occupied by cattle in other continents, and the Australian marsupial Thylacine was strongly homologous to canids in other continents.
There are also Australian marsupial versions of placental moles and placental flying squirrels. So you have that right.
In fact the Greek word for world: Kosmos is now Cosmos and means the entire universe and not just the world or the Earth. In your example we can look at what took place recently in Japan with the tidal wave. The plates may move very slow but then they slip and make a rapid movement that causes earthquakes and catastrophic conditions.
The movement is at most a few meters, normally a few centimeters. And the long movements are usually when there's lubrication at the fault.
