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What is a species? How do new species arise? What is the difference between the graduated and punctuated theories of speciation?
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What is a species? How do new species arise? What is the difference between the graduated and punctuated theories of speciation? Speciation and evolution are topics in biology which are contentious and open to debate. New evidence is continually being found which reshapes our ideas about the mechanisms and patterns of speciation. There is much controversy over many aspects of this topic, from the question, 'what is a species?', to the pattern in which these new species arise. Darwin was the first to powerfully attack the idea of creationalism in 1959, and since this date his theory of evolution by natural selection has dominated. Darwin sparked an explosion in research in this area, and in 1972, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould put forward the idea of punctuated equilibrium. This suggested that evolution was not a slow continuous additive process as Darwin had thought. The theory of punctuated equilibrium states that...
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