 When Eldredge and Gould (1972) introduced punctuated equilibria, the received view of expected morphological change via evolution was that of phyletic gradualism. This is a notion that can be traced all the way from Darwin’s Origin of Species to, for instance, Simpson (1970). In accepting phyletic gradualism, paleontologists had long had to accept that the incompleteness of the fossil record was significantly responsible for the lack of (ideally expected) geological documentation of gradual transformation in the majority of fossilized speciation events. What Eldredge and Gould uniquely realized, however, was that the expectation of phyletic gradualism clashed not only with what the fossil record actually showed, but also with what the dominant model of (allopatric) speciation predicted. So they developed PE: an alternative view of morphological evolution (and stasis) intended to synthesize what allopatric speciation projected with what the fossil record depicted.