 In the Origin of Species, Darwin had attributed the lack of fossil series exhibiting gradual morphological transition to the incompleteness of the fossil record. He thought of speciation and morphological evolution as gradual processes (though he did acknowledge variation in evolutionary rates), and thought that they often happen under the geological radar. As he put it: “Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms” (Darwin 1859 [1964: 292]). Eldredge and Gould were, in contrast, proposing that the fossil record is more complete than it seems, and that we should take the rapid appearance of new species more or less at face value. As they eventually put it, in designing the theory of punctuated equilibrium they were “hoping to validate our profession’s primary data as signal rather than void” (Gould &amp; Eldredge 1993: 223). One epistemological issue in play here is whether the absence of evidence—in this case, the absence of evidence of gradual evolutionary change—is really evidence of absence (Sober 2009; Currie &amp; Turner 2017).