 The classic paper on punctuated equilibria (PE) was co-authored by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (1972), although Eldredge (1971) was originally responsible for the idea. Their (1972) presentation of PE draws heavily on themes from Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) work, as they present PE as a new paradigm to rival traditional Darwinian gradualism (Turner 2011b: chapter 2). Far from challenging the modern synthesis in that early work, they present PE as a straightforward consequence of allopatric speciation (speciation driven by isolating geographic change). Eldredge and Gould reasoned that if speciation were typically allopatric, then it would tend to happen fairly rapidly in geological terms, and new species would be geographically distant from parent species. Consequently, in the fossil record, one should not expect to see very many cases where a fossil series documents a clear and gradual transition from one species to another. Eldredge and Gould also argued that most morphological change occurs in (geologically) rapid spurts during speciation events and that new species, once they arise, typically exhibit stasis.