[BroJoeK]

varmintman: "The basic reality is that Gould was always playing a double game in this regard and the idea that anybody trying to quote him might be engaging in anything nefarious or dishonest is completely laughable....

...But back to Gould, he was insisting on having his cake while eating it, in other words, he said what he had to to get rid of the evoloser yoke which was stifling palaeontology, and then cursed the creationists for quoting that material.
That's a double game and a dishonest one."

First, I don't accept any of your name-calling slanders against Gould as valid.
Gould was obviously bitter at the way Creationists had misconstrued his words.
Here is the link to my previous quote of Gould.
And here to Gould's entire article.

Second, punctuated equilibrium is simple common sense, regardless of your personal attacks on Gould:

Whenever a species has perfectly adapted to its environment then nearly every mutation which actually effects it must necessarily be negative, and so natural selection will weed it out.
And as long as a species interbreeds among all its members, then it can remain basically unchanged for many, many generations.

Only when a sub-group is isolated in a changed environment, and forced to either adapt or die out, can evolution (descent with modifications and natural selection) have major effects over relatively shorter time periods.

Yes, a well-adapted large population can change over time, more or less randomly, in what's called "genetic drift":

"The law of large numbers predicts little change over time due to genetic drift when the population is large.
When the reproductive population is small, however, the effects of sampling error can alter the allele frequencies significantly.
Genetic drift is therefore considered to be a consequential mechanism of evolutionary change primarily within small, isolated populations"

So, how much of evolution is driven by

• A) "punctuated equilibrium", how much by
• B) "genetic drift", and how much is just
• C) natural selection of inherent characteristics (consider the example of dog breeds)?
  

No doubt the correct answer is:

• D) all of the above, each to some degree.

But considered logically, wouldn't a separated sub-species suffering natural selections from a changing environment be most likely to produce more changes over the shortest time periods?

[varmintman]

Gould was obviously bitter at the way Creationists had misconstrued his words.

Gould was PRETENDING to be bitter at the way creationists were quoting him, and they were quoting him correctly. In real life, there is a terribly easy way to avoid being quoted as having said something:

DON'T SAY IT!!!!!