Punctuated evolution is a frankly political term — SJ Gould originated the term “punctuated equilibria” to describe long periods of stasis and the apparent sudden changes to whole taxa as evidenced in the fossil record, coining the term “diastrophe” instead of just using catastrophe. The diastrophe is the punctuation mark in the equilibria.
I don’t care if it’s punctuated or not. Agriculture is the opposite of evolution because the main element in agriculture is the deliberate application of human intelligence to the development of improved specimens.
Trying to pretend that genomic changes in a plant that was a commercialized domestic crop 6000 years ago is evidence of anything other than design is the worst sort of agenda driven anti-science there is.
I agree punctuated evolution is a political term, which set off a warning when I read the article. It has always seemed to me punk-eek was more of a description of what we see in the fossil record than a theory of how the change happened.