RSS & Punctuated Equilibrium
All this talk about RSS & the social media ecosystem evolving now that Google Reader is end-of-life has me thinking of Niles Eldredge & Stephen Jay Gould’s 1972 groundbreaking work, Punctuated Equilibrium. Wikipedia explains it better than I can: Punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology which proposes that most species will exhibit little net evolutionary change for most of their geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis. When significant evolutionary change occurs, the hypothesis proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation called cladogenesis. Cladogenesis is the process by which a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually transforming into another. Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic …