We now know gradualism doesn't work ~ tectonics work!
I detect a thread of "gradualism" in the posts from the Evos here ~ time to catch up to DNA though. The dynamics there simply do not require "gradualism". In fact, we can go in and change the whole picture ourselves. Over the long run we will probably take charge of our own and other genomes.
That's going to really pi$$ off the Creos too.
"We now know gradualism doesn't work ~ tectonics work!"
Plate tectonics is a gradual process.
Hey, I'll openly admit that we certainly don't understand everything about how evolution occurred over the last 3.5 billion years (though we can say for sure that it has happened and continues to do so). It is good to question the assumptions about what we know in science, but if one expects an existing model to be replaced, one must offer up something better than the existing model that is capable of explaining more. That's what burns me about ID - it doesn't offer any explanations of how change occurs, and hasn't contributed anything other than pointing out we don't know everything yet (something we already knew!)
You make a good analogy to tectonics. Tectonics works in "spurts" - small "jolts" that over time add up to colossal changes - but it still, on average, is a gradual process. Evolution may work more in this manner than we think, but we're still talking about a gradual process when considered in the grand scheme of time. There certainly are many examples of documented gradualism known in evolution, but we don't know for certain yet that this type of change explains every instance of evolution, I would agree. This, though, is merely the meting out one of the finer details of the theory, not changing its basic precepts all together.