It doesn't matter. Gradual in the sense of "Nothing is that different from it's parent" and "Populations evolve" is incompatible with "Geologically sudden" as in "Happens in 20,000 years."
And when someone says "Many large groups of facts are intelligible only on the principle that species have been evolved by very small steps" that person is a gradualist.
Science isn't a lawyer's game.
Note to lurkers:
It probably looks like I'm been mean to some poor noob graduate of an AiG/ICR/M-O-U-S-E seminar who is in shock at seeing the things they told him not holding up too well. Nah! T7 has been on these threads for about the time he's been a freeper. I've probably linked the PE stuff to him once every six months or so, just myself, never mind all the other people who have wasted electrons answering his simple Back-Again-Dumb-As-A-Stump-isms.PE is not a hopeful monster theory. It is something designed to account for the gaps in the fossil record and save neo-Darwinism.
PE is based on positive evidence, instances where we find the actual site of the gradual changes from which a species has spread to "suddenly appear" everywhere else. You have been presented with examples.
OK, Genius! Here's where you get to show you've been paying attention. What web page has the examples?
Missed a "not" here, or better, should have just said "is compatible." 20,000 years is both time enough for gradual change in the first sense and fast enough to appear "geologically sudden."
Oh for Pete's sake. If Eldridge's and Gould's claim that most most species experience stasis for most of their existence meshed with Darwin why was it controversial. Why would Eldridge and Gould claim Darwin to be a ""phyletic gradualist?" Why should I accept Douglas Theobald's claim that he wasn't?
It probably looks like I'm been mean . . .
Trust me Vade the only person any lurker will think you are being mean to is yourself.
What web page has the examples?
To return to Douglas Theobald, he's more a polemicist than a scientist despite his degree. Why should I accept his claims?
But here you go:
"To Darwin, therefore, speciation entailed the same expectation as phyletic evolution: a long and insensibly graded chain of intermediate forms.
[a few paragraphs later]
In this Darwinian perspective, paleontology formulated its picture for the origin of new taxa. This picture, though rarely articulated, is familiar to all of us. We refer to it here as 'phyletic gradualism' and identify the following as its tenets:
(1) New species arise by the transformation of an ancestral population into its modified descendants.
(2) The transformation is even and slow.
(3) The transformation involves large numbers, usually the entire ancestral population.
(4) The transformation occurs over all or a large part of the ancestral species' geographic range.
These statements imply several consequences, two of which seem especially important to paleontologists:
(1) Ideally, the fossil record for the origin of a new species should consist of a long sequence of continuous, insensibly graded intermediate forms linking ancestor and descendant.
(2) Morphological breaks in a postulated phyletic sequence are due to imperfections in the geological record." (Eldredge and Gould 1972)