[grey_whiskers]

G.K. Chesterton in his book The Wisdom of Father Brown (originally published in 1929) had as a side topic in one of his short stories the concept of "catastrophism" which seems to touch on this...

"Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism.”"

Cheers!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks, that sounds like it may have been a precursor to the late Stephen J. Gould's punctuated equilibrium model, although that was mostly a semantic exercise or spin-doctoring.

[SunkenCiv]

found a file on the hard drive, called "Punctuated Equilibria":

Evolutionary Dynamics: Models of Extinction
Gunther Eble, Smithsonian Institution, SFI Postdoctoral Fellow
Mark Newman, SFI Research Professor
Kim Sneppen, Niels Bohr Institute
Per Bak, NORDITA, SFI External Faculty
David Raup, Palentology, University of Chicago (Retired), SFI Science Board
Simon Levin, Ecology, Princeton, SFI Science Board

Extinction has played an important role in the development of life on the Earth... It is important first to understand the nature of extinction in the fossil record, before one can undertake any modeling efforts to try to explain that extinction. In recent years a number of claims have been made about apparent trends in the fossil record of extinction which might point to interesting underlying dynamical processes in the biosphere. Stuart Kauffman (biology, Bios, SFI External Faculty), for example, has argued that the distribution of the sizes of extinction events approximately follows a power-law form, taken by some to be indicative of criticality in the processes giving rise to extinction. Sneppen et al. have suggested that the distribution of the lifetimes of genera may also be a power law, and Ricard Sole (ecology, Barcelona, SFI External Faculty) et al. have presented evidence that the power spectrum of extinction intensity during the Phanerozoic has a 1/f form.