Punctuated Equilibrium is loosing adherents as more is known about the effects of catastrophes like major boloid strikes, megavolcanoes, etc. on evolution and climate. For example hominid evolution began about 5 million years ago, and has changed over the years. In the past 100,000 years we have had several large/major events. The eruption of Toba which left a crater about 18 by 65 miles had a very major effect on all the hominid populations 74,000 years ago. Basically, only Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were left in large enough quantity to continue as populations. Neanderthals died off for whatever reason between 20 and 35 thousand years ago, leaving about 1 to 4% genetic traces in the Sapiens population. They were apparently adapted to northern glacial conditions with pale skin and eyes and red hair. Around 40,000 years ago southern Sapiens mutated a white skin gene which allowed them to move north since their women could absorb enough Vitamin D to develop good child bearing hip structure. About 7 or 8 thousand years ago the genetic capacity for people to continue using milk into adulthood appeared in people moving into Europe from central Asia. This genetic change had strong survival benefits in the people with cattle and cold winters. So evolution is hardly static even for us.
Another more recent event was boloid(s) which hit the Northern Hemisphere about 13,000 years ago, destroyed the Clovis culture and probably started the rapid disappearance of many large northern mammals. Three million years ago North and South American linked up in the Panama area and led to significant biota changes and more evolution.
Please state your sources for the idea that scientists have dropped natural selection as the driver for evolution. Maybe meteorologists have dropped it but certainly not geneticists. When conditions change significantly, natural selection among minor (or occasionally major) varients is what increases their presence in the surviving population—white skin, lactose tolerance, etc.
You are right but I think my argument still stands in that the Darwinian concept of natural selection in a Uniformitatarian construct is being discarded. I do Metaphysics not Physics so my terminology may be behind. You simply made the point better than I could in that we see species change when there is an external stressor that causes the environment to rapidly change and thus animals and plants to have to adapt or die not in a slow gradual process envisioned by Darwin.
I just finished reading “Darwin’s Doubt” by Stephen Meyer. He completely dismantles Darwin as well as Gould and his punctuated equilibrium thesis which was to explain large changes in organisms.