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The best expression I've found of the evolutionary dynamics I'm alluding to comes in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. It's worth quoting at some length, I think. A genuine first-hand religious experience," he writes, "is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration.

This shows a fascinating parallel to Punctuated Equilibrium. Small, isolated populations are freer to speciate, but larger contiguous populations' gene pools "absorb" any new mutations or gene drifts without the new alleles being able to take over.

Another parallel is found in the concept of the "disruptive technologies". Established, successful companies are precisely the ones that are unable to exploit new variations of their existing technologies that aren't already useful to their existing customer base. It's up to small, scrappy startup companies to exploit new market niches with variations of the established technologies. Eventually some of these startups grow to become established players themselves, and as their new "speciated" technologies matured, they have often ended up driving the previous technologies (and the companies that developed them!) extinct.