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punctuationism

punctuationism noun: in evolutionary biology, belief that evolution does not proceed at a steady pace, but instead is characterized by periods of stasis, punctuated by brief (within several hundred-thousand years) periods of rapid change.

Noun

punctuationism (uncountable)

  1. In evolutionary biology, belief that evolution does not proceed at a steady pace, but instead is characterized by periods of stasis, punctuated by brief (within several hundred-thousand years) periods of rapid change.
    • Gould has misled himself by his own rhetorical emphasis on the purely poetic or literary resemblance between punctuationism, on the one hand, and true saltationism on the other.1986, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Company, published 2015, →ISBN

Origin of punctuationism

From punctuation + -ism.

Questions about punctuationism

What does punctuationism mean?
Punctuationism means in evolutionary biology, belief that evolution does not proceed at a steady pace, but instead is characterized by periods of stasis, punctuated by brief (within several hundred-thousand years) periods of rapid change.
What part of speech is punctuationism?
Punctuationism is a noun.

Words near punctuationism in the dictionary

  1. punctuation mark
  2. punctuation marks
  3. punctuation space
  4. punctuation spaces
  5. punctuational
  6. punctuationism
  7. punctuationist
  8. punctuationists
  9. punctuationless
  10. punctuations
  11. punctuative

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: punctuationism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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