by Greg Mayer

The now iconic images of President Obama created by Shepard Fairey last year have been widely imitated. It was perhaps inevitable that Darwin should be included among those so honored.

Created by Mike Rosulek, he is selling t-shirts and posters of this, and several other designs, with proceeds to benefit the National Center for Science Education, a most worthy recipient.  I might quibble with “very gradual”, which might evoke memories of the old punctuated equilibrium debate.  Darwin was certainly a gradualist, but as understood by Darwin, and succunctly characterized in chapter 1 of WEIT, gradualism is not incompatible with highly varying rates of change across time and among lineages.  The best summary of Darwin’s views on the subject is a paper by Frank Rhodes entitled ‘Gradualism, punctuated equilibrium and the Origin of Species‘ published in Nature (305:269-272) in 1983.

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)