Henry Shaler Williams (1847-1918) and Punctuated Equilibria

Abstract

From the first realization that organic life on this planet has evolved over geologic time, scientists have speculated about the time interval required for these changes to occur. For many years Darwin's idea of slow incremental changes, gradualism, was the accepted model. In the 1970s Stephen Gould (1941-2002) and Niles Eldridge (b. 1943) provided an alternative model of very rapid evolutionary change, followed by long periods of stability, which they called punctuated equilibria. It now appears that Henry Shaler Williams, a geology professor at Cornell University, arrived at the same interpretation almost one hundred years earlier, but only stated this belief in his class lecture notes. He, like Gould and Eldridge, noticed that the fossil record provides evidence that organisms evolved by very fast physical changes occurring in only a few generations and in a very short geological time interval. Then the organisms appear to undergo almost no change for long periods of time; i.e., long periods of stability through many generations. Exactly why Williams did not produce a formal publication of his concept remains a mystery, but his lecture notes from the early 1880s clearly demonstrate that he had developed the idea of punctuated equilibria.

Personality traits and entrepreneurial intention: The mediating role of risk aversion

“…Further because of low risk aversion there will be high entrepreneurial intentions (S ¸ahin et al, 2019). Same will be the impact of extraversion, as extroverts are more optimistic with low conservativeness they have high-risk tolerance (Pak & Mahmood, 2015), hence with low risk aversion such people will have high entrepreneurial intentions (Brice, 2004;S ¸ahin et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2010;. So, from the above discussion, we argue that risk aversion will mediate the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurial intentions such that;…”

“…Such inconsistencies are observed in the previous literature also. For example, Brice (2004) found the relationship of neuroticism and extraversion insignificant with entrepreneurial intentions. Further, the relationship of agreeableness with entrepreneurial intentions was insignificant in the meta-analysis of Zhao et al (2010).…”

“…Agreeableness is related to passivity, tradition, dependence, trust, care, selflessness, and forgiveness (Costa & McCrae, 1992;Goldberg, 1992;. Such characteristics bind individual to emotional dominance (Brice, 2004). Though an entrepreneur might find patience, cooperativeness, and friendliness helpful, they may help to a certain degree, as entrepreneurs also need to exert high level of energy and motivation, which in result may disturb their sociality (Antoncic et al, 2015) whereas agreeable individuals may not prefer.…”

“…One group emphasizing the demographic features (see Arora & Kumari, 2015;Imbaya & Tarus, 2012). The other group is dedicated to the psychological factors like personality (e.g., Brice, 2004;Gelderen, Kautonen, & Fink, 2015;Mayfield, Perdue, & Wooten, 2008). Personality plays a pivotal role in the development of concepts of entrepreneurship like entrepreneurial career choice (e.g., Zhao, Seibert, & Hills, 2005), role of personality in entrepreneurial cognitions and opportunity acknowledgment recognition (e.g., Ardichvili, Cardozo, & Ray, 2003), personalities role in entrepreneurial motivation (e.g., Miner, 1963), and its role in new venture survival (e.g., Ciavarella, Buchholtz, Riordan, Gatewood, & Stokes, 2004).…”

Evolutionary mode routinely varies among morphological traits within fossil species lineages

“…Mosaic evolution is one among a historical welter of ideas relating to the organism as a combination of ancient and more derived morphological parts, or to these parts evolving at different rates within and among lineages (33,34). The central idea, if not the term itself (35), extends back to the nineteenth century, to Louis Dollo's principle of "crossing of specializations" (36,37) and to conflicting rates of trait change in precise stratigraphic studies of fossil populations (38,39). In 1944, G. G. Simpson "inextricably bound the tempo of evolution with the mode, or pattern, of evolution within the matrix of organism-environment interactions" (40, 41); indeed the measurement of rates is not separable from assumptions about the mode of evolution (42,43).…”