I first read about adaptive radiation in 1965 or so, I believe it was in Ralph Buchbaum's _Basic Ecology_. Or maybe it was World Book encyclopedia. It said that we get lots of speciation events right after a big extinction event, and then they slow down for a long time. You say that this is a special case. Because somebody hypothesised that it had something to do with genetic drift, while nobody hypothesised that PE had anything to do with genetic drift?

There is nothing you have described about PE that isn't true about adaptive radiation. Can you say what's special about PE? The fossil record already showed us that we got long periods of stasis in hard-parts, that was not a new observation. Did Gould perhaps suggest a new reason for the stasis, one that the population ecologists hadn't already stated?

I could easily be wrong that there's nothing here that's important and new. But you have said nothing to show what that something might be, or why it's important. If it's one of the fundamentally important things, why can't you say simply what's new and important about it?

Is it actually such a complicated idea that you can't explain the fundamentals in a short post?