Even though some of the statements of Eldredge, Gould, and Stanley, made in the 1970s, sounded as if they had favored the Goldschmidtian version, they clearly distanced themselves from it in their more recent discussions. When postulating saltations, says Gould (1980), "I do not refer to the saltational of entire designs complete in all their complex and integrated features...instead, I envisage a potential saltational origin for the essential features of key adaptions. "<ref>Ernst Mayr, 1982a. Speciation and macroevolution. Evolution 36, page 1128</ref>}}
Similarly, creation scientist Dr. Don Batten concurs with the Harvard evolutionist Ernst Mayr and states that in 1982 Gould distanced himself from "[[Goldschmidt's hopeful monster theory|Hopeful Monsters]]" and cites Gould stating that "Punctuated equilibrium is not a theory of macromutation, it is not a theory of any genetic process" although Dr. Batten also cites Gould admitting to having supported "certain forms of macromutational theory … though not in the context of punctuated equilibrium."<ref name="creation.com">https://creation.com/punctuated-equilibrium-come-of-age</ref> Dr. Batten further states regarding the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) the following: "By the time of their 21st anniversary review of PE, Gould and Eldridge had retracted to proposing PE as ‘a complement to phyletic gradualism’. This is a rather major backdown on the brashness of their claims in 1972, and especially Gould’s Gould's claims up to 1980..."<ref name="creation.com"/>
In 1986, Niles Eldredge published his work ''Time Frames: the Re- thinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria'' in which he wrote: ‘This book is '''my''' version of the story of “punctuated equilibria” … ... (emphasis added). This of course
suggested that Eldridge wished to remove himself from other versions.<ref name="creation.com"/> According to Dr. Batten, this was because Niles Eldredge had been "less dogmatic than Gould had been in the 1970s about the lack of gradual change in the fossil record". In 1986, Niles Eldridge took objection to the "hopeful monster" association with the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium and wrote: "The assertion that punctuated equilibria represents a resurrection of Goldschmidt’s "macromutations" and "hopeful monsters" remains the most serious and irksome misconstrual of our ideas." Eldridge also added that "The most common misconception about "punctuated equilibria" - that Gould and I proposed a saltationist model of overnight change supposedly based on sudden mutations with large-scale effects (macromutations á la Richard Goldschmidt)..."<ref name="creation.com"/>
==Gradualism==
-Don Batten, review of "The Biotic Message" in ''Creation''<ref>Batten, Don (1997). "[https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j11_3/j11_3_292-298.pdf The Biotic Message: Evolution versus Message Theory]." ''CenTech J.'' Vol. 3, No. 11, pp. 295-296.</ref>}}
==Marxist thought and punctuated equilibrium==
Marxist and [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegelian]] thought had an influence on Gould. He said that he learned communism "on his father's knee", that his father was a Marxist, and that his politics were very different from his father’sfather's. This suggests that he was sympathetic to Marxism but not actually a Marxist.<ref name="worldviewtimes.com">http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-1739</ref><ref>https://creation.com/what-is-the-evidence-that-gould-was-a-marxist</ref> Gould wrote:
{{cquote|Hegel's dialectical laws, translated into a materialist context, have become the official 'state philosophy' of many socialist nations. These laws of change are explicitly punctuational, as befits a theory of revolutionary transformation in human society. In the light of this official philosophy, it is not at all surprising that a punctuational view of speciation [the evolutionary process by which new species are formed] much like our own . . . has long been favored by many Russian paleontologists. It may also not be irrelevant to our personal preferences that one of us [Gould] learned his Marxism, literally at his daddy's knee.<ref name="worldviewtimes.com">http://www.worldviewtimes.com/article.php/articleid-1739</ref>}}