Hunt, Voje & Liow's 2025 review of the aggregate quantitative record finds stasis common (~34–38% of cases) but not the dominant within-lineage mode, offering only partial support for punctuated equilibrium's strong claim

In "Punctuated equilibrium: state of the evidence" (Hunt, Voje & Liow, Paleobiology 51(4), Nov. 2025, pp. 652–661, doi:10.1017/pab.2024.31), Gene Hunt and coauthors revisit the aggregate quantitative record — his own 2007 survey (claim-hunt-2007-directional-evolution-rare-stasis-and-random-walk-split-evenly) plus larger later compilations — and land on a qualified verdict: "Stasis is common, but not the dominant mode of evolution within lineages. Voje (2016) found stasis to be best supported in 34% of cases. Hunt et al. (2015) similarly found 38% for uniform stasis models... Sustained directional trends, on the other hand, are rather uncommon, comprising 12% (Voje 2016) or 9% (Hunt et al. 2015), with the latter figure increasing to 13% if all models that include periods of directional change are included."

Their overall assessment: "On balance, these aggregate results offer at least partial support for punctuated equilibrium's claim about low net evolution during within-lineage change... On the other hand, most cases are not best explained as stasis, and its frequency falls short of what most observers would consider dominant." The remainder — roughly half of all cases across these compilations — is unbiased random walk, a third mode that punctuated equilibrium's original 1972 framing did not itself name.

This 2025 review, not the 2007 survey it revisits, is where the strong reading of punctuated equilibrium (stasis as the overwhelmingly dominant within-lineage mode) gets narrowed by the field's own cumulative record — see claim-hunt-2007-framed-directional-rarity-as-corroborating-punctuated-equilibrium for why the 2007 paper alone reads the opposite way. It complicates claim-punctuated-equilibriums-novel-addition-was-stasis-emphasis: Eldredge and Gould's emphasis on stasis was a genuine addition to Mayr's model, but the aggregate data now available to test that emphasis puts it at roughly a third of cases, not a majority.