"Touch computing-which started with the iPhone"..... At this point I stopped reading...

I'd have to agree, although credentials don't hurt you're chances either. I've never had any formal IT or computing training, I'm entirely self-taught. But I have a PhD in biology and that helped me to get hired in IT. Any degree you may have ultimately counts for something on your CV/resume. But as with all jobs its the experience that counts the most to the interviewer and you don't need a degree to get that experience, especially not with all the open source projects out there.

I'd say you've likely misread both in that case. Do you have any references to hand? I'm intrigued by the idea and I may be forgetting something (it has been some years since I worked on any of this)

They will have changed, just very slowly :) There will be lots of differences between them and the examples preserved in the fossil record, but its not easy to determine what they are. There are lots of ways that species are classified, some are morphological, some are genetic, some are a mixture. How do you know that the coelocanth we see today is identical to the one we see in the rocks? For all we know they could be an example of convergent evolution (unlikely in this case). The fact that forms which function well are conserved does not mean that they have not evolved, it just means they've come up with a good design and forces are at play to preserve that design. The bottom line is that those who advocated punctuated equilibrium hold the view that evolution either happens very fast or not at all. I hold the view (and as far as I recall from my time at University so do most evolutionary biologists) that there are many speeds to evolution, not just stop and go. As far as I'm aware this view is borne out by the fossil record in which we see a variety of paces of change. This is one of the reasons that punctuated equilibrium is referred to (in probably less than a charitable manner) as 'evolution by jerks'.

The fossil record is the problem, its patchy and difficult to interpret. Punctuated Equilibrium is essentially a non-starter as far as I'm concerned (unless something has changed since my departure from the field of evolutionary biology in favour of computing), its a theory that describes a process that most likely doesn't even happen (evolutionary stasis).

Actually no it isn't, most evolutionary biologists I know are less than impressed with the idea. Most evolutionary biologists would probably tell you that the rate of evolution varies greatly and that apparent evolutionary stasis (the hallmark of punctuated equilibrium) is probably just a wrinkle in the fossil record.

The evidence for Gould's ideas concerning punctuated equilibrium has never been entirely convincing to me. PE has also been referred to by those in the gradualist camp as 'evolution by jerks' on the odd occasion....