Why does natural selection appear to happen slowly on long timescales and quickly on short ones? A multigenerational study of four lizard species addresses biology’s “paradox of stasis.”

To Hendry, the paradox of stasis was never a paradox at all. The issue, he said, was that biologists assumed that long-term stasis was the result of short-term stability. Throw out that assumption, and the paradox disappears. “The paradox is illusory,” he said. “Evolutionary biologists like to come up with things and call them paradoxes.”