Meanings of branch speciation in English

Punctuated equilibrium posits a link of observed evolutionary rates to properties of branching speciation in populations.

How do we know that such a pattern records an event of branching speciation, as the theory of punctuated equilibrium requires?

We must therefore be able to defend the central implication that morphological change should be preferentially associated with events of branching speciation.

Change must therefore be concentrated in events of branching speciation, and trends must arise by the differential sorting of species with favored attributes.

In any case, punctuated equilibrium can be adequately and generally recognized by firm evidence linking observed punctuational patterns to branching speciation as a cause.

However, abundant cases of ancestral survival, and consequent punctuational origin of descendant taxa by branching speciation, have also been affirmed as illustrations of punctuated equilibrium.

Punctuated equilibrium proposes that such changes generally occur in discrete units or quanta in geological time, and that these quanta represent events of branching speciation.

The last two modes of bifurcation and cladogenesis both depict branching speciation in the definitional sense that two species emerge, where only one existed before.