There is a passage that discusses the concept a bit.
Henry Farfield Osborn was the director and president of the American
Museum of Natural History during the earlier part of this century.
He was a powerful figure in paleontology.  It continues:

        On the other hand, some of Osborn's diffuculties with prevailing
        evolutionary thinking in the 1920's were based on a
        dissatisfaction with natural selection as a blanket explanation
        for absolutely everything that has happened in evolution.
            And some of Osborn's problems derived from an even more
        common and vexatious source: basic misunderstandings between two
        disciplines.  Both genetics and paleontology obviously bear on
        evolution, but otherwise there are no two more dissimilar
        activiteis than the finding, collecting and analysis of fossil
        bones and shells on the one hand, and figuring out the physical
        and chemical basis of heredity on the other.  To this day the
        very elements of each discipline remain a closed book to the
        majority of practitioners of the other.
                Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and the closest
        thing to the "founding father" of the "synthetic theory of
        evolution," persistently criticized (derided is actually more
        like it) Osborn for writing:"Speciation is a normal and
        continuous process; it governs the greater part of the origin of
        species; it is apparently always adaptive.  Mutation is an
        abnormal and irregular mode of origin, which while not
        infrequenly occuring in nature is not essentially an adaptive
        process; it is rather a disturbance of the regular course of
        speciation."   It took another paleontologist, George Gaylord
        Simpson, to point outthat Osborn was simply using the word
        "mutation" in its *original* sense.  The word first entered the
        paloentological literature in a paper by W. Waagen on ammonite
        evolution-a paper written in 1868.  Waagen was discussing a
        series of ammonites (extinct moluscan relatives of the modern
        pearly nautilus) that he felt formed a linear
        ancestral-descendant lineage.  Successive geological strata
        yielded slightly different forms, and these Waagen called
        "mutations."  To "mutate" is simply to "change."  "Mutation"
        simply popped up again as the natural choice of a word to
        describe spontaneous modifications in some anatomical feature of
        an individual organism-thus, presumably, a change in the
        underlying genetic material- when geneticists started plumbing
        the depths of heredity in the early 1900's.

end quote


The book was written to address the observation:

        For the paradox is this:
                species do not exhibit the sort of directional change
                through thier long histories, the sort of pattern that
                has been considered the true stuff of all evolutionary
                change.  Yet species very commonly are members of
                lineages-trilobites, hominids, horses, dinosaurs-in
                which such directional change between species is a
                commonplace.
        Gould an I claimed that stasis-nonchange-is the dominant
        evolutionary theme in the fossil record.  It is characteristic
        of most species that have ever lived.  Adaptive change is
        relatively rare, and usually associated with speciation, thus
        typically rather rapid.  Once a species appears, if it is
        successful at all, the fossil record shows that it will tend to
        hang on unchanged for vast stretches of time.  And this, we saw,
        destroyed the backbone of the major argument of the modern
        "synthetic theory" of evolution-the argument maintaining that
        absolutely all the features of the history of life could be seen
         as constantly ongoing adjustments to ever-changing environmental
        conditions.  (p.128)

end quote
Eldridge and Gould, 1985.