>>13899124punctuated eq was postulated to explain the "missing link" in macroevolution, an obsolete, rhetorical type hypothesis that describes a more or less linear propagation of the genetic drift associated with pale-ontological changes underlying differences in observed phenotypes.
Some theorists believe the rampant cross-species observable behavior in animals with plastic sexual response could be mechanistically explained that undergird a more robust change in an equilibrium, a hypothesis complicated by numerous more recent discoveries, for example, the platypus genome. That is, the emergence of a "new" species by wholesale collision of chromosomes and genetic material, and not stepwise progression of small mutations expressed in phenotypic variations exposed to environmental evolutionary pressure. The genetics of the platypus suggest such a hypothetical in any case.
In viral replication, the "evolution" between genetic sequences was never subjected to that kind of rhetoric. The enzymes that transcribe and translate have fairly regular kinetic parameters, and genetic drift as a function of the efficiency of variables that can be controlled were more easily observable. And since viruses are simpler and essentially parasitic, much variation outside a successful reproduction strategy has a low probability of becoming a viable variant, what we might consider "evolved". So for instance, covid was immediately recognizable as a coronavirus of a certain type, while a macro-organism would have to accumulate many 1000s more viable mutations to construct a different successful phenotype, and the question then was, by what method can an organism's germline accumulate so many mutations, that doesn't kill it but in fact enhances it, in the absence of a "missing link", fraudsters wanted to argue, "It was God", and debaters wanted to postulate the alternative, totally hypothetical, but less absurd argument that it was an as yet, unknown natural process.
