I made a kinetic theory of replication, which applies to molecules and not to organisms... to individuals, as in the case of Darwin. And I found if molecules reproduce like nucleic acids do, and if they make mistake, I have a kinetic equation which says the temporal dependence of that concentration involves a term which says inherent autocatalysis or its proportionl to its consonant... it has a term which says mutation, it makes with a certain probability any possible mutation according to the number of errors. I had a whole set of equations with the matrix and there was a mathematical way to solve these set of equations, and out came the quasispecies. In other words it shows it's not true, but one always thought about Darwinian evolution, it's not the wild type, a single type, which gets to selection, it's the quasispecies that is a... well, mathematically it's a principle access transformation. You have a matrix, you diagonalize your matrix, and you find that what is selected is not the single molecular species but rather a clan of species, and due to their couplings among... making themselves via mutations... you select this whole clan, and it is not the single species which has to be best.  The clan as a community has to be the best reproductive behaviour, then it comes out.

So the quasispecies... I didn't make a theory of quasispecies... the quasispecies was a result of this kinetic theory of replication.

[Q] So the advantage is for selection, not the individual, but a clan with... surrounded by many low error mutants, and the advantage of it is, if the boundary conditions change, that it is much more dynamic and flexible to adjust to new conditions.

Yes. Now you see already the difference to simple Darwinian type of behaviour. You produce a quasispecies, a large distribution of mutants, And everything is tested in that, and the settles... the population settles in a range where you have the best clan of species, with an average sequence in the middle. Now if you want to get selection by... if you change your environment, and adapt it to a new environment, you don't take anything inside the quasispecies, you have to take something you have not yet tested, and that's at the periphery. So the next one which gets selected is something which appears de novo at the periphery of the equation and therefore it's certainly a punctuated type of evolution.