The above three words constitute one of the more egregious quote mines that Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy has been using in his personal crusade against the reality of common ancestry.

Of course, McLeroy recently admitted that he blindly copied the quote from a Creationist website without even bothering to read the original context, so it should come as no surprise that he completely butchers Gould's intent every time he uses the phrase.

When Gould wrote that "stasis is data," he was referring to the "equilibrium" part of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. He was lamenting the fact that his colleagues had failed to grasp that the stasis seen in the fossil record was actually a relevant part of the data, not something that was to be disregarded as unhelpful information about evolution. Most importantly, Gould was not saying that the observation of stasis means that common ancestry, the central conclusion of evolutionary theory, no longer holds.

In fact, Gould's point was exactly the opposite. Stasis is what we should expect to observe if we apply our modern understanding of how new species form (i.e., allopatric and especially peripatric speciation) to the patterns of change predicted in the fossil record.

An example of McLeroy's confusion can be heard in a recent radio interview. I'll transcribe and comment on the relevant portion below.