No to gradualism over eons of time :

"Gradualism was never proved from the rocks by Lyell and Darwin , but was rather imposed as a bias upon nature... has had a profoundly negative impact by stifling hypotheses and by closing the minds of a profession towards reasonable empirical alternatives to the DOGMA OF GRADUALISM . Lyell won with rhetoric what he could not carry with data ."
S J GOULD , Princeton University Press , 1984 pages 14-16