I've met you and you act like you don't give a shit
I read your article. I've read enough articles that seriously misreport what scientists say to never accept quotes out of context. I've also read articles from scientists who are pissed off and frustrated over being constantly misquoted. That is so even when you don't add possible language difficulties (bad translations, etc) to the possibilities for misinterpretation. Plus we have the prospect of some hacks in The Communist Party who don't understand what they are talking about but see the opportunity for some publicity. Ugly mix.
OK, it is in The Boston Globe, which limits how intentionally misreported things are. However my impression of reporters is that they generally don't understand the subject that they are reporting, and show a combination of looking for sensational angles to stories while doing as little actual work as possible. The result is not particularly accurate.
In this particular case, Chen could easily have been talking about a classic gradualism vs rapid evolution debate, and his "harmony" could be rapid co-evolution. I don't know that. I don't have his papers available. But when I googled for more, the best that I could find was [link|http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&frame=right&rnum=1&thl=0,1624866489,1624808500,1624791143,1624782978,1624735252,1624726748,1624695954,1623996043,1624542267,1624524504,1624506909&seekm=dY%3DPN6LVWnCXP%3Dk2%3D1WQJoEhV3Te%404ax.com#link1|this thread] which includes the quotes in the Globe article and lots of links to this paleontologist's work, all of which are now broken.
However comments made in that thread suggest that people who got to put some context around the quotes felt that his conclusions were misinterpreted badly. Furthermore his conclusions could simply be wrong. For instance suppose that the Cambrian explosion took place in shallow seas around one continent over an extended time period. We don't have many deposits from that time, and so have no records from that continent. When drift pushed that continent near enough to others, the ecosystem exploded out. Voila! Tons of animals and no trace of ancestors anywhere that we can find!
This becomes reasonable hypothesis when you consider that we have evidence that the end of the Pre-Cambrian saw a major continental collision, and all areas which we have record of saw massive ice in the Pre-Cambrian.
Incidentally there are theories that might explain why evolution should be particularly rapid through the Cambrian explosion. For a random instance see [link|http://pr.caltech.edu/media/lead/072497JLK.html|this hypothesis].
Cheers,
Ben
