What is meant by development being both continuity and discontinuity?

I hold that the question of whether intellectual development is continuous or discontinuous is not a meaningful one if these two patterns of development are held to be mutually exclusive. Rather, development involves both continuous and discontinuous elements simultaneously. i attempt to demonstrate the validity of my argument successively for psychometric, Piagetian, cognitive, and contextual points of view, and then make the same demonstration in somewhat more detail from the standpoint of the triarchic theory of human intelligence. i conclude that, as it stands, the continuity-discontinuity debate is largely misconceived and that we should instead be thinking in terms of ways in which development is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with respect to different dimensions of analysis.