Microevolution tells us that genetic variation is high, and selection is strong, meaning evolution acts quickly. This is contrasted by macroevolutionary patterns, where evolutionary stasis occurs repeatedly, and phenotypic change is slow. These two approaches to studying evolution contradict one another, and no model can produce macroevolutionary patterns with microevolutionary parameters. A common approach to this issue has been to attribute macroevolutionary trait change and diversification to speciation alone. Speciation is hypothesized to occur in bursts followed by stasis, invoking ecological opportunity or stabilizing selection as drivers. In contrast, we argue that increasing speciation rates through reproductive isolation alone is unlikely to yield adaptive radiation or increased macroevolutionary diversification. Instead, we identify demographic parameters are likely key in driving rates of diversification and trait change. To test this, we performed an approximate Bayesian computation of a discrete island model under two states: static and dynamic adaptive landscapes. We sampled phenotypic variance, heritability, adaptive landscape width, population size, absolute fitness at the adaptive landscape peak, migration rate, and, in the dynamic model, adaptive peak drift, from distributions based on empirical measurements of populations. We simulated 10 million generations across 20 to 101 adaptive peaks Absolute fitness was recovered as the key parameter that explains both adaptive radiation and stasis on macroevolutionary timescales. Ecological opportunity is interpreted here as an increase in absolute fitness across the adaptive landscape, where valleys have fitness > 1 until niches are colonized and valleys return to extinction traps. Absolute fitness controls the pace of trait change and speciation, linking micro and macroevolutionary patterns.