Again, clipped the bullshit lead in....
A Scientist for the rest of us, Andrew Brown, May 24, 2002, Salon
``...Punctuated equilibrium, Gould's paleontological theory formulated with Niles Eldredge, was a more subtle attack on the hegemony of equations. What it says is that the gradual steady change that the equations of population biologists predict would be happening all the time under the gentle pressure of natural selection is not found in the fossil record because it is not found in nature.
Species, Gould believed, have an existence of their own, which cannot be understood or calculated solely by looking at their genes. They have births, deaths and descendants, and in between birth and death they are stable for millions of years. He did not believe that the transitions between species took place faster than Darwinism would predict, but rather that they were rarer than the simple application of gradualist theory would predict.
Actually disentangling how much of this is controversial is an extraordinarily complicated task. Obviously the fossil and historical record shows that the emergence of new species is a jerky process, more frequent at some times than others; but it is still not clear whether these irregularities are just noise, or, as Gould believed, a signal of deeper forces at work. But he posed the question and it hasn't gone away yet.
His greatest polemical triumph was his attack, with his friend Harvard biology professor Richard C. Lewontin, on the idea that all the features of the organisms we see around us are best understood as adaptations. Using the examples of "spandrels" -- small curved triangles that appear as a side effect when you build a dome around four arches, but which were then exploited by Renaissance fresco painters -- they argued that many features of organisms are there simply as unselected side effects of some other feature that has itself been selected for. Not everything we see in the world has been streamlined by natural selection.
The deep strength of this argument is that it suggests how the inefficiencies of natural selection can themselves provide the raw material for more selection: The origins of birds' feathers were almost certainly as devices to radiate heat. Their ability to shift air was originally a spandrel of their radiating function, but one on which a whole new set of functions could be built.
All these ideas, and innumerable others, are developed in Gould's last book -- and testament -- "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." It was published shortly before his death, though it remains unfinished in the sense that it is 1,400 pages long, and if he had lived he would surely have shortened it by half; it ranges over the whole of evolutionary controversies from Darwin up to Gould. At one stage, he takes up the cudgels against Daniel Dennett again, quoting Schiller, who first said, "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain." But he quotes it in the original German, and that gives a measure of his breadth of extra-scientific interest. He could be an intolerable showoff, but he had done an enormous amount to show off about and he was almost certainly the only guest voice on "The Simpsons" who would quote Schiller in the original, to squelch an enemy.''