Arash wrote:
>
> Care to surmise or cite the specific argument Gould makes against this
> point?
>
It's a long and complex book. It is also a book that anyone who wants to
propound on evolution should read or shut up. If you aren't a biologist,
you should probably also buy a dictionary of biological terms. (The
Oxford Press dictionary is quite reasonable.) The non-biologist should
probably plan to give several months to reading it, a few pages a day.
The only biology I ever studied was a 10th-grade class in 1944-45, but
I've gotten through Gould's book twice & learned quite a bit. I wouldn't
pretend, however, to have the mastery of it that would enable me to
explain it to someone else. Reading it, even if some parts remain opaque
or only superficially grasped still gives one a much deeper sense of
what serious evolutionary thought is like and what the major
complications are.
Carrol