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I've read though several sections of Gould's SEH, but not cover to cover because it was too long and too wordy. So I use it like a reference text to consult. I've also read about half a dozen of Gould's other books over the years. I've spent hours and hours talking with my former in-laws who were experts and professors in co-evolution of plants and their pollenators, and read through many of their technical papers. Their husband and wife team published several journal pieces a year for something like twenty or more years on evolution and co-evolution studies.
When I gave some of my favorite Gould books to Herbert my father-in-law to read for Christmas we discussed the problem with punctuated equilibrium versus incrementalism. The finesse of H's work in the co-evolution of the biochemistry of diet and food sources, between pollenators and their associated plants argues for incrementalism as opposed to punctuated equilibrium. So Gould had a controversial position with established bio-science evolutionary studies. Gould's humor and popular style gave a lot of bio-science types the willies. A fair number of the older generation like H, suspected Gould might be something of a fraud, too much showmanship, not enough science.
Carrol I understand many details about evolutionary biology, down to the metabolic pathways, physiological and anatomical details of several species of plants and animals and their habitats. Dude I have been there and done some of this. I know what is specifically involved in these kinds of studies, and how to analyze their conclusions, materials, methods, and discussions. I know how to take a very narrow topic in biology and track its bibliographic history through the major associated journals, collate the material and figure out the state of knowledge and the possible potential direction for new research. I was lucky enough to get a low wage tech job doing this sort of thing at UCB Koshland in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department for three years.
So stop with this fraud business.
Or, if you want to insist there is something fraudulant about Kenneally, then start acting like a scholar and explain exactly what you mean and then demonstrate it. Hand waving and name calling is no argument and no demonstration. If you don't want to do that, then give me a link to read something written by somebody who has demonstrated what you claim.
Let's get to how I think Gould would put down a lot of the work Kenneally is briefly reviewing. Gould's primary contribution to evolutionary work was to propose a punctuated equilibrium theory that evolution through natural selection proceeds in a cycle from stable slow plateaus then sudden jumps of great activity, then back to a semi-equilibrium and low levels of incrementalism.
If I think about some of the evolutionary linguistics and allied studies in bio-sciences, these look very much like incrementalist theories that depend on small steps of finely nuanced changes under a natural selection regime. Where Gould and Chompsky might be in accord, is that incrementalism does not account for the spectacular difference between humans and other animals, between language and culture we have, and the merely social communication systems and allied learning that all other animals have. This difference implies that something sudden, unique, and destablized happened in our evolutionary history. Gould was against almost any form of incrementalism on principle---well because he was at war with established thought.
Now, so far Kenneally hasn't developed the differences in evolution theory schools and their side of the picture. Perhaps that will turn out to be a critical flaw in much of the recent social science dabbling with biology. But I am not committed to either PE or Incrementalism. My theory says these are not in opposition nor are they mutually exclusive. In Nature anything that can happen, will happen.
So to summarize the way I look at this whole topic. The hominid line co-evolved with their social, psychological, linguistic, cultural (or symbolic systems) and their associated phenotypic anatomy and physiology. This co-evolutionary process was characterized by both schools of evolution, at some periods by jumbs or PE and at other times by incrementalism. There maybe only a distantly related genetic basis for much of these developments because our psycho-social cultural-language complex can evolve on its own without much genetic change in DNA sequences or with very little measurable differences in say skull morphology or artifactual remains in the archaeological record.
One of the deepest problems with Gould's PE hypothesis was that he gave very little account of the external or environmental or causal side of why PE might happen. Dawkins on the other hand exploits this weakness by insisting on a gene-only reductionist arguments.
So I did your homework. Here is a link to that whole other side that Kenneally hasn't dealt with:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/gould/commentary/thurtle.html
``DNA is important for Dawkins, however. Well, at least the idea of DNA. Dawkins isn't interested in actual DNA sequence or DNA folding or protein DNA interactions; he is interested in the idea of the DNA as linear binary code. This allows Dawkins to make the leap from gene as material entity to gene as information. In Dawkins' writings the DNA is the digital information `river' that programs the messy analogue world that we inhabit. "Success in evolution is building programs that don't crash [...] The best way to look at an individual animal is as a robot survival machine carrying around its own building program."5
Gould's hyphenated modifier, `hyper', refers to Dawkins' explanations of evolutionary theory using the smallest possible units of analysis and for his single minded reliance on the theory of natural selection.6 Although some of his later books layered rich interpretations over his `selfish gene' argument, Dawkins' established his modus operandi early: explanatory power through reduction. As even his friend and admirer the philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted ``[s]ome people object to Dawkins as being what I now call a greedy reductionist--that is, they think he's vastly oversimplifying, trying to get the job done with too few levels of explanation. Even though some version of that objection may be true, it's not a big deal. [...] Dawkins is not wrong--he's just been too optimistic sometimes.''7
As the debates documented in the `G Files' testify, Stephen Jay Gould's modus operandi is the scholarly antithesis to Dawkins: explanatory power through synthesis. True to the modifier `pluralist,' he has embraced a number of intellectual traditions in his efforts to broaden our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. For example, Gould relies heavily on multidisciplinary analysis, personal anecdote, and historical and literary references in his writing. Gould's use of history is especially sophisticated. He not only recognizes current historical methods and issues; he has contributed solid scholarship in the history of biology. Where Dawkins looks toward the computer sciences for inspiration, Gould turns toward literature and history.
Although Gould recognizes the primary importance of natural selection in evolution, he has lobbied freely and eloquently for complicating simple accounts of natural selection. He has supplemented the customary argument that populations gradually gain in adaptive fitness through competition with bold complications and detailed exceptions. The complications appear under three main themes: offering exceptions to the account of evolution as gradual cumulative change (evolution as progress), pointing to the importance of historical contingency (thus leaving room for catastrophic climatic changes, such as the impact of a large comet), and establishing the importance of non-adaptive side consequences of variation (biological structures that constrain function even though they were not specifically selected for)....''
So to conclude. I don't recommend you read this book, unless you want to. But in the mean time, let's allow others to discuss these issues and works with some open minds.
CG