A Revised Darwinism
نویسندگان
چکیده
Stephen Jay Gould's last book and magnum opus is first and mainly a theoretical revision. The revision is of Darwinism, in both its original and Modern Synthesis formulations, of what Gould calls the " tripod of support " on which the theory of natural selection traditionally rests. This tripod consists of three major claims: (1) The sufficiency of natural selection acting at the level of the individual to explain the major features of evolution at all temporal and taxonomic scales. Gould's view is that species selection is necessary to explain most large-scale patterns. (2) A view of natural selection as creative, as supplied with variation that is copious, small in effect, and directionally unbiased (Gould's term is " isotropic "), and therefore as causal in the origin of novelty. Gould argues that variation is massively constrained, and that these constraints are a major source of creative input. (3) Evolution at the large scale – i.e., macroevolution, including large-scale trends – can be understood as the direct extrapolation of processes at the small scale, i.e., microevolution. Gould argues that different processes may operate at different scales, sometimes in opposition, or more often, orthogonally. The book is also a work of history. It is a history of Darwinian thought from the 19th century to the 21st – a selective history to be sure, focusing on figures whose views are central to the revisions Gould proposes. And finally the book is a summation and a synthesis of Gould's life's work. He pulls together the major themes of those hundreds of Natural History columns and dozens of books, plus his technical papers on Cerion, into a single story. Like the Origin itself, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is truly " one long argument. " It is a treatise, or a kind of legal " brief " in support of the revisions Gould proposes to the conceptual tripod (although a less apt term than " brief " is hard to imagine – the book is 1343 pages long). The book reveals all of the many Goulds who have so much enlivened evolutionary discourse in the past forty years. We see Gould the virtuoso, polymath, and show-off. He can't just explain Geoffroy's version of transcen
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