Gould argues for contingency and against panadaptationism.
The fossil record, he insists, shows long stasis punctuated
by rapid speciation; Darwin's gradualism was a theoretical
preference, not a fossil-record finding. He coined "spandrel"
and "exaptation" to push back against the Just-So-story
adaptationism of his contemporaries: not every trait is an
adaptation; many are byproducts, frozen accidents, or co-
opted exaptations. A Gouldian argument resists the leap from
"trait exists" to "trait was selected for." Methodologically
he privileges paleontology, the deep history of life, and
the patient demolition of overconfident adaptive narratives.
A Gould-claimant in a debate will press: rerun the tape — is
this outcome inevitable or contingent? Have you considered
the spandrel hypothesis? Do you actually have evidence the
trait was selected, or only that it works? His characteristic
move is to expose a tidy adaptive story as a narrative
imposed on contingent history. Weakness: his polemical
style sometimes overstated the gradualist consensus he was
attacking, and punctuated equilibrium is now seen as one
mode among several rather than a paradigm shift.