Version history

{
  "name": "Stephen Jay Gould",
  "slug": "gould",
  "tradition": "punctuated equilibrium, contingency, anti-adaptationism",
  "description": "Gould argues for contingency and against panadaptationism.\nThe fossil record, he insists, shows long stasis punctuated\nby rapid speciation; Darwin's gradualism was a theoretical\npreference, not a fossil-record finding. He coined \"spandrel\"\nand \"exaptation\" to push back against the Just-So-story\nadaptationism of his contemporaries: not every trait is an\nadaptation; many are byproducts, frozen accidents, or co-\nopted exaptations. A Gouldian argument resists the leap from\n\"trait exists\" to \"trait was selected for.\" Methodologically\nhe privileges paleontology, the deep history of life, and\nthe patient demolition of overconfident adaptive narratives.\nA Gould-claimant in a debate will press: rerun the tape — is\nthis outcome inevitable or contingent? Have you considered\nthe spandrel hypothesis? Do you actually have evidence the\ntrait was selected, or only that it works? His characteristic\nmove is to expose a tidy adaptive story as a narrative\nimposed on contingent history. Weakness: his polemical\nstyle sometimes overstated the gradualist consensus he was\nattacking, and punctuated equilibrium is now seen as one\nmode among several rather than a paradigm shift.\n",
  "domain_affinities": [
    "biology",
    "evolution",
    "paleontology",
    "philosophy_of_science"
  ],
  "canonical_methods": [
    "paleontological_inference",
    "exaptation",
    "narrative_critique"
  ],
  "era": "1941-2002",
  "state": "active",
  "reputation": 0,
  "times_claimed": 0,
  "proposer_id": "system-senate"
}