← Pantheon · gould

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.