Peter Pike of Triablogue has written a post interacting with Steven Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life. Gould is a Darwinist that falls into the catastrophist camp, as opposed to the gradualist camp which includes Richard Dawkins. Peter explains the difference thusly:
“Either organisms evolve slowly and not too far away from the basic phenotype, or else organisms evolve rapidly so that when a random catastrophe occurs there will be a chance for some of the organisms to survive.”
Here is another quote from the entry:
“In other words, Gould here argues that Natural Selection—or more specifically “Survival of the Fittest” is not a tautology because it is predictive; yet it is impossible to predict who will survive. In short, the way I see the argument shaping up is as follows:
Opponents to Darwinism say X neutralizes Natural Selection
Gould says that X does not neutralize Natural Selection because of Y.
Gould then says that Y is not true.Frankly, I can’t see why Y is relevant then. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps we can argue that Gould is saying Natural Selection is true for most of the time, just not when it really matters—at the time of mass extinction (which Gould labels as “decimation”). This also does fit with some of Gould’s other statements, wherein he specifically says that Natural Selection does not apply during these mass extinctions”
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