NELdredge; "Let us return for a moment to the grand pattern of nested sets of resemblence linking up absolutely all species on Earth. Closely related species are classified in the same genus, and related genera are put in the sme family. Families are lumped together in the same order, and related orders are grouped into the same class. This is the Linnaean hierarchy that was devised, long before Darwin's day, to encompass the nested pattern of similarities that define groups of organisms - a pattern naturalists had observed in the organic world since Aristotle. But we must ask, what exactly are these genera, families,orders, and so on? It was clear to Darwin, and it should be obvious to all today, that they are simply ever larger categories used to give names to
ever larger clusters of related species. That's all these clusters, these higher taxa, really are: simply clusters of related species."
Gould however attempted IN THE SAME hierarchy formaliststructure to have have had it said, "But if contingency resided only in this basic aspect of environmental scaling, then the principle, though sound enough, would not run so deep in Darwinian traditions. Rather, contingency gains its greatest force thought the principle of quirky functional shift: the discordance between historical origin and curent utility, and the consequent fallacy of direct inference from modern status to intial meaning. Nietzsche emphasized the primary role of this discordance in the study of history by writing (as quoted more fully on p.1217) that "the development of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its
progressus towards a goal," and the inevitabilityof functional shift makes any important.."
If the target is the heirarchy in thermodynamics IT DOES matter that this issue of the progress to the unconditioned ONLY works for the criticism NOT the possible one or two functions devolved by workers OUT of the non-progressus. But as one poster recently said, there were no transcendence thus the difference of this as taught evolutionary thought by dint of Herbertisms vs some other but Kantian explanation of what was said falls by the way side of Gould's female sonumbonoum as the fetus' head size. Gould had thought that we critics of evolution substituted 'neceesity' for 'importance' but in the case of entropy INCREASE IT WAS the other conditioned way around. We all would like to see the postcondition of the thermodyanmic hierachy applied but if we argue whether it is a form of progressus (vs say a regresses against an absolute infinity) we will never see even that Gould is light years ahead of Dawkins nor that isolation of this increase is nothing but Gould's "secondary acceleration". We cant. At least I have not seen it.