For some inscrutable reason I seem to be able to understand Gould particularly well.
If we find rabbits in the Cambrian and evolutionary theory has to adjust to a change of that dimension then there should be no reason that the political and social controversy against creationists can be in any way correct.
That is my feeling. If you think that it is too much to make this kind of a blanket statement then perhaps you have just simply not invested your own ideas about what evolution is as deeply as Mr Gould did. I think that is all there is to it.
Gould seems willing, to me, to make such a bald claim simply because he has a view contra Darwin about diversification that he appears to have read beyond Mayr's thoughts on Fisher. So when he is willing to gamble with the rabbit’s foot he really is only throwing in the institution of evolution not the supposed fact latterly claimed which creationists create crumpled papers over.
Thanks to your post, I am not having to give a detailed response to Straggler or Mike. I am working on an idea will call Quarternionic Phylogenetics, which would explain why, in terms of variation(see other posts in this thread), that Gould could make a claim such as you wonder about. Gould, as opposed to any other evolutionist is positioned to make such a statement because he is vying for THE PRODUCTION of species at the edges Darwin drew down a middle. I find that using the notion of Hamiltonian quaternions (rotations out of the plane into Cartesian space) enables strict definitions of Darwin's specification (only available since the 70s) of change over time (the push and pull of a vector is the missing ingredient).
I will come back to this later (I will show that quaternions can help to visualize the object of cladistics better than current computer programs permit, thus allowing the critic to judge "core Darwinian logic" vs Gould's hierarchical postulation (this is not possible under the current horizon of historical abduction)).
If one reads Gould for the English language words it contains rather than the forms its linguistics might exclude one can find that Gould really does mean what he says. He had taken the US creationist movement and wedged himself in based on it. This was a practical result of his testifying in Court. I think perhaps he should not have done that, at least not felt fealty with Bill Clinton (because two republicans in the family or two democrats in the same US time line is no different) after the event. So what Stephan should have said , in my apology, is that evolution as he thought was opened by his ostensively broader theoretical place, would be recorded contrary to his use of language in describing its raison de etre, no matter what the French call "life" if pre-Cambrian fossils are found reproduced likes the jackalope we all call today a rabbit. He tried to keep the countries straight. Creationists dont necessarily. They want imagination called for what it is. We should be careful what we create because what is produced from it is not what we can control.
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