re: #480 itellu3times

Well, large parts of what Stephen J. Gould wrote about, “exaptations”, put him at odds with Richard Dawkins, yet somehow Gould thought he was supporting and arguing for evolution anyway. I never could figure out what Gould thought he was saying. Could you?

The thing is, finding things that evolution does not explain, does not weaken it as a theory. What would weaken it as a theory is if it predicted something that could not be observed. That hasn’t happened. Too many darned observations, if anything.

If evolution doesnt explain why I like red and you like blue that doesn’t affect the thousands of things it does explain.

So, yes, there are things that evolution fails to explain, but these are not weaknesses as such, until and unless a better theory comes along that gets right what evolution now says, plus does better on these other areas, whatever they may be.

There has been a scientific dispute between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, but the emerging scientific consensus is that they are not mutually exclusive, but are rather poles along a mutational continuum. Sometimes leaps happen (such as in metamutations, like when the highly refined cortical hand-eye coordination module, that had evolved over millions of years, was suddenly also placed in the service of the mouth-ear nexus, allowing us to produce and parse speech) , and other times tiny changes do.

btw: here’s an interesting article co-authored by the late Gould:

ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu