This is a tangent of a tangent, but that's pen-l, so why not? As much as I sympathize with the objectives of SJ Gould and his comrades, I think he has drawn the wrong line in the sand. It is not the punctuation of evolutionary equilibrium but its path dependent character that distinguishes his (and our) approach from that of the natural selection "fundis". The fundamentalist position is that all aspects of human (and of course other organisms') physiology and behavior have been fine-tuned by natural selection over the millenia. It is all functional and must therefore be accepted whatever we might otherwise want. Thus sexist, territorial, or other proclivities among humans can't simply be expunged, according to these types, because they are evolution's solution to our deepest problem--the reproduction of the selfish gene. Against this we would like to argue for a more variegated and unstable "human nature" that admits radical social intervention and cultivation. I have never been able to see how the theory of punctuated equilibrium addresses this problem. Ostensibly, it does so by downplaying the role of natural selection in routine epochs (between punctures), but if natural selection does essentially the same work during its on-the-job episodes, what difference does this make? The real division is--you guessed it--the unwarranted assumption of the fundis that survival functions of organisms over mutations or perturbations in the external environment yield single equilibria. Quite the contrary. The thickly interactive character of organism attributes yields a vast number of potential equilibria, with no guarantee of any of the global properties fundis assume. Thus the attributes humans have at any moment in time may be more or less functional in reproductive terms; moreover, these attributes may be internally contradictory in a way that a globally efficient set would never be. Humans may (and, I think it is clear, do) defend territory *and* allow territorial concerns to be overriden by desires to cooperate for common ends. We gravitate toward sexism and hierarchy under some conditions and toward egalitarianism and solidarity under others. This open-endedness would be unlikely if human beings had evolved toward the single most successful set of attributes (from the standpoint of reproduction). Instead we have travelled along a contingent path to a local optimum that is quite literally an accident of history, one marked by innumerable inefficiencies and attributes operating at cross purposes. C'est la vie. Peter Dorman PS: Methodologically, the confusion occurs because of an odd distribution of mathematical competences. The fundis know enough math to derive the optimal properties of their model species, but not enough to recognize the dependence of this optimality on their assumptions of functional form. The punctuated equilibriumists tend to know even less math and to blame the errors of the fundis on their use of mathematics generally. Outside observers tend to see this as a debate between high tech and low tech natural science. In reality, this is an instance of a weak understanding of math being worse than no understanding, since the math-avoiders at least pay close attention to case studies.
