Charles,
It is neither one of those. My point is that genetic
change via mutations need not be seen as arbitrary insofar
as the number of mutation-fixation increases with brain
development as a strategy to increase survival.
This is just one problem in Gould.
Another difficulty I found in him is that he thinks not much happen -
in terms of evolutionary change - between 3.5 billion years ago and
600 million years ago, between the origins of the
first forms of life (bacteria and blue-green algae) and
the origins of multicellular organisms, thus underestimating
how significant was the transition from
prokaryotes to eukaryotes (nucleated) cells. And there
are many more problems.
