What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the evolving understanding of evolutionary biology beyond just natural selection.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes that while adaptation and natural selection have long been considered cornerstones of evolutionary theory, many recent discoveries in evolutionary biology have revealed additional mechanisms that complement and sometimes challenge the primacy of natural selection. Gould suggests that clinging too strongly to natural selection as the only major driver of evolution is outdated, as the field has broadened to include various other processes that influence biological change.
In practice
In a lecture on evolutionary theory, you can use this quote to discuss the broader mechanisms of evolution.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
To stop short in any research that bids fair to widen the gates of knowledge, to recoil from fear of difficulty or adverse criticism, is to bring reproach on science. There is nothing for the investigator to do but go straight on, 'to explore up and down, inch by inch, with the taper his reason;' to follow the light wherever it may lead, even should it at times resemble a will-o'-the-wisp.
The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
Certein bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.
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