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 Gould suggests that clinging too strongly to natural selection as the only major driver of evolution is outdated, as the field has broadened to include various other processes that influence biological change.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.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives.
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.
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