To: DMaA who wrote (7705 ) 3/13/2006 6:01:12 PM From: Wildstar Read Replies (1) | Respond to Gould did believe that evolution did not have a direction, but other "sons of Darwin" certainly do: Richard Dawkins to name one. I favor Dawkins' view for a few reasons, including the fact that Gould often let his politics get in the way of good science. simonyi.ox.ac.uk Notwithstanding Gould's just scepticism over the tendency to label each era by its newest arrivals, there really is a good possibility that major innovations in embryological technique open up new vistas of evolutionary possibility and that these constitute genuinely progressive improvements (Dawkins 1989; Maynard Smith & Szathmary 1995). The origin of the chromosome, of the bounded cell, of organized meiosis, diploidy and sex, of the eucaryotic cell, of multicellularity, of gastrulation, of molluscan torsion, of segmentation - each of these may have constituted a watershed event in the history of life. Not just in the normal Darwinian sense of assisting individuals to survive and reproduce, but watershed in the sense of boosting evolution itself in ways that seem entitled to the label progressive. It may well be that after, say, the invention of multicellularity, or the invention of metamerism, evolution was never the same again. In this sense there may be a one-way ratchet of progressive innovation in evolution.
