I'm one of those angry atheists mentioned earlier. I'll try not to bite your head off.
Anyway, there is a lot we don't know about biology and heredity and evolutionary mechanisms. I personally get aggravated when soemone tries to argue that existence of Santa Claus is more plausible than evolution because the existence of Santa Claus does not need to be rational. But you don't seem to be doing that, so here goes.
I am not familiar with Mr. Gould's theories and/or hypotheses. But there are a couple of possible explanations of which I am aware for the explosions of new life. As far as I know, natural selection merely eliminates those species that cannot survive in the new environment. For example, there can be climate change that kills off a species not well adapted to that climate. Or a new gene can come along that is dominant to the first and there are no climactic conditions to deselect for that gene. Most people only think of the first case, in which climate change occurs or a new predator migrates to that region from another region.
It might be possible that, when such conditions occur, species are more likely to mutate and change and put out new varieties. That might be possible, that stress of that type trigggers that kind of change. But I think it would be easy to replicate that stress for a population under controlled conditions and observe the explosion in variety, and I don't think that we have been able to accomplish that.
I think it more likely that plagues of retroviruses occasionally explode across lands and across species and rewrite DNA willy nilly with DNA copied from other organisms as well as random code. That mechanism would account for a sudden explosion of new varieties, followed by natural deselection of some of those varieties.
I am not really familiar with the "gaps" in the fossil record, unless you are talking about the expectation of observing gradual change from one species to the next. If that is it, then I think the retrovirus plagues I mentioned account for what we see. Please let me know if that covers it.
Anyway, there is a lot we don't know about biology and heredity and evolutionary mechanisms. I personally get aggravated when soemone tries to argue that existence of Santa Claus is more plausible than evolution because the existence of Santa Claus does not need to be rational. But you don't seem to be doing that, so here goes.
I am not familiar with Mr. Gould's theories and/or hypotheses. But there are a couple of possible explanations of which I am aware for the explosions of new life. As far as I know, natural selection merely eliminates those species that cannot survive in the new environment. For example, there can be climate change that kills off a species not well adapted to that climate. Or a new gene can come along that is dominant to the first and there are no climactic conditions to deselect for that gene. Most people only think of the first case, in which climate change occurs or a new predator migrates to that region from another region.
It might be possible that, when such conditions occur, species are more likely to mutate and change and put out new varieties. That might be possible, that stress of that type trigggers that kind of change. But I think it would be easy to replicate that stress for a population under controlled conditions and observe the explosion in variety, and I don't think that we have been able to accomplish that.
I think it more likely that plagues of retroviruses occasionally explode across lands and across species and rewrite DNA willy nilly with DNA copied from other organisms as well as random code. That mechanism would account for a sudden explosion of new varieties, followed by natural deselection of some of those varieties.
I am not really familiar with the "gaps" in the fossil record, unless you are talking about the expectation of observing gradual change from one species to the next. If that is it, then I think the retrovirus plagues I mentioned account for what we see. Please let me know if that covers it.
