You are in way over your head on this one. It is clear that you are behind on current literature.
The “selfish gene” is old hat and out of date. Multi-level evolution is increasingly widely accepted
by many geneticists, with such mechanisms as reciprocal altruism being keys. The equations for when
the Williams argument on this matter breaks down have been around since James F. Crow first put them
out back in 1953, although they were re-codfied and more widely distributed in the 1970s as the
Hamilton-Price equations.
I am in my office where I do not have copies of the relevant books, and I never read the one by Gould that has you most worked up. It may well be that Gould claims excessive credit for ideas that were due to Williams in it. I do not know. I do know that while they disagreed on various things, Gould certainly does cite Williams in other places and writings and clearly recognized his role in various matters, at least in other places, if not in this particular book. There is little doubt that you are wildly exaggerating his sins in this particular matter.
Also, while one can find the idea of a variable rate of evolution in Darwin, there is no doubt that he saw evolution as fundamentally continuous and extremely gradual. “Nature non facit saltum” is the frontispiece for all editions of his Origin of Species, which comes ultimately from Leibniz. The guy you linked to dismisses Gould’s (and Eldredge’s) idea of “punctuated equilibrium” as already known to Darwin and thus derivative. Excuse me, but this is horse manure. Gould and Eldredge may have overstated the case, but they completely altered the discourse, and the awareness of the possibility of much more rapid evolution is now much more widely accepted.
Indeed, these ideas are linked, as I suspect you know. The possibility of more rapid evolution is indeed tied up with the idea of multi-level evolution, if only partially. It is indeed a “hardline, fundamentalist Darwinian” position that denies this, as it has been by Dawkins (and Williams earlier).
Eliezer,
You are in way over your head on this one. It is clear that you are behind on current literature. The “selfish gene” is old hat and out of date. Multi-level evolution is increasingly widely accepted by many geneticists, with such mechanisms as reciprocal altruism being keys. The equations for when the Williams argument on this matter breaks down have been around since James F. Crow first put them out back in 1953, although they were re-codfied and more widely distributed in the 1970s as the Hamilton-Price equations.
I am in my office where I do not have copies of the relevant books, and I never read the one by Gould that has you most worked up. It may well be that Gould claims excessive credit for ideas that were due to Williams in it. I do not know. I do know that while they disagreed on various things, Gould certainly does cite Williams in other places and writings and clearly recognized his role in various matters, at least in other places, if not in this particular book. There is little doubt that you are wildly exaggerating his sins in this particular matter.
Also, while one can find the idea of a variable rate of evolution in Darwin, there is no doubt that he saw evolution as fundamentally continuous and extremely gradual. “Nature non facit saltum” is the frontispiece for all editions of his Origin of Species, which comes ultimately from Leibniz. The guy you linked to dismisses Gould’s (and Eldredge’s) idea of “punctuated equilibrium” as already known to Darwin and thus derivative. Excuse me, but this is horse manure. Gould and Eldredge may have overstated the case, but they completely altered the discourse, and the awareness of the possibility of much more rapid evolution is now much more widely accepted.
Indeed, these ideas are linked, as I suspect you know. The possibility of more rapid evolution is indeed tied up with the idea of multi-level evolution, if only partially. It is indeed a “hardline, fundamentalist Darwinian” position that denies this, as it has been by Dawkins (and Williams earlier).