Evolution and Extinction

Gould's views of evolution and extinction makes sense to me. Two key points: first, a feature of an organism that helped it survive a mass extinction event, could not have been developed to deal specifically with that mass extinction event (species tend not be able to look ahead a million or two years into the future). Second, the reason we see a new species appear all of a sudden in the fossil record, instead of some intermediate form, is because the change probably took places in small numbers on the fringe of the population. With such a small sample, it is unlikely the fossil record had a chance to capture such a snapshot. When this 'superior' species came back to the main population, or otherwise grew in number, it did so as a fully modified species. This fully changed state is the one that was immortalized as a fossil.

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