“Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection… Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.”

—  Stephen Jay Gould , book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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“Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features are homologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers (or homologs) - not mere analogs - of worms and insects.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

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“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.”

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“But all that changed when Darwin explained those designlike features by natural selection. The best evidence for God simply vanished.”

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“Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function.”

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“[Even Darwin’s] natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.”

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https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/566866395540246528 (15 February 2015)
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