SOURCE: Wheeler, David L. “An Eclectic Biologist Argues That Humans Are Not Evolution's Most Important Result; Bacteria Are.” Chronicle of Higher Education 43, no. 2 (6 September 1996): A23.

In the following review, Wheeler examines Gould's opinions about the limits of natural selection in Full House.

Stephen Jay Gould's brain could be viewed as the product of a few billion years of evolution, but he is using it these days to argue that progress isn't inherent in the evolutionary process.

Humans, he says, shouldn't be regarded as evolution's most important invention. “I don't deny that the consciousness of one species has had a profound impact on the planet,” he says. “But that doesn't change the fact that it is still one species, one lineage out of millions and billions, and therefore a very curious, unpredictable result that has just happened to have occurred once.

“Run the story a hundred more times and...