The great wrinkled finger debate

This past May, I was fortunate enough to take part in a conference in Venice, Italy, which was a retrospective on the legacy of famous paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould 10 years after his death. The choice of Venice as the conference venue was a nod to one of Gould’s most famous and influential papers, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme“, which he co-authored with Richard Lewontin in 1979.In the paper, Gould and Lewontin 1979 drew an analogy between the “spandrels” or, if you’re overly pedantic about architectural terminology, “pendentives“ ...

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