ABSTRACT
The implicit appeal of the theory of evolution is that with one or two basic laws with attendant corollaries, the history of life on the planet earth can be fully explained. The evolutionary ideal of slow development and gradually increasing complexity of species over eons of geologic time now seems impossible to hold. Some years ago two heterodox evolutionists presented an account of evolution that was not by slow and insensible degrees but a process that came about in unpredictable jumps, a theory they termed "punctuated equilibria". Gould's probabilistic view of evolution was not intended to provide a basis for religious belief. Evolutionary theory fulfills the basic deterministic ideal of scientific explanation; given a set of initial conditions, the application of a scientific theory will predict in detail all the successive stages that follow the initial conditions.
