 The ensuing debate about punctuated equilibria proved to be complex and contentious. Gould, in particular, made increasingly bold and controversial claims on behalf of PE during the 1980s, and he tended to see PE as the opening wedge for a more ambitious critique of the modern synthesis. Notoriously, Gould also flirted with non-Darwinian accounts of speciation, such as Richard Goldschmidt’s (1940) idea that new species arise from “hopeful monsters” (Gould 1977). The stasis claim of PE was also controversial, especially since Gould took it to mean that cumulative, directional natural selection is a less significant factor in evolution than many had thought. The reasoning was that if directional natural selection were the dominant driver of evolutionary change, then you would not expect to see such clear patterns of stasis in the fossil record. PE elicited a great deal of opposition from biologists and philosophers who were more committed to a selectionist picture of evolution (Dawkins 1986; Dennett 1995; and see Sterelny 2001a for a useful guide to the controversy).