As for Gould himself...here's John Maynard Smith, Crafoord prize winner:

"the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed [Gould's] work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists."

And here's Paul Krugman:

Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks").

What is rare in the evolutionary economics literature, at least as far as I can tell, is references to the theorists the practitioners themselves regard as great men - to people like George Williams, William Hamilton, or John Maynard Smith. This is serious, because if you think that Gould's ideas represent the cutting edge of evolutionary theory (as I myself did until about a year and a half ago), you have an almost completely misguided view of where the field is and even of what the issues are.

How can you be so sure about what you think you know about this subject? 

As to William he  ignored the issue of Horse Evolution, the Archeopteryx and the DNA studies which were part of the info posted.  One can not be sanguine as an expert on evolution and pretend not to hear certain questions.

I regret you have ignored Post 10 on "Biologists Look at ID".

(Edited by Robert Davison on 8/22, 11:15am)

Objectivism precludes neither hypothesis because of the current absence of definitive evidence for either.  It does however preclude both the materialism some atheists want to hang on Darwinism and the creationism some theists want to hang on ID.  The fact that many people have a priori stakes in the truth of one hypothesis or the other, it remains obnoxious to Objectivism to deny that a genuinely scientific disputes exists between the two.