Free Republic

After reading the links you cited, one would imagine that Gould and the Neo-Darwinists were members of one big, happy family who really were in basic agreement. Alas, the reality is different.

The article you referenced with Gould's reflections was published in 1991, but there is another that gives a clearer picture of the areas of agreement and disagreement: Gould's article in the New York Review of Books in June 1997, in which he refers to followers of Dawkins as "Darwinian Fundamentalists." He also says the following: "[Daniel Dennett’s] limited and superficial book reads like a caricature of a caricature—for if Richard Dawkins has trivialized Darwin’s richness by adhering to the strictest form of adaptationist argument in a maximally reductionist mode, then Dennett, as Dawkins’ publicist, manages to convert an already vitiated and improbable account into an even more simplistic and uncompromising doctrine." Clearly peace was (and is) not at hand.

You are saying, in different words, that orthodox Darwinists find the fossil record to be in complete accord with their view of evolution. True. What can't be escaped is that Gould considered his concept to be 1) more faithful to the evidence in the fossil record than Neo-Darwinism is and 2) different from orthodox Neo-Darwinism. Dawkins may believe that Gould agreed with him (while merely placing emphasis on different aspects of the evidence), but it is clear that Gould considered his own views to differ from Dawkins'.

I have that book too. Here's what it says on a page before the quote: "...it is impossible for us to decide whether the origin of life here was a very rare event or one almost certain to have occurred. Even though the arguments are sometimes put forward for the latter view, they seem very hollow to me."