Not unlikely that this old German "Konstruktionsmorphologie" school and their ideas about constraints had a considerable influence on later criticisms of adaptationism. See also the spandrels paper of 1979 that cites earlier studies by Seilacher & Co.

Dear Mark,

I remember various discusions with Dolf Seilacher and his student Wolf Reif on the constraint topic. Seilacher was most interested in "principles" of construction, arguing like an architect rather than an evolutionist. He was influenced by engineers of Stuttgart university. Reif, on the other hand, was the one who emphasized the constraints aspect more, but I presume his influence on Gould was limited, as they lived in different worlds of thought. So, in sum, I believe it was Seilacher who had influence on Gould, albeit in a rather superficial, general way.

To be honest, I think Gould had a rather fuzzy view of constraints, his definitons changed over time, were sometimes contradictory. Gould was more focused on contingency, rather than physical laws constraining evolution and potentially constraining the power of selection. This is why he emphasized "historical constraints" so often, a concept that I find problematic. Nevertheless, the spandrels paper was very important, and as so often, gained more attention than the earlier papers by Seilacher (1970, 1972) and Reif (1975), especially because these were mostly written in German.

I would agree that Gould had a fuzzy view of constraints, and more I would say very fuzzy as much of his thinking about evolution lacked an integrated coherence. As to the impact of his paper, given his prominence his paper received similar prominence - at least in the English speaking world. But whether it was much of a paper is another matter. It was not very deep in its analysis, far less than potential influences such as Leon Croizat whom Gould read, but never cited even though he seems to have borrowed on Croizat;s work in this respect.

John Grehan