Gould and Lewontin finally come to the conclusions that the constraints placed on natural selection are possibly the most important part of evolution because these constraints restrict the pathways of natural selection so severely. One category of constraints is phyletic constraints, which affect how a species can evolve based on it’s history. One important example of these is developmental constraints in which the early stages of development are both highly conserved and strongly restrictive, allowing for only a few possible adaptations to occur. The other kind of constraint discussed is architectural constraints, which arise as architectural restrictions that never were adaptations, but rather the necessary consequences of material and designs selected to build the basic body plan. This is where the concepts about architecture from the introduction come into contact with and highly relate to the body plans traits of modern organisms. The authors come to the conclusion that the evolutionary meanings or pattens cannot be understood by viewing secondary adaptations as the reason for the pattern itself. They make it very obvious that it is the pattern that controls the traits and not …show more content…
Thereby, they discounted the adaptationist program for relying too much on story telling and assuming natural selection, when if fact, there are much stronger forces out there driving natural selection, itself, as well as other evolutionary change. The main impacts this article was trying to make was to correct the misconception had by many evolutionary biologist that natural selection is not the only force, and they really wanted to encourage researchers to maintain a more pluralistic mindset to aid in further understanding of how the life on earth changed into what it is