For example, the emergence of segmentation in body plans in his 1988 article “The evolution of Evolvability”:
I suspect that the first segmented animal was not a dramatically successful individual. It was a freak, with a double (or multiple) body where its parents had a single body. Its parentś single body plan was at least fairly well adapted to the specieś way of life; otherwise they would not have been parents. It is not, on the face of it, that a double body would have been better adapted. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, it survived (we know it because its segmented descendants are still around) if only (this, of course, is conjecture) by the skin of its teeth.
Even though I may exaggerate when I say “by the skin of its teeth”, the point I really want to make is that the individual success, or otherwise, of the first segmented animal during its all lifetime is relatively unimportant. No doubt many other new mutants have been more successful as individuals. What is important about the first segmented animal is that its descendant lineages were champion *evolvors*. They radiated, speciated, and gave rise to whole new phyla. Whether or not segmentation was a beneficial adaptation during the individual lifetime of the first segmented animal, segmentation represented a change in embryology that was pregnant with evolutionary potential.
Good writing and immensely appealing to a certain sort of person, but what does it have to do with science?
See also: What the fossils told us in their own words
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