But remember, evolutionary claims of progress were (and are) rife in the social sciences. That was what Gould ended up changing, if nothing else.
How would this relate to shock Bruno Latour's conceptualization of Actor-Network-Theory, where the sociologist simply tries to maximise the number of sources of uncertainty in a set of trials, without resorting to a "explanatory social theory"?
But remember, evolutionary claims of progress were (and are) rife in the social sciences. That was what Gould ended up changing, if nothing else.