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Ironically, Steven Jay Gould himself was driven to abandon his earlier notions of gradual evolution because even he couldn't quite explain how a human eye could have evolved if 99.9% of an eye couldn't see, how a mosquito wing could have evolved if 99.9% of a wing wouldn't lift it off the ground, etc. He came up with his theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which states that individual elements in an organism evolve in their entirety. Interestingly, it should be pointed out that there is no more evidence of "punctuated equilibrium" than there was of Darwin's "pure" evolution.

This is a gross distortion of Gould's position. He didn't believe that individual elements in an organism evolve in their entirety. Did you ever read Gould?

I have not read any of Gould's works -- I am basing this on an interview he did for National Public Radio (I think) back when I was in high school. It was a caller to that radio show who asked him the question about what a mosquito looked like before it "evolved" into a mosquito, and his inability to answer the question probably made him do some serious thinking.