As I said, I literally just did a google image search for “Kodiak bear Alaska” and took a screenshot of the top page of results. I didn’t cherry pick anything.
Gould wasn’t talking in the context of creation vs evolution, where the term “Darwinism” is often used as a slur to imply that modern scientists hold up Darwin’s work as divine truth.
It’s amenable to testing. I actually added the “probably” in there to cover all the bases, as it’s possible that some mutations that disrupt the “eye-forming” developmental pathway could disrupt other aspects of development, incurring a net negative fitness cost.
Hard, not impossible.
The difference is that these “just-so-stories” aren’t presented as hard facts. As I said earlier, sometimes we have to settle for saying “this is a plausible explanation, but we don’t really know”. The explanations we’re more confident in have more supporting evidence, as with anything.