Academic Questions: The Mismeasures of Gould

“[Steven Jay] Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.”

YEP, that’s the Steven Jay Gould—Harvard paleontologist, best-selling science popularizer, Natural History magazine columnist, and media superstar—in the opinion of John Maynard Smith, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory. Smith’s skepticism about Gould is pervasive among his peers. Daniel Dennett’s brilliant 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, was largely devoted to dispelling Gouldian misinformation. John Alcock, author of standard animal-behavior textbooks, recently described Gould as “consistently employing the same limited set of debating techniques and stylistic devices . . . while simply ignoring evidence to the contrary.”

JR

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J. Philippe Rushton

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“[Steven Jay] Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.”

YEP, that’s the Steven Jay Gould—Harvard paleontologist, best-selling science popularizer, Natural History magazine columnist, and media superstar—in the opinion of John Maynard Smith, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory. Smith’s skepticism about Gould is pervasive among his peers. Daniel Dennett’s brilliant 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, was largely devoted to dispelling Gouldian misinformation. John Alcock, author of standard animal-behavior textbooks, recently described Gould as “consistently employing the same limited set of debating techniques and stylistic devices . . . while simply ignoring evidence to the contrary.”