Evolution professor Jerry Coyne writes:
Punctuated equilibrium (PE) was first proposed in a paper by Niles Eldredge and Steve Gould (“E&G”; reference below) in 1972, the year before entered graduate school. When I entered Harvard in 1973 it was a huge deal, heavily promoted by Gould, a professor in the Museum of Comparative Zoology as a replacement for the view of evolution most people held (“neo-Darwinism). Not a little of the theory’s popularity came from Gould’s nonstop promotion as well as his extraordinary ability to write popular science. ...Gould was also an over-opinionated Jewish Marxist.But, over time, PE became more than a hypothesis about the relative rate of evolutionary change in fossil lineages. It morphed into a theory of evolutionary process — a theory that was pretty much “non-neo-Darwinian” and also much more controversial. And while the pattern may be right, the processes proposed by E&G are so wrong that I’d call them “definitively falsified”.
Among the general public, Gould's most famous work was a book attacking the measurement of intelligence. The book was trashed by experts, and praised by non-experts. As Wikipedia politely explain:
The book received many positive reviews in the literary and popular press, including many written by scientists, but the reviews in scientific journals were, for the most part, highly critical.[4] Literary reviews praised the book for opposing racism, the concept of general intelligence, and biological determinism.[4] Reviews in scientific journals accused Gould of historical inaccuracy, unclear reasoning, and political bias.Gould is dead. He is still a good example of how a very high status public intellectual can be full of crap.
1 comment:
Phyllis is dead. She's a very good example of how a high-profile public personality can be full of crap... and wrong 100% of the time. Trump is another example.
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