This summer Gould himself catalogued the errors of his opponents across two issues of The New York Review of Books. Great fun for us spectators, if only we can figure out what they are all fighting about. The first paragraph associates his opponents with the ''tradition of eugenic thinking which . . . Nor is he much kinder in the rest of the book. Unfortunately, the vigor of his polemic is not matched by the clarity of his analysis.
Readers hoping to be tutored in the nuances of the debate are likely to go away disappointed.
The Gould-Dawkins debate is best appreciated against the background of changes in modern Darwinian theory. Twentieth-century genetics has spawned a vision of natural selection far removed from Darwin's. Genes of different kinds swim around in this pool, and those that are most successful at getting copies into the next generation will eventually squeeze out their competitors. This view of evolution renders whole organisms, like us human beings, almost incidental. Inhabiting a successful breeding organism is one way a gene can get itself into the next generation.