Talk:Stephen Jay Gould/Archive 1

message: It's not clear that Gould was a "radical socialist", IMO.  His parents were Communists and he knew and appreciated Marx, but as far as I know he was never a member of any socialist group.  And of course, he was involved in anti-racist activism and (somewhat peripherally, I think) with Science for the People.  But in Reinventing Darwin, Niles Eldredge says that Gould wasn't a Marxist.  And when asked about his politics in a Skeptic interview, Gould said only that he preferred Clinton to Dole.  He also wrote at least one mild defense of GM foods.  
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:he was to some degree an admirer of Marxism, although he was by no means a communist
Should be reworded. 'Communist' is horribly ambiguous (Stalinist? Leninist? Marxist?). Maybe to something like:
:politically, he sympathized with left-wing views, and was, to some degree, a Marxist.
Depending on the interpretation of the adjective 'communist', its inclusion becomes either redundant or unnecessary. Sir Paul 23:11, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)
A quote from Gould illustrating his political views would provide bones for this rather flabby assertion. Not every progressive liberal humanist realist is a "Marxist"!
: Gould said that he considered his views "a private matter" and chose not to discuss them in his writing.  (See chapter 9 of the Structure.)  So most of what we know about him comes from what his friends and colleagues said about him.  He never denied being a Marxist (although he famously said that Eldredge was not one), but nor does it appear from my reading that he ever claimed to be one, either.  121a0012 03:43, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Politics 

message: :Biologist John Maynard Smith has claimed that "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 nonbiologists as the preeminent 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."  He also claimed Gould "is giving nonbiologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."  (Both quotes appear in Robert Wright's essay The Accidental Creationist).
Summary of some points made (click "View Other Revisions" to see details of this discussion):
* John Maynard Smith is is a biologist and not a popular science writer.
* Gould's work may not be solidly in the biological mainstream, but it's still generally within the purview of legitimate science.
* Robert Wright may be likelier to be the fringe figure here, not Stephen Jay Gould. A quick assay of Mr. Wright's work on the Web shows his positions lie on fairly shakey ground.  For instance, he criticizes Gould for neglecting to notice that there is a general trend from simplicity to complexity in evolution, but this is a trend that is not there and not taken as a mainstream position.
* The power of historical contingency is a major theme in Gould's popular writing, and his most famous professional work (punctuated equilibrium) too.  He's the last person I'd have suspected of being tied to historical determinism.
* Richard Lewontin was the chairman of Gould's department at Harvard, and made the claim, "There is nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao that is or can be in contradiction with a particular set of phenomena in the objective world."  This may mean that Lewontin views science and ideology as separate domains, or perhaps mean that science that seems to contradict Marx, Lenin, or Mao is necessarily wrong.
* Gould once used Lewontin's comment in a metaphorical talk on punctuated equilibrium many years ago, which made some view him as sharing Lewontin's political beliefs.  However, Gould has commented that punctuated equilibrium was more Niles' idea than his.  Niles has a different political background than Gould, so with regards to punctuated equilibrium, Gould's politics may in fact be completely irrelevant anyway.
* Gould has been heavily involved in heated debates regarding sociobiology, and has a firm stance in the "anti" camp.  Some have bashed Gould, claiming this "jihad" to be wrong and suggesting that Gould must be tainted by communist beliefs for taking the positions he has.
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It seems to me that some of this would be good to place in the main article--how about that, some actual useful content coming out of mere dialectical wrangling...  :-) --LMS
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The second to last point is inaccurate.  Suspicions that Gould's scienctific opinions are influenced by his politics arise in regards to his views on sociobiology, not punctuated equilibrium.
: Not entirely so.  See his discussion of the Beverly Halstead British Museum cladism controversy (Structure, pp. 984–85).  121a0012 03:48, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commentary on Gould 

message: Can you give a reference for this? --163.1.97.11 18:07, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Dawkins...strongly advocated [Evolutionary Psychology]" 

message: : One reason for such strong antipathies was that Gould presented his ideas as a revolutionary new way of understanding evolution that relegated adaptationism to a much less important position.
Is there a cite for this?  I don't see this in any of Gould's books (of which I have read all but two); indeed, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he goes to some length to portray this view of his views as urban legend.  (See the Appendix to chapter 9, pp. 972–1024.)  He points out that punctuated equilibrium (the target of most of the attacks described in this section) makes no claims about microevolutionary mechanism, as it is a theory about how known microevolutionary processes scale in geological time resulting in macroevolution.  As for adaptationism, he reiterates, throughout part II of the Structure, that his claim is only for a greater relative frequency of non-adaptive processes, not that adaptation is unimportant.  His denial is specifically of panadaptationism, not of the importance of  adaptation generally.
Regarding the attack of Maynard Smith, Gould writes:
: Such statements stand in welcome contrast to the frequent grousing of strict Darwinians who often say something like: “but we know all this, and I said so right here in the footnote to page 582 of my 1967 paper; you have stated nothing new; nothing that can alter the practice of the field.“  I will never forget the climactic moment of the Chicago macroevolution meeting [in 1980], when John Maynard Smith rose to make such an ungenerous statement about punctuated equilibrium and macroevolutionary theory in general—and George Oster responded to him, “Yes, John, you may have had the bicycle, but you didn't ride it.”  (Structure, p. 1023)
Gould attributes some of the negative reaction to punctuated equilibrium to a culture clash between paleontologists and neontologists (i.e., those who study living populations).  The original paper was written for a paleontological audience, and uses words like sudden and rapid which mean something very different to paleontologists than they mean to most people.  Some readers (so Gould says) who were unfamiliar with paleontological jargon mistook this to mean that he and Eldredge were making claims for truly saltational evolutionary change, which would be quite a radical notion.
:::: 121a0012 03:35, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on the controversies 

message: Gould also wrote an essay entitled Nonoverlapping Magisteria where he essentially ceded the field of ethics to religion.  I'm not sure I can write a properly impartial summary on this, but I do feel strongly that this essay is significant enough that it, and its consequences, deserve some mention here.  Is anyone willing to rise up to this challenge? Alienus 20:48, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: More than just that essay; the books Rocks of Ages and The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox, both mentioned in the bibliography, treat the subject in extenso.  I would not for a moment say that he "ceded the field of ethics to religion"; rather, he categorically excluded ethics and religion from the domain of science.  I don't have the philosophy background to write an unbiased article or section on the topic, so I'm not volunteering, but I agree that it's an important idea and should be treated in more detail.  121a0012 04:54, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for adding that information.  I have some of the background, but neither enough familiarity with nor impartiality towards this material to give a neutral description.  We've got two people agreeing that the topic deserves a place.  Anyone up to writing it? Alienus 19:53, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nonoverlapping Magisteria