> I didn't realise Dawkins' theory had been so thoroughly refuted.
It has not. The "battle lines" between the "Dawkins school" and the "Gould school" were established in the 1970s and 1980s, and they are pretty much the same still. Each school probably thinks they refuted the other one decades ago already.
Also the majority of biologists don't give these much thought either way.
>
What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
> If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.
neither of those quotes, written by people who are not biologists, actually demonstrate how Gould is supposedly wrong. I find it ironic that they are the ones accusing Gould of politicizing evolutionary biology, but they are the ones doing the politicizing.
What Prominent Biologists Think of Stephen Jay Gould
Many nonspecialists believe that Stephen Jay Gould was the preeminent evolutionary theorist of the 20th century. His The Mismeasure of Man might be the most widely read book on biology/evolution among scholars in the humanities. But people specializing in the fields in which Gould pontificated generally had a poor opinion of his scholarship.
Bernard D. Davis (1983)
It is…not surprising that Gould’s history of the efforts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, received many glowing reviews in the popular and literary press, and even a National Book Critics Circle award. Yet the reviews that have appeared in scientific journals, focusing on content rather than on style or on political appeal, have been highly critical of both the book’s version of history and its scientific arguments. The paradox is striking. If a scholar wrote a tendentious history of medicine that began with phlebotomy and purges, moved on to the Tuskegee experiment on syphilitic Negroes, and ended with the thalidomide disaster, he would convince few people that medicine is all bad, and he would ruin his reputation. So we must ask: Why did Gould write a book that fits this model all too closely? Why were most reviewers so uncritical? And how can non-scientific journals improve their reviews of books on scientific aspects of controversial political issues?
John Maynard Smith (1995)
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 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 publically criticised because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary biology.
Ernst Mayr (2000)
Skeptic: You developed your theory of allopatric speciation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould applied that to the fossil record and called it punctuated equilibrium. Was this just a spin-off from what you had already done? What was new in punctuated equilibrium?
Mayr: I published that theory in a 1954 paper (“Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution,” in Huxley, J., A.C. Hardy, and E.B. Ford, Eds., Evolution as a Process, London: Allen and Unwin), and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others. But what I derived from my research in the South Sea Islands is that in these isolated little populations it is much easier to make a genetic restructuring because when the numbers are small it takes rather few steps to become a new species. A small local population that changes very rapidly. I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local population that changed very rapidly in the fossil record. My essential point was that gradual populational shifts in founder populations appear in the fossil record as gaps.
Skeptic: Isn’t that what Eldredge and Gould argued in their 1972 paper, citing your 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution several times?
Mayr: Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.
E. O. Wilson (2011)
I believe Gould was a charlatan….I believe that he was…seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.
Richard Lewontin (2015)
Steve and I taught evolution together for years and in a sense we struggled in class constantly because Steve, in my view, was preoccupied with the desire to be considered a very original and great evolutionary theorist. So he would exaggerate and even caricature certain features, which are true but not the way you want to present them. For example, punctuated equilibrium, one of his favorites. He would go to the blackboard and show a trait rising gradually and then becoming completely flat for a while with no change at all, and then rising quickly and then completely flat, etc. which is a kind of caricature of the fact that there is variability in the evolution of traits, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but which he made into punctuated equilibrium literally. Then I would have to get up in class and say “Don’t take this caricature too seriously. It really looks like this…” and I would make some more gradual variable rates. Steve and I had that kind of struggle constantly. He would fasten on a particular interesting aspect of the evolutionary process and then make it into a kind of rigid, almost vacuous rule, because—now I have to say that this is my view—I have no demonstration of it—that Steve was really preoccupied by becoming a famous evolutionist.
Robert Trivers (2015)
Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods of long stasis interspersed with periods of rapid change. All of this was well known from the time of Darwin. The classic example were bats. They apparently evolved very quickly from small non-flying mammals (in perhaps less than 20 million years) but then stayed relatively unchanged once they reached the bat phenotype we are all familiar with today (about 50 million years ago). Nothing very surprising here, intermediate forms were apt to be neither very good classic mammals, nor good flying ones either, so natural selection pushed them rapidly through the relevant evolutionary space.
But Steve wanted to turn this into something grander, a justification for replacing natural selection (favoring individual reproductive success) with something called species selection. Since one could easily imagine that there was rapid turnover of species during periods of intense selection and morphological change, one might expect species selection to be more intense, while during the rest of the equilibrium stabilizing selection would rule throughout. But rate of species turnover has nothing to do with the traits within species—only with the relative frequency of species showing these traits. As would prove usual, Steve missed the larger interesting science by embracing a self-serving fantasy. Species selection today is a small but interesting topic in evolutionary theory, not some grand principle emerging from paleontological patterns….
Hard to imagine—but at the end the organism appears to be in full self-deception mode—a blow-hard fraudulently imputing fraud, with righteous indignation, coupled with magnanimous forgiveness for the frailties of self-deception in others….
Much less so, it was said was Stephen Gould, who was into self-promotion, self-inflation and self-deception full time. Not only was his science hopeless but so was much of his behavior in other contexts as well.
Again, I find it really funny that these guys are politicizing the guy who they claim to be politicizing science. All of this critique is criticism of character and of rhetorical style.
As an aside, I also think it's funny that you could easily* substitute the name Gould for Feynman in each of these criticisms, but somehow Feynman is considered a demi-god among physicists for having the same 'character flaws' and rhetorical flair.
Your first criticism was that Krugman and Yudkowsky weren’t biologists, so I found multiple examples of biologists saying Gould was untrustworthy. Now you’re claiming that the critics of Gould are politicising science. This is a bit rich seeing as Gould always put his politics above science.
Comparing Feynman to Gould is distasteful. They may both have been blowhards, self publicists and excellent writers but only one of them launched campaigns of harassment against other researchers. You could not easily substitute Feynman for Gould in these criticisms. Feynman never wrote anything as dishonest as Mismeasure of Man.
> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
If you would like to back up your claim that the same criticisms could be made of Feynman as of Gould here are the summaries. I’m sure the parallel statements will be easy to find if you’re right about Feynman.
Krugman: Gould was a good writer but vastly more respected outside his field than in it because he was a good writer more than a good scientist.
Yudkowsky: Gould wrote multiple books in which he acted as if other peoples’ life’s work was unknown to him, pawning off their intellectual work as his own, pretending that the field was in a state of confusion and that he, the towering genius, had brought closure and clarity.
Davis: Gould wrote a book of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty that was looked upon with favour in the popular press and panned by experts writing for other experts.
Smith: His ideas are so confused as to be unworthy of discussion but outsiders think he’s a genius of the field because he can write well.
Mayr: One of Gould’s only actual claims to originality was a trivial extension of work dating back either to the founder of the field or to a course taught to undergraduates in which he was a teaching assistant.
Wilson: Gould was a charlatan who dishonestly and repeatedly mischaracterised the work of other scientists.
Lewontin: Gould would take reasonable ideas and caricature them to the point they were plainly wrong.
> Your first criticism was that Krugman and Yudkowsky weren’t biologists, so I found multiple examples of biologists saying Gould was untrustworthy. Now you’re claiming that the critics of Gould are politicising science. This is a bit rich seeing as Gould always put his politics above science.
And they are guilty of the exact same non-arguments. Doesn't matter if they are scientists or non-scientists, the criticisms are exactly the same.
>> Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists concerning the disciplines of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which Gould and Lewontin opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker advocated.[93] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition from groups such as the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[94] Pinker accuses Gould, Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.
Again, where's the real critique of opposition to sociobiology? There are actually numerous flaws with sociobiology and evo-psych, which you seem to just dismiss out of hand as made up lies. The interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies and Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which Gould was drawing from (though not necessarily in an optimal manner) provide sober critiques of the authority of science and of the political nature of knowledge and knowledge production. These fields look at how scientific practice is actually done and draw out mechanisms through which knowledge is produced through the interactions between people, prior knowledge and beliefs, objects of experimentation or evaluation, goals, pragmatic circumstances, 'grey' and information infrastructures, and community norms and expectations. Take a look at Epistemic Cultures (https://www.worldcat.org/title/epistemic-cultures-how-the-sc...) for a great example of such work, which compares scientific practice among high-energy physicists and molecular biologists, who follow very different trajectories in the formulation of new ideas, according to their circumstances and needs.
Gould's work is along similar lines.
One major critique of the Mismeasure of Man is that Gould dredges up long-dead hypotheses about race. However, these claims are in fact not dead, and have real impact on the world today. As an archaeologist, I can relate. Laypeople still think that archaeology does and believes things that have been debunked and shifted away from decades ago, things that 'prove' the inferiority of some races or that fuel nationalist and racist agendas. The thing is, people who are devising racist and nationalist policy are generally not intellectually honest, and don't care to actually read up on why or how these claims are wrong. They find an article from 1934 that supports their views and they go with it, and dismiss any criticism as coming from ""radical scientists", whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.". Mismeasure of Man is clearly a popular non-fiction book geared towards educating laypeople about the flaws of race science, with the hope that people will recognize when policy is being enacted based on shitty science and oppose it when they do.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
> What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-...
> If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.