| 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould > 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. Trivers: Gould was an intellectual fraud. |
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.