[VictorPath]

Gould said that one faction of evolutionary biologists were mostly wasting their time, it's not a surprise that they would be firmly negative about that.

The letter signers you posted say they are from the center for evolutionary psychology, departments of anthropology and psychology. This is the whole problem, they have one foot (if not both feet) outside of science and in social science.

[pdonis]

> Gould said that one faction of evolutionary biologists were mostly wasting their time

Yes, he said that, but he said it in the context of giving descriptions of what those evolutionary biologists were doing that were completely disconnected from reality.

> The letter signers you posted

Are an anthropologist and a psychologist, yes. But the criticisms of Gould that they describe are by no means limited to those fields. The names they list in footnote 2, for example, are a roll call of major evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Those people are not "outside of science"; they are right in the middle of the scientific field that Gould portrayed himself as an expert on, and they all say Gould's claims are nonsense.

[User23]

Gould himself provides good reason to believe his ideas are nonsense. He began with the result he wanted, and then unsurprisingly got it.

  My original reasons for writing The Mismeasure of Man mixed the personal with the professional. I confess, first of all, to strong feelings on this particular issue. I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s. (p. 36)