[mandevil]

Oh believe me, that's Gould's main point, and the reason that he kept writing these monthly essays for three decades.

Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to successfully categorize animals (1) reminds us that we are making the same sorts of mistakes, and that a century from now they will look back at our quaint beliefs about X, Y, and Z and say what fools that we are. But this is why stubbornness is a double-edged sword. Sometimes being stubborn means that you can see the truth when no one around you can, and sometimes it means that you are the person whose funeral causes science to advance one Planck unit forward. (2) The only difference is whether you are correct!

1: He didn't realize that Darwinian common descent and evolution were the reasons that his scheme worked for life- those ideas became commonly accepted almost a century after his death- and that rocks, not having any sort of common descent, couldn't be mapped into that sort of hierarchy. He himself didn't spend that much time on the subject, he mostly just asserted that they would fit into the same scheme because he was revealing God's True Law, and it would therefore have to be in rocks just like in living things, but several of his followers spent their lives trying to fit rocks into that same sort of scheme and it just fell apart every time.

2: Stubbornness is not necessarily related to age- there seems to have been no correlation between age and acceptance of either evolution or plate tectonics- so Planck's Principle is a little loose.