Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science

A Review of SJ Gould's last book

Can be found here.

An excerpt...

Why, then, should readers interested in sociobiology, evolutionary psychology or a biological “take” on human nature even bother with TSET at all? Because Gould’s ideas matter, if only because the nonprofessional American public takes him so seriously, as the major modern avatar of evolutionary wisdom. (Biologists are typically surprised to learn the reverence with which Gould is treated by many lay-persons, who, in turn, are equally surprised to find that most professionals - far from sharing their giddy adoration - consider Gould’s ideas, in the words of John Maynard Smith, “so confused as to be not worth bothering with.”)

For decades, Stephen Jay Gould became the late-20th century incarnation of Soapy Sam Wilberforce, arguing that evolution had almost nothing to do with human behavior (although unlike Wilberforce, he at least accepted Homo sapiens’s phyletic connectedness to the rest of life). A brilliant polemicist, Gould also carried the torch for several idiosyncratic revisions of evolutionary theory, wherein lies the rationale for his book.

-p

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