Forest_Dump wrote:genemachine wrote:I would generally avoid Gould, his science and his politics are often argued to be somewhat overlapping.
I am curious about what you think or have heard Gould's politics, etc. are. I have read a lot of his stuff and never really got that kind of impression although that is exactly what my impression of Dawkins is - he usually ends up blurring his politics and religion with his science.
Most recently there is this paper from PLoS Biology which argues that it was Gould, not Morton, whose biases crept into their calculations on skull measurements.
"The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info ... io.1001071From the abstract
did Morton really fudge his data? Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted? We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton's skulls and reexamining both Morton's and Gould's analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould
I'm probably not the best person to comment on Gould's exact politics. I've found his attacks on various theories to be in a predicatable direction and often his descriptions of other scientists, their work, and often entire fields, to be crude caricatures. My best explaination of the consistent direction of his attacks on "adaptionism", evolutionary psychology, psychometric testing, etc. and scientists in these fields is that he wants people to be more equal than some of the work in these fields suggests we are. He's not quite promoting lysenkoism, but that would appear to be the direction of his bias. In the disputes I have read, I tend to agree with a non caricatured version of the other side.
You can take your pick from the critiques online, as I'm sure you have done already. I must say - Gould attracts great detractors.
I would recommend people read Gould, and the disagreements, and the modern state of the fields he criticises, consider the interplay between ESSes and Punctuated Equilibrium, and all the rest, but life is short.