Comments on: Recycled Content: Gould Quote of Darwin Considered Harmful

By: Ashley Moore

Ashley Moore — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:57:19 +0000

‘Laurie Appleton’! I remember arguing with him in 1994 on a BBS in Brisbane. I didn’t know he was so ‘famous’.

What is it is Brisbane and creationists? Appleton, Ken Ham, Jonathon Sarfati. For a town that doesn’t produce too much, it sure does produce a lot of kooks.

By: Austringer

Austringer — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:43:23 +0000

Another instance of “so close” commentary, it looks like.

By: dave souza

dave souza — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:48:02 +0000

May I commend to your attention Eldredge’s Confessions of a Darwinist http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/eldredge-confessions-darwinist/#fn11 of 2006 where he finds that Darwin’s view hadn’t been what he’d assumed as a worker (and not a historian) – “Well! I had grown up believing that Darwin was the quintessential gradualist—so I was flabbergasted to read in his very first evolutionary thoughts he was a “saltationist.” Darwin let the patterns of abrupt replacement in time and space speak for themselves. Small wonder that when we resurrected stasis as a pattern for all to contemplate, Gould and I were tarnished with that same saltationist brush—this time hurled as an insult.”

By: Austringer

Austringer — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:21:19 +0000

Stephen Jay Gould was a brilliant and gifted scientist and writer, but he wasn’t a saint. When it came to advancing his own viewpoint at the expense of those long dead, he did not always overcome temptation. Charles Darwin’s stature has made him a convenient target for people looking for a foil to demonstrate how thoroughly modern and innovative they are in contrast to Darwin’s old-fashioned stances. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that we get treated to assertions that Darwin held an old-fashioned stance that wasn’t actually Darwin’s, or at least that they have glossed over some indications that Darwin may not have been quite as much of a stick-in-the-mud as was represented.

I read most of Gould’s anthologized essays, several of his books, and have read parts of his long final book, “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”. It was precisely the mismatch between some of the popular essays and the content of the technical articles about “punctuated equilibria” that shifted my perception and evaluation of Gould from something near “absolute authority” to something more like “interesting and entertaining, but look into the background yourself before relying upon it”.

One of the other of my favorites along these lines is the assertion from Ernst Mayr in work dating back to the 1940s that Darwin had expressed no coherent species concept. Later, long after his own reputation was made in spades, Mayr would write “One Long Argument”, in which he discussed the two somewhat different species concepts Darwin wrote of during his lifetime. IIRC, in that later work, Mayr even commended Darwin for having come so close in his first such effort at approaching some of the conceptual components of Mayr’s own “biological species concept”.

It really does pay to take historical reflection where the writer has a personal stake with a large grain of salt.

By: Dave S.

Dave S. — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:30:55 +0000

I was mildly surprised to read this. I must say my estimation of Gould has been going down rather than up in the last decade. I suppose its easy to confuse him as the authority in the field rather than just one voice of many not necessarily singing the same hymn, since he was so prolific at writing for the lay reader (although sometimes his literary or historical asides I find unreadable). It goes to show to always go back to the primary source, regardless of who the secondary source might be .