Finally, I would recommend you read Chapter 9 (I know, it is almost 300 pages long) of Gould’s magnum opus. He does an excellent job of covering most of these controversies, with a fair amount of mea culpas for some of his own misstatements over the years. A lot more fair-minded than the junk in your post or in your links, frankly.
Well,
I got the book out of the library,
Managed to quickly flip through Chapter 9 tonight, after finishing a rather long day’s work,
(Mostly because the book is due back at the library tomorrow),
And I’ve got to say, Gould’s reputation as a clear writer is overrated. I didn’t find any exonerating evidence for Gould in the parts of Chapter 9 that I quickly flipped through. It’s difficult to read a book you can’t trust -
- as exemplified, for example, in the very Table of Contents, where in Chapter 7 on “The Modern Synthesis as a Limited Consensus”, we see Gould (and his book was published in 2002), discussing “Synthesis as Hardening” and “The Later Goal of Exalting Selection’s Power”, discussing books published in 1937, 1951, 1944, 1953, 1942, and 1963. In short, the huge revolution that started in 1966 doesn’t seem to exist so far as Gould is concerned. There was a subsection of Chapter 7 labeled “Adaptation and Natural Selection”, which I flipped to, but it’s not about Williams’s book at all, just a random section with the same name!
Lamarck gets a mention in Gould’s Table of Contents. So does William Paley. Not George Williams, though. Apparently it’s harder to hit a moving target.
Going to the index, I did find a number of mentions of George Williams. I flipped to a discussion of “adaptation and natural selection” on pages 550-554. The discussion is about group selection. Then Gould starts going on about some mysterious sin called “reductionism”, of which Williams is apparently guilty, but what kind of false experimental predictions result is never quite explained, at least not in the parts that I read.
In short, if Gould departed from his policy of railing against the romanticism of the pre-Williams period as if they were current beliefs that Gould alone had dispatched—this being his great sin bordering on warped plagiarism—his redemption is not visible from the small parts of this gigantic book which I was able to peruse, before I returned the tome to my library.
Finally, I would recommend you read Chapter 9 (I know, it is almost 300 pages long) of Gould’s magnum opus. He does an excellent job of covering most of these controversies, with a fair amount of mea culpas for some of his own misstatements over the years. A lot more fair-minded than the junk in your post or in your links, frankly.
Well,
I got the book out of the library,
Managed to quickly flip through Chapter 9 tonight, after finishing a rather long day’s work,
(Mostly because the book is due back at the library tomorrow),
And I’ve got to say, Gould’s reputation as a clear writer is overrated. I didn’t find any exonerating evidence for Gould in the parts of Chapter 9 that I quickly flipped through. It’s difficult to read a book you can’t trust -
- as exemplified, for example, in the very Table of Contents, where in Chapter 7 on “The Modern Synthesis as a Limited Consensus”, we see Gould (and his book was published in 2002), discussing “Synthesis as Hardening” and “The Later Goal of Exalting Selection’s Power”, discussing books published in 1937, 1951, 1944, 1953, 1942, and 1963. In short, the huge revolution that started in 1966 doesn’t seem to exist so far as Gould is concerned. There was a subsection of Chapter 7 labeled “Adaptation and Natural Selection”, which I flipped to, but it’s not about Williams’s book at all, just a random section with the same name!
Lamarck gets a mention in Gould’s Table of Contents. So does William Paley. Not George Williams, though. Apparently it’s harder to hit a moving target.
Going to the index, I did find a number of mentions of George Williams. I flipped to a discussion of “adaptation and natural selection” on pages 550-554. The discussion is about group selection. Then Gould starts going on about some mysterious sin called “reductionism”, of which Williams is apparently guilty, but what kind of false experimental predictions result is never quite explained, at least not in the parts that I read.
In short, if Gould departed from his policy of railing against the romanticism of the pre-Williams period as if they were current beliefs that Gould alone had dispatched—this being his great sin bordering on warped plagiarism—his redemption is not visible from the small parts of this gigantic book which I was able to peruse, before I returned the tome to my library.