Actually, I’d say it’s a good example of how a passionate ideologue who is at the same time very smart and a great writer can produce an extremely biased propagandistic work that nevertheless looks admirably objective and reasonable to a casual reader. Certainly, the book deserves a place among the most skillfully crafted works of ideological propaganda in history. This is especially evident when you compare it with similarly slanted but much cruder and more obviously propagandistic works by Gould’s less talented co-ideologues (most notably Not in Our Genes by Lewontin et al.).
Actually, I’d say it’s a good example of how a passionate ideologue who is at the same time very smart and a great writer can produce an extremely biased propagandistic work that nevertheless looks admirably objective and reasonable to a casual reader. Certainly, the book deserves a place among the most skillfully crafted works of ideological propaganda in history. This is especially evident when you compare it with similarly slanted but much cruder and more obviously propagandistic works by Gould’s less talented co-ideologues (most notably Not in Our Genes by Lewontin et al.).