Re: Who's the expert?
Peter Card (pjc@jet.uk)
16 Dec 1996 10:59:26 -0000
edconrad@prolog.net (Ed Conrad) writes:
>I didn't know that Stephen Jay Gould had been ``taken to task"
>by Richard Dawkins, whoever the hell HE is.
This is troll, isn't it?
Check out the science section in a decent bookshop. About half the
popular-science books on evolutionary biology were written by Stephen
Jay Gould, and most of the rest were written by Richard Dawkins. They
seem to take contrasting positions on the way to look at evolution,
but they are both respected scientists, and highly readable writers,
who sell lots of books. Gould's actual accademic speciality is snails,
so I suppose that he is likely to arouse a certain amount of
pop-science envy among his peers when his essays on evolutionary
biology sell well, but not from Dawkins, who also sells well.
Read 'em both.
>Maybe Richard Dawkins -- I suppose a power-that-be -- would like
>an opportunity to step into the ring with someone his own size for a
>change.
They are pretty much a match.
>He'll learn rather quickly that his nonsensical factless rhetoric
>is going in one ear and quickly out the other, and that the only
>concrete fact to emerge from what he has to say is that
>his bullshit stinks.
It would be a dull world if respected scientists agreed about
everything. Since you haven't read Dawkins on Gould, is it possible
that you are arguing from ignorance?
--
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