Re: Who's the expert?
Ed Conrad (edconrad@prolog.net)
13 Dec 1996 11:00:07 GMT
edconrad@prolog.net (Ed Conrad) wrote:
>mgallo@slonet.org (M. Gallo) wrote:
>> I recently read an article by Robert Wright,
>>http://www.slate.com/Earthling/96-11-27/Earthling.asp, where
>>he unflinchingly attacked the reputation of Stephen Jay
>>Gould. He writes, "... basically, that Gould is a fraud. He
>>has convinced the public that he is not merely a great writer,
>>but a great theorist of evolution. Yet, among top-flight
>>evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest -- not
>>just a lightweight, but an actively muddled man who has warped
>>the public's understanding of Darwinism."
>> Of course, Gould has been taken to task before by
>>people such as Richard Dawkins, but is Wright going over the
>>top here? Gould, a Harvard professor and columnist for
>>_Nature_, certainly seems respectable to a layman like me.
>>How can I evaluate his stature in the scientific community?
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I didn't know that Stephen Jay Gould had been ``taken to task"
by Richard Dawkins, whoever the hell HE is.
Sounds like another of those stuffed-shirt big-mouth know-it-all
egomaniacs with an alphabet-soup collection of letters behind
his name but who, if he ever had to stand on his own, wouldn't be able
to fight his way out of that proverbial paper bag.
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.
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.
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