geo wrote:I’m not sure how much I understand the nuances of the ongoing argument between the Dawkins-Dennett and Gould camps.
I also don't understand the ins and outs, but I can say this - I keep running into "anti-Gould" material that I, in my limited knowledge, know to be wrong. Actionably wrong - the sort of accusation that wouldn't even pass the "reckless disregard for truth" test for which comments on politicians are libelous, since a Q and A session or a thorough job of reading would have shown them to be false.
geo wrote:You would expect evolutionary theory to encompass new ideas and new discoveries.
I think a fair amount of the unfairness has been generated by anachronism, in which statements which make some sense in the academic environment in which they were made don't hold up so well after the environment changed. So, for example, when Gould supposedly declared "Darwinism is dead" he was clearly talking about an orthodoxy of gradualism and "mutation as raw material" which no longer has a dogmatic hold on matters. When Gould was putting forward "selection at the level of species" as a major part of the Darwinian process, this was considered anathema by many orthodox Darwinists because it doesn't fit the textbook adaptationist story. So Gould claimed too much, and popularists still hold it against him, but the pejorative reactions which were also wrong somehow seem to be conveniently forgotten.
geo wrote:Gould asserted many times in his long, illustrious career that this or that is non-Darwinian in nature.
I would like to see the quotes. I do not remember reading anything by Gould claiming that, for example, punctuated equilibrium is "non-Darwinian." I suspect if you look at the original statements, it would have been clear from the context that he was talking about a particular narrow interpretation of Darwinism.
geo wrote: Why was this so important to him to brand some new concepts—usually his—as strictly “non-Darwinian”? Turns out that Creationists also like to make this distinction, insinuating that Darwinism (which I personally think is a dated term) is forever on the brink of failure simply by virtue that it changes.
First, I repeat that I doubt it was important to him, or that he repeatedly made such claims. Second, Dawkins, Dennett and everybody else who writes about evolution argue that Darwinism changes (epigenetics being a blatant example) so why is it that Gould gets tarred with spreading this malicious gossip among the creationists? I re-iterate that a scientist cannot be held responsible for the things flat-earthers like about their work.
geo wrote: The more I look into this issue, I see that a lot of criticism has been directed toward Gould over the years. Indeed, here’s an an article from none other than Robert Wright entitled “The Accidental Creationist.”
None other than Robert Wright? Not exactly known for his scientific research. A brilliant writer and thinker, for sure, and I expect correct about Gould erring by neglecting arms races in his claims of complexity-neutral evolution (but then Wright deals pretty shallowly with the issues involved, in his New Yorker piece, so it's hard to be really sure).
Gould has also turned out to be broadly correct in his criticisms of sociobiology, where the tendency to inappropriately claim things are biological adaptations most clearly ran amok. People who deal in big ideas make mistakes - I defy anyone to find an exception. What I find irritating is the urge to pile on Gould without even understanding him. Most scientists in the field stay away from the urge to "take sides", and some who don't, like, apparently, John Maynard Smith, do not do so from a position of ignorance. But the frequency of jumping from ignorance to personal criticism rivals the frequency of specious borrowings by Creationists, and it raises some questions.
. . . over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance—and, oddly, in some ways because of it—he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.
http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
I was left completely unconvinced. Let's see, he abetted creationists by arguing that evolution is random and has no bias toward meaning, complexity, or producing humans. Say what? Read Wright's statements on this carefully. He never does give a plausible account of how this claim of neutrality of evolution might abet creationism. (But Dennett says Gould believes in skyhooks, and Dennett is an honorable man.)
Or, no! it wasn't his argument for neutrality of evolution that helped those nasty guys, it was his claim that there were gaps in our standard Darwinian story. Yeah, that's the one. So he must mean that Goddidit, and obviously has been telling falsehoods in order to help his secret buddies on the other side. Except that we just agreed that understanding of evolution has indeed had to evolve, and no scientists ever asserted that God, or any other skyhook, was in those gaps, so basically Gould stands accused of uttering blasphemy against the name of Darwin, even though his criticism of gaps has been taken on board and is now part of normal evolutionary understanding.
geo wrote:Gould often refers to the other camp as “Darwinian fundamentalists” or “ultra Darwinists”. Two of the Darwinian "fundamentalists", Jerry Coyne and Brian Charlesworth, wrote in the April 1997 Science Magazine that
Our concern as evolutionary geneticists (2). has been with Eldredge and Gould's repeated revisions of the mechanisms proposed for stasis and rapid evolution. Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change (3). These mechanisms were said to decouple macroevolution from microevolution, leading to Gould's pronouncement that "if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy" (4, p. 120). Yet many evolutionists saw no obvious contradiction between punctuated pattern and Darwinian process: Stasis can result from stabilizing selection (for example, long periods of environmental stability); rapid evolution can result from selection-driven responses to sudden environmental change or invasion of new habitats; and the association of morphological change with speciation can result from the fact that both are promoted by adaptation to new environments (5).
What are these "distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms"? And since, as the authors observe, there is no obvious contradiction between punctuated pattern and Darwinian process, how is it that the textbook presentation of punctuated equilibrium is a "non-Darwinian process?" I think they are not getting into the details of population stability and the comparatively unusual event of successful speciation, so it's hard to evaluate their claim. But the only "non-Darwinian" aspect I am aware of in Gould's popularized presentations of p.e. speciation is the notion that the raw material, genetic variation, is always present so that it is not mutation that drives speciation but the comparatively contingent events that create the conditions for speciation. And of course, that's not "non-Darwinian" but just a very different take on how Darwinian mechanics operate. (It is, though, a decoupling of macroevolution from microevolution - is that supposed to be the great blasphemy?)
If anything, this simply spells out in some detail how Gould's "grandiose claims" may only appear to be overstated in light of the confusion around what is and is not meant by Darwinism. Has Gould's claim about Mayr's characterization of the theory been refuted? At least that would represent a specific dispute that isn't about semantics. I don't know the answer, but the generalities in this quote certainly didn't provide enough detail to assess it.
geo wrote:There’s some truth that Dennett is a little black-and-white in his thinking. For example, he comes up with the notion of cranes and skyhooks and then accuses Gould of looking for skyhooks—his own concept.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
geo wrote:I love to read Gould’s stuff and I’m enjoying this book quite a lot too.
Me too. If you read "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" for the new ideas, pulled from here and there and, to a great extent, illuminating each other, it's really an interesting book. If you read it for sorting out controversies, it leaves a person shaking their head with frustration.