Re: New Gould Collection Coming Out

On Mon, 29 May 2006 09:25:12 +1200, "observa" <observa@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"catshark" <catshark101@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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observa wrote:
"catshark" <catshark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Maybe I'm just not paying attention but there is a new collection of
Stephen Jay Gould's work compiled by Steven Rose and Paul McGarr
coming
out
that I was unaware of:

THE RICHNESS OF LIFE
by Stephen Jay Gould

<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2197721,00.html>

Given the nasty stuff Rose directed at E.O.Wilson, Dawkins and Pinker

You mean worse than what Gould said about Wilson, Dawkins and Pinker?


Both I guess. Both of them, and Lewontin, were guilty of similar
misrepreseantation and quote mining the Cretinists are guilty of. A while
ago I read several books that were either written, or edited, by Rose and
Lewontin. And since then I've read many of the originals they were opposed
to. Very often they simply deliberatly misquote, or take things out of
context. They clearly have a political agenda and need the blank slate to
continue justifying it.
I very
much doubt that any collection he selects will be worth a hell of a lot.

Well, I would have thought that would hang more on what you think of
Gould than on what you think of Rose, but . . .

Well, as a historian before I was anything else, _what_ is selected usually
is a result of the selector's biases. And the combined result of such
selection can be such as to support the selector's preferences.


Other than support his political agenda that is.

Having just finished reading Pinker's "The Blank Slate", I can't see
how Rose could be alone in that regard.

Hmm, well I've read The Blank Slate twice, and am currently reading How the
Mind Works. I do note that Pinker's, and other evolutionary/cognitive
scientists appear to have opened doors for further research. And also
appear to base their findings on duplicable research. In other words there
appears to be a cummulative research history. That does not appear to be
the case for research based on the the blank slate assumption.

As an ex-teacher I had to wade my way thru stuff on pedagogy based on the
blank slate assumption. None of it was any use in the classroom. Have you
read Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption?

I'd be curious to know what your position is on the evolutionary sociology
stuff.

I won't pretend to know enough to really judge it. Pinker's book was a
strange "defense" of it, however. You didn't have to take sides in the
controversy to see that Pinker's claims of having no political motives rang
hollow. One doesn't spend most of the first third of the book settling old
scores out of disinterested science. This fits with Ullica Segerstrale's
history of the debate, _Defenders of the Truth_ and her opinion that both
sides had motives not to resolve their differences, which weren't nearly as
great as the parties made out. That desire to maximize differences with
the "received view" is a common tactic in scientific disputes as David Hull
has shown. That's why I take Pinker's claims about his opponent's
positions with a healthy grain of salt. (And the kind of "blank slate" that
might show up in school curricula doesn't necessarily have anything to do
with front line science.)

The evidence Pinker produced in the first sections of the book was
extremely weak to this layperson's eyes but then, in the last third, he did
a much better job. But some of the things he claimed were the result of
evolution seemed to me to require the kind of hyper-evolution that was one
of the acknowledged problems with Wilson's early work. Still, there seems
to be considerable value in at least looking to evolutionary accounts for
social interactions, though there is more than a hint of "just-so" about
them.

As to the allegations of "dirty pool", I sincerely doubt that either side
was inhabited only with angels in that regard.

--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------

In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen

- Emily Dickinson -

Do you think everyone should have a blog?
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.