Stephen Jay Gould - Controversy

Controversy

Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history, but was not immune from criticism by biologists who felt his public presentations were out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory. The public debates between Gould's supporters and detractors have been so quarrelsome that they have been dubbed "The Darwin Wars" by several commentators.

John Maynard Smith, an eminent British evolutionary biologist, was among Gould's strongest critics. Maynard Smith thought that Gould misjudged the vital role of adaptation in biology, and was critical of Gould's acceptance of species selection as a major component of biological evolution. In a review of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Maynard Smith wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory." But Maynard Smith has not been consistently negative, writing in a review of The Panda's Thumb that "Stephen Gould is the best writer of popular science now active... Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these." Maynard Smith was also among those who welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of evolutionary paleontology.

One reason for criticism was that Gould appeared to be presenting his ideas as a revolutionary way of understanding evolution, and argued for the importance of mechanisms other than natural selection, mechanisms which he believed had been ignored by many professional evolutionists. As a result, many non-specialists sometimes inferred from his early writings that Darwinian explanations had been proven to be unscientific (which Gould never tried to imply). Along with many other researchers in the field, Gould's works were sometimes deliberately taken out of context by creationists as "proof" that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved. Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his writings in later works.

Gould disagreed with Richard Dawkins about the importance of gene selection in evolution. Dawkins argued that evolution is best understood as competition among genes (or replicators), while Gould advocated the importance of multi-level selection, including selection amongst genes, cell lineages, organisms, demes, species, and clades.

Dawkins also found that Gould deliberately played down the difference between rapid gradualism and macromutation in his theory of punctuated equilibrium. Criticism of Gould and his theory of punctuated equilibrium can be found in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and Unweaving the Rainbow, as well as chapter ten of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea.