Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [151]
4. Poundstone, Carl Sagan, pp. 112, 357; Davidson, Carl Sagan, pp. 202–205, 389–392. Poundstone describes the debate at the NAS over Sagan’s nomination this way: “Texas A&M chemist Albert Cotton took dead aim on the popularization issue. He judged popularization to be oversimplification—symptomatic of an inadequacy in doing science. There were nods of approval. Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel-laureate medical physicist, shook her head, vowing, ‘Never, never.’ One foe said that the fact that Carl Sagan had even gotten on the ballot demonstrated how ‘dangerous’ it was to allow open nominations” (p. 357).
5. Michael White, “Eureka! They Like Science,” The Sunday Times, December 13, 1992.
6. Awards include a National Book Award for The Panda’s Thumb, a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Mismeasure of Man, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Wonderful Life, on which Gould commented, “Close but, as they say, no cigar.” Forty-four honorary degrees and sixty-six major fellowships, medals, and awards bear witness to the depth and scope of his accomplishments in both the sciences and humanities. He even has a Jupiter-crossing asteroid named after him (“Stephengould,” as by IAU convention), discovered by Gene Shoemaker in 1992. Awards and citations taken from Gould’s curriculum vitae, dated September 2000. The reference to Gould as “America’s evolutionist laureate” appears in numerous publications, but first appears, ironically, in Robert Wright’s highly critical review of Wonderful Life, in The New Republic (January 29, 1990). He meant it sarcastically, but it has been adopted since in praise.
7. Bernard D. Davis, Storm over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment, and Public Policy (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 130, 136.
8. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 262–312.
9. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 197–98.
10. John Maynard Smith, “Genes, Memes, and Minds,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 19 (1995): 46. The quotation is repeated often by Gould’s critics: Richard Dawkins (n. 9), John Alcock (n. 11), Robert Wright (n. 12), and Michael Ruse (n. 13). Gould replied in the New York Review of Books 44, no. 10 (1997): 34–37:
He really ought to be asking himself why he has been bothering about my work so intensely, and for so many years. Why this dramatic change? Has he been caught up in apocalyptic ultra-Darwinian fervour? I am, in any case, saddened that his once genuinely impressive critical abilities seem to have become submerged within the simplistic dogmatism epitomized by Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, a dogmatism that threatens to compromise the true complexity, subtlety (and beauty) of evolutionary theory and the explanation of life’s history.
11. John Alcock, “Unpunctuated Equilibrium in the Natural History Essays of Stephen Jay Gould,” Evolution and Human Behavior 19 (1998): 321–35.
12. Robert Wright, “The Intelligence Test: A Review of Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould,” ’The New Republic (January 29, 1990): 32. See also Robert Wright, “Homo deceptus,” Slate (www.slate.com) (November 27, 1996); Robert Wright, “The Accidental Creationist,” The New Yorker (December 13, 1999): 56; and Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
13. Michael Ruse, The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates (Denver: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 247–48.
14. Ronald Numbers, in response to a questionnaire about Gould’s strengths and weaknesses as a scientist, conducted in June 2000, as part of a larger survey to assess the personality characteristics of eminent scientists.
15. Charles Darwin to Henry Fawcett, September 18, 1861, letter number 133 in F. Darwin, ed., More Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), pp. 194–96.
16. This rough classification of Gould’s books