![]() Holloway's slur is based on a critique by him and five other anthropologists of Gould's famous 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man (W. In an August 1995 profile of him for Scientific American I summed up his worldview, which emphasizes the role of randomness, or "contingency," in shaping life, as "shit happens."īut I admired Gould's ferocious opposition to biological determinism, which he defined as the view that "the social and economic differences between different groups-primarily races, classes and sexes-arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology." I loathe biological determinism, too, and so I must defend Gould against charges that he was a fact-fudging "charlatan," as the anthropologist Ralph Holloway of Columbia University put it. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. ![]() I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. ![]()
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