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Yep...for a "scientist" he was driven by emotion. Socialism had to make sense since it felt right to him. He was an intellectual bully and had a closed mind.

And he used his knowledge of baseball to make himself seem "one of the people." I am sorry that he is dead, but he was an bad influence on on scientific thought and debate.

Recently someone wrote to New York Review of Books to object to Daniel Dennett's reference to what Dennett called a SJ Gould-style dishonest rhetorical trick. Because he was dead, this person wrote, Gould ought to be given a break.

My reaction was to remember all the times Gould wrote an essay in which he ridiculed some deceased scientist (usually American and what Marxists call "bourgeoisie") for having made some terrible mistake attributable to the evils of the capitalism mindset. I also recall he accused other dead scientists of scientific fraud and that other investigators claimed it was the accusers who were dishonest. (Read Fletcher on the Marxist gang-bang of Cyril Burt for example.)

It was his stock-in-trade and the fact that he is not immortal should not be a reason for granting him a pass.

As for his science I think his work confirms the efficacy of the IQ tests he took as a youngster on which he received a not-outstanding score. He admitted (bragged about?) this in an NYRB article (March 29, 1984):

I am hopeless at deductive sequencing ... I never scored particularly well on so-called objective tests of intelligence because they stress logical reasoning.

Time will judge him harshly not only for his bullying dishonesty but for his inability -- despite a decades-long personal encounter -- to think-through the relationship between cancer and evolution.