"NO!! Now see how things go awry."
Ok, wasn't sure exactly what you meant. :) All this turkey is making me sleepy lol.
"I meant that Dawkins Ad Hominem was a doozy since Gould could not be there to defend whether he had read the book or not. "
But it wasn't an ad hominem. Gould made statements about Dawkin's book that clearly indicated he either
a) Hadn't read it.
b) Had read it and but chose to ignore parts of it.
Dawkins charitably chose to conclude A. It was a conclusion based on the evidence before him; if it was an attack on Gould's character it was certainly germaine to the claim Gould made. I would have picked B. Gould had done this thing before, notably with E. O. Wilson when he wrote Sociobiology in 1975. Gould signed on to the following in an article in the New York Review of Books,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9017
"The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex. Historically, powerful countries or ruling groups within them have drawn support for the maintenance or extension of their power from these products of the scientific community. For example, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. said.
The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest…. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.
These theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."
Gould was very quick to throw around charges of racism and eugenics when the science went against HIS political views.
Just because he is dead doesn't mean you can't point out where was wrong, or where he may have acted wrongly.
To claim that Dawkin's is the one using an ad hominem is to get it exactly backwards.
But it wasn't an ad hominem. Gould made statements about Dawkin's book that clearly indicated he eitherAnd this is how Dawkins characterized it.
it appears that Gould didn't read it either. Ah well, why bother to read a book, if the title alone tells you it must be the sort of book you disapprove of on political grounds?
That is Ad Hominem. I would also guess from what I have seen of Gould that he would have read the book. I have it on good authority that Gould was a scientist of some good quality.
Ironically, the only time Bradley comes anywhere near criticising his hero Gould, Gould is right and Bradley wrong. He wonders whether Gould may have gone over the top in suggesting that the evolutionary rise of humanity is a complete historical accident. I am with most biologists in agreeing that Gould's point is so obviously true that it never needed saying. We had thought that Gould was, not for the first time, attacking a non-existent straw man. But even straw men occasionally exist, and this one appears to be instantiated in the form of Clive Bradley. You can see why it would appeal to his politics. It might be thought to appeal to Gould's politics too, but Gould is too good a scientist to let that distort his perception of nature. ---- Dawkins
P.S. Gould died in 2002, Dawkins response was in 2000, I guess I have to revise "doozy".