My impression is that Steven Wolfram got away with publicly claiming credit for a lot of people’s ideas in his recent book “A New Kind of Science”, in the sense that the public was never set straight. Gould probably could have too. My guess is that he simply didn’t understand the logic and the conceptual background behind the “Williams Revolution”, and was able to ignore it because it was unknown even to most professional biologists and to paleontologists like himself. Evolutionary biologists knew about it, but there aren’t very many of them. From outside, if you don’t understand their arguments, they can be ignored as one minor sub-specialty with some heterodox ideas obscured behind pretentious math. He didn’t need neutronium earplugs. He just ignored his tiny band of critics with the same sort of justification, superficially, as I use when ignoring various specialties in macroeconomics. They are too small, demand too much thought to follow their arguments, and can’t, as far as I can tell with minimal effort, make useful predictions. Probably, his idea of minimal effort is was than mine is, but after all, he was just a paleontologist who gained a lot of status. Status pretty inevitably reduces people’s effective intelligence.
Gould’s problem was basically that he didn’t realize that evolutionary biologists were not some small sub-field, no more relevant than their size within biology and the historical sciences would suggest, but were rather the only scientists with expertise relevant to the questions he was discussing.
Thus we return to this blog’s regular program, that of trying to figure out good general high-level heuristics for identifying the relevant experts on an given question.
My impression is that Steven Wolfram got away with publicly claiming credit for a lot of people’s ideas in his recent book “A New Kind of Science”, in the sense that the public was never set straight. Gould probably could have too. My guess is that he simply didn’t understand the logic and the conceptual background behind the “Williams Revolution”, and was able to ignore it because it was unknown even to most professional biologists and to paleontologists like himself. Evolutionary biologists knew about it, but there aren’t very many of them. From outside, if you don’t understand their arguments, they can be ignored as one minor sub-specialty with some heterodox ideas obscured behind pretentious math. He didn’t need neutronium earplugs. He just ignored his tiny band of critics with the same sort of justification, superficially, as I use when ignoring various specialties in macroeconomics. They are too small, demand too much thought to follow their arguments, and can’t, as far as I can tell with minimal effort, make useful predictions. Probably, his idea of minimal effort is was than mine is, but after all, he was just a paleontologist who gained a lot of status. Status pretty inevitably reduces people’s effective intelligence.
Gould’s problem was basically that he didn’t realize that evolutionary biologists were not some small sub-field, no more relevant than their size within biology and the historical sciences would suggest, but were rather the only scientists with expertise relevant to the questions he was discussing.
Thus we return to this blog’s regular program, that of trying to figure out good general high-level heuristics for identifying the relevant experts on an given question.