Gould’s rhetorical strategy was straight from the Marxist book he was influenced by as a child: the status quo is reactionary, bad, and monolithic; revolutionaries are good; everyone is a vector of the Hegelian dialectic except ‘us’. So he had no problem setting up caricatures as opponents, a bunch of speciecentric believers in progress and eugenics, biased beyond belief.
His Mismeasure of Man is a great example of his methods. His criticism mainly centers on pre-1940 work as if their sloppy methods and biases render human biodiversity disproven: By that logic, Pasteur, Mendel, Millikan, Flemming, Freud, Eddington all should have negative signs attached to anything they asserted (see Einstein’s Luck). He employed the rhetoric of emphatic reassertion “Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow: … Human equality is a contingent fact of history”. He dwelt on anecdotes, such as a question from a 1917 IQ test (Who was Christie Mathewson?), though there was subsequently a huge amount of research on much better tests when he wrote this in 1980. IQ is important, and you can measure it.
Straw men. Repetition. Ad hominem attacks. Totally ignoring the better arguments from your opponents. That was his style.
Gould’s rhetorical strategy was straight from the Marxist book he was influenced by as a child: the status quo is reactionary, bad, and monolithic; revolutionaries are good; everyone is a vector of the Hegelian dialectic except ‘us’. So he had no problem setting up caricatures as opponents, a bunch of speciecentric believers in progress and eugenics, biased beyond belief.
His Mismeasure of Man is a great example of his methods. His criticism mainly centers on pre-1940 work as if their sloppy methods and biases render human biodiversity disproven: By that logic, Pasteur, Mendel, Millikan, Flemming, Freud, Eddington all should have negative signs attached to anything they asserted (see Einstein’s Luck). He employed the rhetoric of emphatic reassertion “Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow: … Human equality is a contingent fact of history”. He dwelt on anecdotes, such as a question from a 1917 IQ test (Who was Christie Mathewson?), though there was subsequently a huge amount of research on much better tests when he wrote this in 1980. IQ is important, and you can measure it.
Straw men. Repetition. Ad hominem attacks. Totally ignoring the better arguments from your opponents. That was his style.