Barkley Rosser,
oops, I meant “if...weren’t.”
Your invocation of group selection was completely irrelevant. It’s so irrelevant, I refuse to elaborate. I find it hard to believe you continued reading past the phrase “Williams revolution.” It’s worth pointing out that Tooby explicitly praises Gould’s promotion of group selection.
Punctuated equilibrium was an ad hominem response to an ad hominem attack, so it’s not irrelevant, but it’s pretty tenuously connected.
The problem isn’t that Gould was wrong or over-promoted his own ideas; the problem is that he massively misrepresented the state of the field. The problem is in his popular writing, not his professional writing (though Maynard Smith does mildly criticize them as well).
his eloquence was hardly unique among his competitors.
Are you sure he had any competitors?
Surely, his eloquence was not unique among similarly qualified academics, but probably few of them tried to get into the popular field. Maybe you need connections to get on the magazine circuit, but I suspect that the normal course of things are that the connections drag the scientist into writing. From there on, I imagine they’re judged by their communication skills, not their content or connections. Also, Gould started when he was fairly young and energetic, as contrasted with, say, Lewis Thomas, who retired to writing when he was at an age Gould barely reached.
I find the response to Barkley Rosser’s non sequitors disturbing. Sure, if he wants to pattern-match “gene’s eye view” and start arguing about group selection, by all means argue about it, but don’t accept his claim that it is relevant to this post! And punctuated equilibrium? Would it make a difference to any of this if Gould were an important theorist?