BIO-BLASPHEMY :

Evolving dispute aptly summed up : a review of Dawkins vs. Gould : Survival of the Fittest By Kim Sterelny ( Carlin Romano, May. 26, 2002, Philadelphia Inquirer)

The core tenet of Gould's work on evolution remained simple: While natural selection explains much evolutionary change on every biological level from gene to individual organism to species, it can't explain everything that has happened to "life" since, so to speak, its birth. Chance and other factors also play a role. [...]

Readers curious about the logic of Gould's positions on evolution will find Kim Sterelny's Dawkins vs. Gould a brisk introduction. By pitting Gould against England's Richard Dawkins, perhaps his closest peer as a controversial public ideologist on evolution, Sterelny, a New Zealand philosopher, both exploits the real-life "punch-up" evolutionary biology
has become over the last 20 years and outlines its conceptual dimensions. The book's jacket copy understandably emphasizes the matchup's "tale-of-the-tape" clash.

"Dawkins," it asserts, "author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchman, conceives of evolution as a struggle between gene lineages; Gould... sees it as a struggle between organisms. For Dawkins, the principles of evolutionary biology apply just as well to humans as they do to all living creatures; for Gould, however, this sociobiology is not just ill-motivated, but wrong, and dangerous. Dawkins' views have been caricatured, and the man painted as a crazed reductionist, shrinking all the variety and complexity of life down to a struggle for existence between blind and selfish genes. Gould, too, has been falsely represented by creationists as rejecting the fundamental principles of Darwinism..." [...]

Dawkins, for example, argues that selection "fundamentally acts on lineages of replicators"--mainly genes--while Gould believes selection "usually acts on organisms in a local population." Gould believes that "there are important patterns in the large-scale history of life that have no selective explanation," while Dawkins thinks most evolutionary patterns "are accumulations over vast stretches of time of microevolutionary events."

One of the interesting ways in which Darwinism resembles a religious belief is that believers in evolution try to minimize the seriousness of this dispute, lest the rigor of the criticism that the two sides wield against one another be seen to have undermined the whole structure. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2002 7:43 AM