Related: The Trouble With "Good".

I think seeing Bad Guys should especially be avoided. Nobody's an evil mutant; as a first approximation, prominent scholars have good intentions and are not stupid. So seeing Stephen J. Gould as a villain or a fool is as wrong as Stephen J. Gould seeing Edward Wilson as a villain or a fool.

Accepting that fact of many people who loudly disagree with each other can be difficult, but I think the proper response isn't to decide that one particular subgroup is right and one subgroup is wrong (a decision often made with very little information), it's to lower our base estimate that any particular scholar is right, and lowering even more our estimate that we can form a correct opinion on that subject with even less information on the scholars.