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 tha...
per the Black Swan:
The set of potential multicolored variations of Swans is infinite (purple, brown, grey, blue, green, etc). We can not prove any one of them do not exist. But every day that proceeds where we don't see these swans gives us a higher probability they do not exist. It never equals 1, but it's darn close.
The problem with the Black Swan parable is not that it's untrue, but rather unimportant. The set of things we have no evidence of is infinite. To then pounce across an unexpected observation (eg, a Black Swan, that Kevin Federline is a re...
As a chicken is a way for an egg to create another egg, I would like to 'tell my genes to jump in a lake', as Steven Pinker puts it, but considering so many of my preferences are in sync with my genes, I have the feeling they are very good at getting me to rationalize their preferences. I don't think there's intrinsic meaning in anything, but when I see connections, or patterns, in music or jokes or anything, that I haven't noticed before, I find that meaningful, pleasurable in a way my genes can't understand. But my love for my kids, and the meaning it gives me, clearly the gene gremlins are at work