Greg Roe from California State University, Long Beach, was good enough to send me this note: "In today's (12 Feb. 2000) Orange Country Register, News 16, at the bottom I noticed a report on a survey that announced "there are more atheists and agnostics than Muslims, Jews or Mormons in the United States." Survey by Barna Research Group of Venture...thought maybe it would be an interesting note to ad to the Skeptics email...."
Brian Siano passes along this fun little ditty:
Self-deprecating humor marks many of the best letters:
To Carl Sagan:
I have just finished The Cosmic Connection and loved every word of it. You are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style, and when I read what you write, I hear you talking.
One thing about the book made me nervous. It was entirely too obvious that you are smarter than I am. I hate that.
Isaac Asimov (11)
http://bookwire.bowker.com/bookinfo/article.aspx?28477
I alerted you all to Robert Wright's Gould-bashing article in The New Yorker last December. Here is an article about Wright as an intellectual stalker that appeared in this weekend's New York magazine by Ethan Smith. He interviewed both Gould and Wright (and several others), and, in my opinion, exposes Wright for exactly what he is: a wannabe nobody. Although the piece reads like it could have been commissioned by Gould himself, Steve told me he doesn't even know the author.
Look Who's Stalking
The ugly feud between pop paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and science writer Robert Wright has been simmering for ten years now -- except somebody forgot to tell Gould.
By Ethan Smith
In a 25-year career as a successful public intellectual, Stephen Jay Gould has accrued nearly all the trappings of celebrity: a new loft in SoHo, tenure at Harvard, a gig at NYU, book sales totaling in the millions (his twentieth title, The Living Stones of Marrakech, comes out next month), not to mention a schedule that takes him to London, Paris, or L.A. almost weekly. Not bad for a college professor. But recently, he's picked up one of the less desirable accoutrements of fame. The graying, 58-year-old Queens native has become the first paleontologist in history with his own stalker -- albeit an intellectual one.
Last December, The New Yorker printed a 5,000-word essay, "The Accidental Creationist," with the subtitle "Why Stephen Jay Gould Is Bad for Evolution." The writer, Robert Wright, openly mocked Gould's credibility as a scientist and spokesman for evolution. In fact, Wright, a well-connected D.C. journalist, called his subject an unwitting accomplice in the fundamentalist crusade against science. The piece accused Gould of the ultimate heresy among evolutionists: offering succor to religious zealots who want to remove Darwin from the schools. It was a foolish and outrageous claim, and even Gould's enemies were taken aback.
Unrepentant, Wright quickly lobbed another grenade at Gould. His new book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, published last month, devotes 30 pages to a no-holds-barred attack on Gould. Even the footnotes contain digs, accusing Gould of "evasion," of inappropriately carrying out "a psychoanalysis of Darwin," and of "flagrant illogic."
If readers are confused by Wright's single-minded fury -- after all, his attacks seem largely unprovoked, and Gould's theories about evolution are really tangential to Wright's central thesis that human intelligence is on the verge of melding into "one great global mind" -- Gould, too, is utterly nonplussed. Relaxing on a leather couch in his new office at NYU (he's taken up half-time work there as a visiting researcher in the biology department), he appears genuinely baffled by this sudden onslaught. Hooking his thumbs nervously into the belt loops of his khakis, he wails, "I've never even met Robert Wright!"
"It's like a classic Western. Gregory Peck is the veteran gunfighter, and some young punk comes into town wanting to take him on. Peck does everything he possibly can to avoid shooting the poor kid."
This isn't the first time Gould has heard Wright's footsteps behind him. "It's like a classic Western," observes Richard Milner, Gould's editor at Natural History and the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution. "Gregory Peck is the veteran gunfighter, and some young punk comes into town wanting to take him on. Peck does everything he possibly can to avoid shooting the poor kid, but eventually he's goaded and prodded and bugged into doing something about him."
It all started in 1990, when Wright reviewed Gould's eleventh book, Wonderful Life, in The New Republic, where Wright was then a senior editor. Wright pointedly accused Gould of intellectual dishonesty, "putting words in Darwin's mouth," and tailoring his own scientific views to fit his socialist politics: Punctuated equilibrium -- Gould's famous reinterpretation of Darwinist theory as a series of violent fits and starts, not a gradual process -- was wrongheadedly informed by a "Marxist" view of human history. Besides being veiled communist agitprop, Gould's underlying theories weren't even new, according to Wright.
Looking back, even Wright wonders if he went too far. "My original review of his book, I have to admit, was very hard-hitting," he told me by phone from Washington. "And I'm sure he perceived it that way." But Gould doesn't remember it that way. In fact, he doesn't remember it at all. "I never even read that review," he maintains. "Or if I did, I didn't particularly remember the name of the writer -- it was someone I'd never heard of before."
Indeed, the underlying gist of Wright's critique was hardly original -- in fact, this view of Gould's work had long existed within the self-contained world of evolutionary biology. Scientists like John Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins had raised the same issues before. (UC Berkeley biologist Kevin Padian attributes the criticism to "academic penis envy.") But it was Wright's vehemence, along with his lack of scientific credentials, that was so striking. And he was just getting started.
Wright was trying to goad and prod Gould into responding -- and at the same time get himself accepted as one of the big boys. He had good reason to try to establish himself as a legitimate player in the ongoing debate among real evolutionists: He was already laying the groundwork for The Moral Animal, his 1994 book about evolutionary psychology (the contested field that seeks to explain all human behavior in strictly Darwinian terms), and a public reply from Gould would have done wonders for his credibility. But he was disappointed. "Gould, alas, paid me no mind," he complained in a 1996 Slate column describing, in the language of evolutionary psychology, the men's (thus far one-sided) "feud": "Savvy alpha male that [Gould] is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny, marginal primate such as myself."
Finally, though, in the fall of 1996 -- six years after the New Republic review -- the goading apparently got to Gould. "Last month," Wright crowed in the same Slate column, "Gould's long-repressed contempt burst forth from the reptilian core of his brain and leapt over the fire walls in his frontal lobes." Well, sort of. Eight pages into a Natural History column on Martin Luther, in a half-sentence parenthetical, Gould called The Moral Animal "the most noted and most absurd example" of evolutionary psychology.
That was it. That was the answer Wright had been waiting for all these years. Not surprisingly, he treated Gould's seven-word indifferent response as a more dastardly blow than a full frontal assault. "He has this obsession with Gould," concedes Slate editor-in-chief Michael Kinsley, a friend of Wright's. "But we like obsessions." Incredibly, even Kinsley sees the paleontologist's casual slight as a sign that Gould himself has been the aggressor all along. "Gould's position is 'I'm much too important to dignify this whoever-he-is,' " he says. "I think that's not an admirable stance to take, because even people who disagree with Wright would agree that he's an extremely smart, original, and important thinker. So it's bullying, really, on Gould's part."
February 14, 2000
This winter, after a brief silence, Wright has come back into Gould's life with a vengeance. To coincide with the publication of Nonzero, Wright has orchestrated a flurry of bylined pieces in The New Republic, Time, and the New York Times. But it was his New Yorker article that drew blood. "Other people have attacked me before," Gould says. "But this was different. I've read The New Yorker my whole life; I consider it a friend. And this did feel, emotionally, like a betrayal by a friend."
If Wright's editors there, Dorothy Wickenden and editor-in-chief David Remnick, knew Wright was using their pages to promote Nonzero and reignite his dormant feud, they aren't saying. Neither responded to multiple phone calls and e-mails about the article. But others have complained. "I read the article," says Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a longtime ally of Gould's. "I thought it was dumb." Other evolutionists, even those who've been critical of Gould in the past, expressed shock at what they saw as Wright's disingenuousness. "No one has explained evolution to the public better than Gould," says Berkeley's Padian. "It strikes me as really tragic that The New Yorker, of all publications, would devote that much space to character assassination."
For his part, Wright still insists he's the aggrieved party. "The motivation at Gould's end is very much political," he says, referring to accusations that evolutionary psychology is just social Darwinism in disguise. "And you know, one could argue that I have my own political agenda -- but it definitely isn't the agenda Gould is reflexively attributing to me." Which is? "Which is that I want poor people to starve!"
Gould can take comfort in the fact that even some of Wright's allies are wincing at the New Yorker attack and Nonzero's wackier claims -- among them the imminent emergence of a global "superbrain," facilitated by the Internet and global media, as the next step in cultural and biological evolution. This is Wright's version of the famously amorphous "noosphere," or "thinking envelope of the earth," posited by mid-twentieth-century Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
"Teilhard is generally regarded as a hopeless romantic, deeply wrong, and sort of a pathetic figure," says Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has sided with Wright against Gould in the past. "Anyone trying to resurrect him is swimming upstream, no question."
Gould, meanwhile, doesn't feel like the winner. "I still can't understand why The New Yorker ran that article," he says. And though he's been asked to review Wright's book, so far he has declined the invitation.
From the February 14, 2000 issue of New York Magazine.
Most of you know the long saga of Dr. Laura and Skeptic magazine (recounted here before and in the preface to my book How We Believe. I don't know how much press play this gets around the country, but in Hollywood (for obvious reasons) she is in deep trouble for her homophobic gay-bashing comments, played out in the Los Angeles Times over the past couple of weeks. Her defense was the classic one of all bigots: but some of my best friends are gays, and: just because I think gays are biological freaks and cultural deviants who will never go to heaven until they change and that they should get corrective therapy to relieve themselves of this terrible disease, doesn't mean that I don't respect them as human beings and believe that God loves them.
Here is an article from the Daily Variety summarizing Dr. Laura's latest travails.
By Peter Bart, Daily Variety Editor-in-Chief
HOLLYWOOD (Variety)-The rebirth of quiz shows may be appalling to some, but here's the good news: At least they've put another nail in the coffin of TV's saddest genre, the talk show.
The serious intellectuals who once reigned supreme as TV gabbers-Rikki Lake, Jenny Jones, Roseanne and the like-all took serious hits in the ratings over the last year. Even Jerry Springer, that maven of mayhem, got whacked by 32%. All told, TV gabbers lost 5.6 million homes for a 14% drop between November '98 and November '99. And this was before the quiz shows established their new-found hegemony.
"It's an aging genre," was the assessment of one research organization, Frank N. Magid Associates. "There used to be a point where the programs were distinguishable from each other, but now there isn't a lot to choose from."
Well, maybe. Obviously worried about the derivativeness of talk TV, Paramount's brave syndication arm is giving us a TV gabber who certainly should be distinguishable. She's Laura Schlessinger, the fizzy physiologist (she's not a psychologist) whose radio show commands a broad audience across the country.
And since Paramount is convinced its new show can generate big bucks, it's impatient with naysayers who believe Dr. Laura represents, not a great leap forward, but rather an ominous throwback.
Indeed, in style and content, she's more akin to the Morton Downey Jr.-Joe Pyne school of gabbers who stirred more rage than enlightenment. "Go gargle with razor blades," Pyne used to advise his callers. Dr. Laura may not be far behind.
Is she really that offensive?
Dr. Laura's view of the world makes Gary Bauer (news-web sites) look like a liberal weirdo. She delivers shrill lectures against abortion. Pre-marital sex sends her into paroxysms of rage. Same-sex marriage is anathema. "Liberals" are people who want to sexualize their children. Indeed, her sermons on homosexuality have enraged a sector of the gay community, especially within the walls of Paramount.
"What gay person working for Paramount would be happy about this?" Joe Keenan, an Emmy-winning writer-producer on "Frasier" told Brian Lowry of the Los Angeles Times. "We feel the way the Von Trapp children would feel if Dad decided to divorce Maria and marry Joan Crawford. She's not a happy addition to the family." And other members of "the family" are joining in.
Dr. Laura doesn't merely disdain gays. To her, gays are "deviants," products of "a biological disorder" who can and should get themselves cured through "reparative therapy."
Her perorations strongly suggest that many gays are predators, eager to convert new members to the faith. She urges parents to avoid bringing kids into the company of possibly gay relatives. She denounces those professional organizations like the American Psychological Assn. for removing homosexuality from lists of "mental disorders." She frequently quotes the supposed research of groups like the Family Research Council that are essentially fundamentalist propaganda groups, suggesting that their studies hold greater validity than those of, say, the American Medical Assn.
In view of these ideological fusillades, GLAAD, representing gay and lesbian groups, will present its case to Paramount on Feb. 14, and many will look on with interest as Paramount squirms.
The issue is an arresting one: Should a major syndicator help promulgate the ideas of an ideologue who will inflame community tensions over issues like same-sex marriage and gay rights?
To be sure, Dr. Laura doesn't see it that way. She insists she's not homophobic, but is merely "a serious Jew" whose beliefs derive from Scripture.
A call to Dr. Laura is the closest thing to a child being summoned to the principal's office. Callers are chastised, berated and barbecued. A serious career woman who had a child out of wedlock is plastered with a scarlet letter and condemned to a life of shame. To Dr. Laura, you have to live by the book. Her book.
"How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys?" she will declare. Or: "Same-sex marriage is destructive to Western civilization because it destroys the building block which is mom, dad, committed, heterosexual, monogamous, children."
Well, Paramount's syndicators may feel they've found a building block to revive talk TV, but I suspect a lot of people around the country may feel otherwise. Those quiz shows are looking better all the time.
Reuters/Variety