This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

Some evolutionary biologists, such as Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould have employed dialectical materialism in their approach, playing a precautionary heuristic role in their work.

Lewontin, Gould and Eldredge were thus more interested in dialectical materialism as a heuristic, than a dogmatic form of ' truth ' or a statement of their politics.

In response, Gould, Richard Lewontin, and others from the Boston area wrote the subsequently well referenced letter to The New York Review of Books entitled, " Against ' Sociobiology '".

With Richard Lewontin, Gould wrote an influential 1979 paper entitled, " The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm ", which introduced the architectural term " spandrel " into evolutionary biology.

" Gould and Lewontin asserted that it is Panglossian for evolutionary biologists to view all traits as atomized things that had been naturally selected for, and criticised biologists for not granting theoretical space to other causes, such as phyletic and developmental constraints.

Criticism, most notably made by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centered on sociobiology's contention that genes play an ultimate role in human behavior and that traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by biology rather than a person's social environment.

In particular, Lewontin, Rose & Kamin drew a detailed distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity, as has Stephen Jay Gould.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a colleague of Gould ’ s, is a proponent of said argument in relation to the cognitive ability tests that determine a person ’ s intelligence quotient.

The panglossian paradigm is a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin to refer to the notion that everything has specifically adapted to suit specific purposes.

Over the years, the Review has featured reviews and articles by such writers and thinkers as Timothy Garton Ash, Margaret Atwood, Russell Baker, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Bloom, Joseph Brodsky, Noam Chomsky, J. M. Coetzee, Frederick Crews, Ronald Dworkin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Jay Gould, Murray Kempton, Richard Lewontin, Alison Lurie, Peter Medawar, Daniel Mendelsohn, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, Peter G. Peterson, Nathaniel Rich, John Searle, Zadie Smith, I. F. Stone, Desmond Tutu, John Updike, Derek Walcott, Steven Weinberg, Garry Wills and Tony Judt.

Coon eventually resigned from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, while some of his other works were discounted because he would not agree with the evidence brought forward by Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leonard Lieberman and others.

He disagrees with some contentions of popular scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Steven Rose, and Jared Diamond.

The word ' Neo-Lysenkoism ' has occasionally been invoked by hereditarian researchers as a rhetorical term in the debates over race and intelligence and sociobiology to describe scientists minimizing the role of genes in shaping human behavior, such as Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould and Barry Mehler.

Many people, such as Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin feared that sociobiology was biologicially determinist.

The most notable critics of the view that genes play a direct role in human behaviour have been biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

Critics ( most notably Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould ) contend that the adaptationists ( John Maynard Smith, W. D.

Evolutionary psychologists name several prominent scientists as supposed proponents of the standard social science model, including Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, Richard Lewontin, John Money, and Steven J. Gould.

Dennett argues that Gould alternated between revolutionary and conservative claims about the theory, and that each time Gould made a revolutionary statement — or appeared to do so — he was criticized, and thus retreated to a traditional neo-Darwinian position.

As such, Gould proposed that IQ-test proponents assume the existence of " general intelligence " as a discrete quality within the human mind, and thus they analyze the IQ-test data to produce an IQ number that establishes the definitive general intelligence of each man and of each woman.

UCSB's first Provost was thus Clarence L. Phelps, while UCSB's first Chancellor was Samuel B. Gould.

For example, Gould complains of the lust of women thus,

In a review of The Mismeasure of Man, Bernard Davis, professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School, said that Gould erected a straw man argument based upon incorrectly defined key terms — specifically reification — which Gould furthered with a " highly selective " presentation of statistical data, all motivated more by politics than by science.

When visiting Venice in 1978, Gould noted that the spandrels of the San Marco cathedral, while quite beautiful, were not spaces planned by the architect.

Gould suggests that the extraordinary diversity of the fossils indicate that life forms at the time were much more diverse than those that survive today, and that many of the unique lineages were evolutionary experiments that became extinct.

This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the " pluralism " of evolution ( i. e., its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one ).

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt Shirley Hofstadter was married to Gould's maternal uncle Herbert Rosenberg.

It is a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to contrast with their model of punctuated equilibrium, which is gradualist itself, but argues that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability ( called stasis ), which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution.

Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould – notable, given the diversity of this trio's views on other scientific matters.

According to Gould " stasis may emerge as the theory's most important contribution to evolutionary science.

To this end, Gould later commented that " Most of our paleontological colleagues missed this insight because they had not studied evolutionary theory and either did not know about allopatric speciation or had not considered its translation to geological time.

John Lyne and Henry Howe, in a more positive evaluation, states that " re-analysis of existing fossil data has shown, to the increasing satisfaction of the paleontological community, that Eldredge and Gould were correct in identifying periods of evolutionary stasis which are interrupted by much shorter periods of evolutionary change.

Stephen Jay Gould ( September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002 ) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science.

Early in his career, Gould and Niles Eldredge developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly, alternating with longer periods of relative evolutionary stability.

Gould made significant contributions to evolutionary developmental biology, especially in his work Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

Gould championed biological constraints such as the limitations of developmental pathways on evolutionary outcomes, as well as other non-selectionist forces in evolution.

Gould believed this understanding undermines an essential premise of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

Gould never embraced cladistics as a method of investigating evolutionary lineages and process, possibly because he was concerned that such investigations would lead to neglect of the details in historical biology, which he considered all-important.

Gould is one of the most frequently cited scientists in the field of evolutionary theory.

Shortly before his death, Gould published a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory ( 2002 ).

A passionate advocate of evolutionary theory, Gould wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary biology to a wide audience.