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"Remembering Stephen Jay Gould: Bully and Boob"

76 Comments -

1 – 76 of 76
Anonymous Anonymous said...

" He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

The pursuit of truth means nothing, nothing to their ilk.

3/17/13, 8:31 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation."

That last clause--Mr. Tattersall seems very Gouldian. Like, man, what's wrong with the study of racial differences or the study of male-female differences or the study of anything as long as the truth is what is sought? Just another anti-science guy.

3/17/13, 8:36 PM

Anonymous FredR said...

Gould was a good writer though. His essays on random natural history subjects are very engaging.

3/17/13, 8:36 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

...but is actually a pretty funny account of Gould's penchant for projection of all his own intellectual inadequacy, ethical shortcomings, and ethnic hostility on to the morally and technically superior scientists that he fulminated against.

The typical scotch-irish.

3/17/13, 8:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gould wasn't "humane and passionate", it was dishonest and sleazy.

3/17/13, 8:38 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Slightly OT:
Astonishing racial disparities in the new class admitted to NYC elite public schools:

—Stuyvesant offered admission to 9 black students; 24 Latino students; 177 white students; and 620 students who identify as Asian.
—Bronx Science offered admission to 25 black students; 54 Latino students; 239 white students; 489 Asian students; and 3 American Indian/Alaskan Native students.
—Brooklyn Tech offered admission to 110 black students; 134 Latino students; 451 white students; 960 Asian students; and 5 American Indian/Alaskan Native students.

http://www.schoolbook.org/2013/03/15/high-school-admissions

3/17/13, 8:57 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I imagine that theLevel Playing Field Initiative has a framed photo of Gould placed at the head of their table during meetings.

3/17/13, 9:06 PM

Anonymous Dave Pinsen said...

"The ends justify the means."

Can they really be that proud of these ends? How is the average American Indian or African American better off today because of Stephen Jay Gould's work?

3/17/13, 9:32 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gould was a paradigmatic exemplar of what is destroying the West.

The American Lysenko.

Anon.

3/17/13, 9:32 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

If the Chinese figure out how to engineer genius babies by selecting the smartest gametes or zygote for a given couple, that black Americans will exploit the hell out of that technology. It would be terribly interesting to live in a world with super-intelligent dark-skinned black people.

3/17/13, 9:34 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What a lame article by Tattersall. His big conclusion is that Scientists are human too--really? No kidding... Ever sat through a department meeting, or spent even 1 month at a Western university? Yes, amazing to consider, professional academics or "researchers" i.e. hired hands nevertheless operate under finite resources and divergent incentives which drive them into sectarianism, petty feuds, and the backstabbing of perceived rivals. Zounds

3/17/13, 9:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

'As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”'

I don't even know where to begin with this statement. Conviction yes, integrity not so much. One suspects that the bias was conscious rather than unconscious. And as far as his bias being on the side of the angels, I think the jury is out on that one. If those angels were Hebraic, then Herrnstein was on the side of the devil. Who knew?

3/17/13, 9:38 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Can they really be that proud of these ends? How is the average American Indian or African American better off today because of Stephen Jay Gould's work?"

That was never the point. I suspect that his real point was to prevent another Holocaust. And much like a good elephant repellant, Gould's single-handed prevention of the great Holocaust of 1985 was magnificently successful. You have Gould to thank.

3/17/13, 9:47 PM

Blogger Faust said...

He was the American Trofim Lysenko.

3/17/13, 9:50 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

IMO, if the angels stand for falsehood then they're not angels. You can't polish this turd.

3/17/13, 9:51 PM

Blogger Aaron Gross said...

This post has a cute 1990s, Usenet kind of feel to it. It's easy to imagine the ">>'s" indenting the quoted article. Appropriate retro feel, given the subject matter.

3/17/13, 9:56 PM

Anonymous Alden said...

"He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

Well, there you have it. Modern leftist humanism laid bare: they've got the wrong thoughts, but they're the Right Thoughts.

3/17/13, 10:27 PM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

Gould was not a liberal but a self-described Marxist.

3/17/13, 10:28 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"If the Chinese figure out"

they haven't?

3/17/13, 10:41 PM

Anonymous Big Bill said...

Well I for one still have Gould to thank. I took "Thinking about Thinking" by the Three Yiddish Amigos (Dersh, Gould and Nozick) and discovered in the bound class notes J. Philippe Rushton's survey articles laying out the r/K theory in detail. It blew my mind as much as La Griffe du Lion did a decade later.

It was probably the single best idea I got out of Harvard.

Thanks again, guys!

3/17/13, 11:12 PM

Anonymous stari_momak said...

OT -- totally. But the Jodi Arias trail seems to have some iSteve worthy interest. Mormon male victim, Hispanic (perhaps old school) alleged perp. The two and their friends seem all to have rattled around much of the Great Basin, at least the southern parts of it, despite having California connections.

3/17/13, 11:19 PM

Anonymous theo the kraut said...

> deeply thoughtful demolition in Natural History
> of the purportedly scientific bases for discrimination
> against Jewish immigrants to America furnished
> by such savants as H. H. Goddard and Karl Pearson.


wikipedia.org Karl Pearson:


Goddard established an intelligence testing program on Ellis Island in 1913. The purpose of the program was to identify "feeble-minded" persons whose nature was not obvious to the subjective judgement of immigration officers, who had previously made these judgements without the aid of tests.[4] When he published the results in 1917, Goddard stated that his results only applied to immigrants traveling steerage and did not apply to people traveling in first or second class.[5] He also noted that the population he studied had been preselected, cutting out those who were either "obviously normal" or "obviously feeble-minded", and stated that he made "no attempt to determine the percentage of feeble-minded among immigrants in general or even of the special groups named – the Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians"; a qualifier omitted in works by opponents of the study of intelligence such as Gould and Kamin.[4]

3/17/13, 11:59 PM

Blogger Dennis Dale said...

There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation.

He's already glumly nostalgic for the dark ages.

3/18/13, 12:48 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dave Pinsen - Can they really be that proud of these ends? How is the average American Indian or African American better off today because of Stephen Jay Gould's work?

Not better off at all. But then that's not the point, the point is to attack and undermine The Hated Enemy - white folks. In which case Gould is still succeeding from beyond the grave.

3/18/13, 2:40 AM

Anonymous Jonathan Silber said...

Both the Liberals and the Islamists are fanatics.

And both think that, because they're on the side of the angels, anything and everything is permitted them.

3/18/13, 3:50 AM

Anonymous Chicago said...

Boas, Montagu, Gould, people like this always seem to grab the megaphone and control the message.

3/18/13, 4:25 AM

Blogger chagavin said...

"" He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

Lies are never "on the side of the angels." If you truly believe in "racial equality", and you truly believe all the enormous differences in behavior and outcome are due only to environment and nuture (or lack thereof), then you should welcome whatever truth comes.
And anyway, whose side are those "angels" on that he's talking about. Vast injustices have been done to the so-called privileged racial classes in America in the past 60 years. That's been extensively discussed in this blog.

3/18/13, 4:38 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

FredR: Gould was a good writer though.

Gould became a terrible writer as the years went on, his prose progressively more verbose and logorrheic.

-meh

3/18/13, 4:38 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

he was on the side of the angels

to clarify: he was on the side of the Jews who control the bullhorn (and so am I, thank you sir, may I have another?)

3/18/13, 4:42 AM

Blogger Icepick said...

Can they really be that proud of these ends? How is the average American Indian or African American better off today because of Stephen Jay Gould's work?

You assume the ends are to make American Indians or African Americans better off. You assume this, of course, because that's what they say their ends are, but after decades of seeing the results, it's time to assume they have different ends, since they are largely pursuing the same policies that have failed in the past.

Ignore what they say, watch what they do.

Based on what they're doing, they appear to be attempting to stifle dissent on any and all issues in order to create a stratified society in which a self-selected few are on top. Helping "disadvantaged minorities" isn't the goal, and if nonesuch existed they'd make up a new class to fit the need. For example, if the old nastiness in racial subjugation faded into the background, they might find a minority oppressed because of their sexual preference. One can see this progression news, and how new outrages are always being created: gay marriage, for example.

Again, ignore what they say, watch what they do.

It's really difficult to do that, at times, because most of us have been raised to be polite, and assume that people mean what they say. Hell, in this case most of those making the pronouncements probably believe what they're saying.

3/18/13, 5:49 AM

Anonymous Camlost said...

It would be terribly interesting to live in a world with super-intelligent dark-skinned black people.

That world is currently known as Hollywood.

3/18/13, 6:06 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

Standard apology of Stalin's crimes. It was on the side of angels to create an equal society.

The very problem is fighting ALL kinds of race-ism. One should fight radical racism and pseudo-scientific racism but one should defend rational race-ism that only means races exist and racial differences exist and racial consciousness is natural.

Radical and/or pseudo-scientific anti-racism is as evil as radical racism. It is equally blind.

3/18/13, 6:11 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous FredR said...

Gould was a good writer though. His essays on random natural history subjects are very engaging."

I tried reading a book by Gould once. I forget which one - something he wrote in the late 70s or early 80s. It was just about unreadable - verbose to the point of distraction. He was obvioulsy so in love with his own prose, that he never bothered to check whether his words actually conveyed the meaning he intended (or indeed, any meaning at all). It was also self-consciously stuffed with baseball references as if to say: hey, I am a regular american guy - I like baseball. Which of course, he wasn't. He was an ivy-league elitist and a marxist intellectual.

Gould was a fraud. He was ultimately nothing but a propagandist and a purveyor of unscientific beliefs that were in fact wrong. Not much of a legacy for someone who was purportedly a scientist.

3/18/13, 7:53 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, Miss gives less welfare to blacks and it has more poor blacks with kids. More liberal states like Washignton gave a little more welfare but have less poor blacks with kids. Other factors are involved here.

3/18/13, 8:08 AM

Anonymous Big Bill said...

"the most fashionable solution for The Gap is to more or less kidnap tiny black children and hand them over to college graduates to raise during almost all of their waking hours, then drop them off with their kin only for sleeping."

I went to the much touted Abecedarian Project and tried to estimate the cost of educating each little black tot.

My rough estimate based on the annual investment and number of kids served (no pension costs, facility costs, etc.) was somewhere between $125,000 and $250,000 per year per kid.

There were also the opportunity costs: it required a large stable of nubile young white women who should be making white babies and educating white children.

The dollar cost and the racial cost are just not worth the sacrifice to the white community. However, if the Negro community wishes to take responsibility for their race and pay for this I certainly wouldn't stand in their way. Better Physics than Fiddycent.

3/18/13, 8:12 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mr. Gould's "anti-racism" or what presumably passes for it...how has it prevented the squandering of lives that are led by blacks in Oakland, Detroit, the 9th Ward of New Orleans, and an endless number of cities and communities across the land. How? Can his defenders tell me? Can his kind tell me?

3/18/13, 9:31 AM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form....

Except the form of racism that holds Whites collectively guilty for acts of nature.

3/18/13, 9:50 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Obviously, unless the resident whose chair was stolen or pumpkin smashed actually witnessed these acts of vandalism being committed by an African-American person, an assumption by the victim or the author about the ethnicity of the perpetrator is patently foolish. "

"Last summer he was sitting on his stoop in a lounge chair and went in to use the bathroom, and when he returned, there was no chair—a neighbor watched a black kid on a bike zero in to lift it."

It is extrordinarily rare for whites to commit pranks, much less crimes, against the elderly. That kind of depravity is almost exclusively a black thing.

3/18/13, 9:53 AM

Blogger pat said...

Today we have another such popular pseudo-scientific theorist - Jared Diamond. They occupy much the same niche. I am close to having read everything Diamond has written just as I read almost every popular book by Gould. Both are gracious authors but I read them slowly because I disagree with nearly all their conclusions. I have to fight my way though their books.

Both are innumerate. Diamond includes no numbers at all in his books and Gould only pretended to. Gould confessed himself that he wasn't any good at math and I take him at his word. See his article on "spandrels".

But oddly enough he wrote at least two books in which he lectured his readers pompously about statistics. He often used baseball analogies to appear folksy but to anyone who knew even a little math this was hardly needed. He only discussed elementary concepts. He wrote ponderous lectures on mistaking the median for the mean and vice-versa - as if he was imparting the wisdom of the ages. He should have stuck to his personal attacks on the character of Victorian scientists.

It's odd how people who are bad at numbers become famous for their math work. Another example of someone who is self confessed as not very mathematical is Michael Mann of the "hockey stick" fame. I wonder if Mann like Gould is a Marxist?

Already Gould's considerable fame is fading. Dressing up a leftist political lecture as an essay on scientific history isn't a very effective mechanism for lasting regard, no matter how well done. He is nowadays remembered for only two things: punctuated equilibrium and the mustard seed bias in cranial measurements.

It always seemed to me that punctuated equilibrium is just a product of scale and discrete versus continuous. Evolution happens one organism at a time. Either a specific individual reproduces or it doesn't. It's a dicrete phenomenon. Continuity only appears when you stand back. In the classic example horses seem to have smoothly and continuously grown taller. At least that how it looks from a smattering of fossils and millions of years of time. But of course that's an observational illusion. Conventional Darwinian theory was smoothing the bumps out like anti-aliasing software. Gould supplied a needed corrective. Good job.

But he has also become the most famous scientific villain since Cyril Burt was accused of dry labbing his twin studies.

For all his speculating about the subject biases of Morton, he has shown himself to be the one victimized by his own prejudices. He didn't even try to replicate Morton's measurements by experiment. He revealed himself to be the real "arm chair philosopher". He approched the issue as a lterrary man not a scientist.

Most of the liberal public still think he has debunked racial differences in brain sizes but that view can't last. Morton wrote before there was medical imaging at all. Today millions have had MRIs and Cat Scans. These brain revealing technologies are commonplace. You can see your brain now if you just ask your doctor for the films. They are like the results of blood tests - once rare and mysterious - now routine.

Blacks really do have smaller brains and all of Gould's wondrous prose can no longer hide this fact.

Albertosaurus

3/18/13, 10:13 AM

Anonymous anony-mouse said...

So let me see. Its wrong for Gould to have spent so much time constantly attacking a dead person-says the person constantly attacking (the dead) Gould.

3/18/13, 10:32 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Boas, Montagu, Gould, people like this always seem to grab the megaphone and control the message.

It's a pattern anthropologists themselves should be interested in and trying to explain.

See Chapter 2 in Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique", The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences.

3/18/13, 11:06 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"on the side of the angels"

more like

On the side of the fallen angels just like the father of lies. Gould called the truth lies, and evil good.

3/18/13, 11:19 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I remember leafing through a couple of Tattersall's books over the years. He seemed a lot like Diamond, not as bad as Gould, but he was clearly upset by the political implications of the gene-centered view of evolution. This would have been like giving Diamond a retrospective on Gould, if you ignore the fact that Gould's widow has been attacking Diamond for pointing out people in New Guinea are violent. They picked a somewhat favorable reviewer and still got some ample criticism of Gould. If they had got say a more knowledgeable theoretical biologist or population geneticist he or she would likely have ripped Gould to pieces, alas, The Powers That Be were not going to let that happen.

E.O. Wilson's former Harvard colleague and co-author Bert Holldobler would have been nice, but of course he is German, and a Bavarian to boot, which can't be allowed. They could have gotten A.W.F. Edwards of Cambridge U. who demolished Richard Lewontin's spurious arguments about racial diversity. But hey, he's British and must therefore subconsciously be representative of WASP privilege. Plus he is a protege of Ronald Fisher, who believed in Eugenics, and we all know Eugenics=Fascism because Gould told us so, this despite the fact that lots of 20th century lefties believed in it ardently as well, so no chance he would do the retrospective either. So they picked a politically palatable WASP from Britain who wouldn't attack him too much.

3/18/13, 12:00 PM

Anonymous 2Degrees said...

Gould stuck his nose in everywhere. Conway-Morris blew his analysis of the Burgess Shale out of the water. He was the better scientist.

Be we all know who made the most money. Being PC can be very lucrative.

3/18/13, 12:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gould is a product of Antioch College,as am I.He was the guest speaker at my commencement in 1981.
if you want to understand Gould's views on race,you need look into Antioch. it will tell you all you need to know>

3/18/13, 1:35 PM

Blogger panjoomby said...

i learned the words ineluctable & inexorable from him:) i read "mismeasure" 4 times from the early 80s to early 90s. the first time i believed it. then the bloom was off the rose. when i met him he called me "the mental tester" in a friendly way:) While i despise his leftist lying tactics, I must say he was good at conveying: "evolution does NOT mean progress, just adaptation to changing local environment."

3/18/13, 2:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The real mismeasure of man involved penis size.

In order to allay white male fears about the Negro threat, liberal scientists lied that all penis sizes are more or less the same across races.

3/18/13, 2:52 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Gould stuck his nose in everywhere. Conway-Morris blew his analysis of the Burgess Shale out of the water. He was the better scientist."

I still would blame Gould less than those who enabled him. No matter how much he had to say, he wouldn't have been heard unless the powers that be favored him and promoted him over truthtellers.
I mean Jared Taylor has a lot to say too, but is he given the platform Gould had? That is the real difference.
Same thing with Malcolm Gladwell. He didn't so much succeed as was favored for success.
Same thing with Obama, a total nonentity.

3/18/13, 2:55 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

He seemed a lot like Diamond, not as bad as Gould, but he was clearly upset by the political implications of the gene-centered view of evolution.


Is there some other view of evolution?

3/18/13, 2:58 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In order to allay white male fears about the Negro threat, liberal scientists lied that all penis sizes are more or less the same across races."

Relax, dawg. This cracker won't be in your territory. I'm busy where I am...

3/18/13, 3:11 PM

Blogger Dennis Dale said...

anony-mouse said...
So let me see. Its wrong for Gould to have spent so much time constantly attacking a dead person-says the person constantly attacking (the dead) Gould.


This sort of thing has become so common in comment thread debate. Anything but engage ideas and assertions.

But let's take this seriously, if only to reveal its silliness: criticism of Gould's legacy of mis-characterizing the legacies of the dead is off limits, you see, because he's dead.

I say great, let's entomb his record of distortion with his corpse--but that requires the cooperation of Gould apologists: stop holding him up as an exemplar of reasoning and we'll stop revealing this as a fraud. Deal?

Gould not only picked his fights with conveniently passed-on giants, he picked them with giants who had no willing defenders in the Boasian tyranny post-WWII. A rather typical bully then--one with no real balls.

3/18/13, 3:13 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Well, Miss gives less welfare to blacks and it has more poor blacks with kids. More liberal states like Washignton gave a little more welfare but have less poor blacks with kids. Other factors are involved here."


I don't know the stats and you haven't given them so I'll just throw this out: I'm going to guess that most people in Miss of all races are much less likely to have abortions than all people in WA state are. It's a religious thing.

3/18/13, 3:16 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I encourage people to read the Krugman link. The "evolution by jerks" line he repeats is extremely funny in its context.

3/18/13, 3:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there some other view of evolution?

Well Gould's view was: It can't be true, because that would mean guys like Galton were right all along. That's why Gould and his fellow travelers at Harvard coined the term "biological determinism". Guys like Gould, Diamond, and Tattersall are carry-overs from before gene-centered evolution took over the field, by the time those ideas had taken over they were already middle-aged and still carried with them the pre-gene centered views.

3/18/13, 3:53 PM

Anonymous Harry Baldwin said...

Same thing with Obama, a total nonentity.

Is Obama really a nonentity? Was it his quality as a non-entity that caused people to see a potential national candidate in him ten years ago? Was it his nonentitiness that enabled him to beat the favored Hillary for the 2008 nomination, and go on to win the presidency twice?

Calling Obama a nonentity is like calling Brad Pitt or Robert De Niro nonentities. There may not be much going on in there but they certainly have something that's proven immensely valuable. The Republicans could have used such a nonentity in the last two elections.

3/18/13, 5:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, 98% of readers aren't going to make it to the bottom of that page. Most are going to look at the picture and think "Gould liked to converse with giraffes. What a nice guy."

Maybe 10% are going to read the first paragraph or two and conclude that Gould was popular, interesting, a virtuoso, and generally important figure in evolutionary anthropology.

Maybe 2% will read all the way to the end. Of those two percent, maybe 1-1.5% are going to come out with the impression that Gould had some problems, but was on the side of the angels, racism is bad hmmmkay, etc.

The remaining 0.5%-1% probably knew before reading it that Gould was an inveterate liar, a staunch opponent of the truth, a fraud who will be remembered by history as an American Lysenko. Of those people, there will be two camps. One will hate him, his kind and everything he stands for. The other camp will privately celebrate his mendacity and use his life as a study in profiting from con-jobs. They will treat him as a master to be learned from. Outwardly, those same people will outwardly play dumb and feign a caring, sharing nature when writing about him, excusing him for every sin in whatever manner they think will be plausible. And they will laugh.

3/18/13, 6:07 PM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"Harry Baldwin said...

Is Obama really a nonentity? Was it his quality as a non-entity that caused people to see a potential national candidate in him ten years ago? Was it his nonentitiness that enabled him to beat the favored Hillary for the 2008 nomination, and go on to win the presidency twice?"

George W. Bush is a non-entity, and he was elected too. The President is now little more than an empty vessel into which party operatives and campaign donors poor their hopes and schemes. So, yes, Obama is a non-entity.

3/18/13, 8:46 PM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"anony-mouse said...

So let me see. Its wrong for Gould to have spent so much time constantly attacking a dead person-says the person constantly attacking (the dead) Gould."

No, Steve was criticizing Gould for wrongly and maliciously attacking a dead person.

And your post was as tendentious and mendacious as most of your posts are.

3/18/13, 8:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Is Obama really a nonentity?"

In substance, yes. He lucked out from the beginning because the media was on his side.
Look, if the media had given McCain/Palin the Obama-treatment and Obama/Biden the McCain/Palin treatment, Obama would have lost.

Obama didn't beat Hillary. Obama with media wind behind his back beat Hillary.

Nonentities can win in American politics. Bush II won twice and managed to convince 80% of American that the invasion of Iraq was totally necessary. Why? Media backed him on that.

3/18/13, 9:20 PM

Anonymous Cail Corishev said...

Is Obama really a nonentity? Was it his quality as a non-entity that caused people to see a potential national candidate in him ten years ago? Was it his nonentitiness that enabled him to beat the favored Hillary for the 2008 nomination, and go on to win the presidency twice?

Yes, yes, and yes. Any more questions?

But seriously, it was his lack of anything resembling a personality or record that enabled white voters to project their wishes upon him. Past black candidates like Jesse Jackson were unelectable because they stood for things. Obama -- as he himself said -- was enough of a blank slate that different people could assume he stood for their different beliefs about what their vision of a post-racial, half-black, half-white candidate would stand for.

Too much "entity-ness" would have spoiled that.

3/18/13, 9:49 PM

Anonymous Harry Baldwin said...

It's fine to say that Obama won largely because he had the media and other powerful forces backing him, but to say he's "a total nonentity" implies that the media could have pushed any schmo into the presidency. Obviously, Obama has personal qualities that enabled him to make the most of the advantages offered him. The same thing might be said of Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy. Weren't they nonentities too? What is the purpose in calling someone who rises to the presidency a nonentity--literally, "one of no importance or influence"--other than as a putdown? It can be dangerous to hold your enemies in contempt.

This line of argument reminds me of the claim many make that Obama is a stammering idiot who can't formulate a sentence without the help of his teleprompters, when in fact he has done well in debates and is obviously a fairly intelligent (though not brilliant) person.

As far as Bush, I would consider him as more of an empty vessel than Obama, though I don't think nonentity is the right word for either of them.

3/18/13, 10:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mr. Anon, Gould actually wrote a baseball book, a collection of essays call Triumph and Tragedy, a Lifelong Passion for Baseball. A copy was given to me a friend who's also a Yankees fan.

Gould is like every other NYC-born Jew who comes to Boston: he wore his Yankees fandom on his sleeve.

3/19/13, 5:07 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Mr. Anon, Gould actually wrote a baseball book, a collection of essays call Triumph and Tragedy, a Lifelong Passion for Baseball. A copy was given to me a friend who's also a Yankees fan.

Gould is like every other NYC-born Jew who comes to Boston: he wore his Yankees fandom on his sleeve."

So it is an elaborate fraud. It all strikes me as a tactic for saying, in effect, "Look, I must be a loyal, traditional American - I like baseball. My marixist subversion of everything else in society not withstanding."

I don't care. A commie rat is still a commie rat, even if he does like baseball. And, anyway, it was not germane to talking about the Cambrian explosion.

And all that not-withstanding, the fact remains: as a writer, Gould stunk.

3/19/13, 7:50 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"Harry Baldwin said...

It's fine to say that Obama won largely because he had the media and other powerful forces backing him, but to say he's "a total nonentity" implies that the media could have pushed any schmo into the presidency."

I think they could. Again - G.W. Bush leaps to mind. Someday, they may push into office somebody of such obvious schmoeness that their power to do so will be revealed.

"Obviously, Obama has personal qualities that enabled him to make the most of the advantages offered him."

Yeah. Blackness. He was the first SWPL sounding black to be elected to the Senate - Bingo! He's in. I remain unimpressed with him.

3/19/13, 7:55 AM

Anonymous Svigor said...

So let me see. Its wrong for Gould to have spent so much time constantly attacking a dead person-says the person constantly attacking (the dead) Gould.

So, let me see. Jews' tendency to reflexively defend other Jews (even the bad ones) means Jews aren't ethnocentric (what we call "racist" when whites do it).

In order to allay white male fears about the Negro threat, liberal scientists lied that all penis sizes are more or less the same across races.

Ever notice how the issue of race and penis size never seems to involve mentioning all those tiny yellow dicks? I mean, it's not like there's a developed black country that pumps out lots of porn, so there's still some mystery there. But yellow dicks? Case closed.

3/19/13, 8:51 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is Obama really a nonentity?

He only became a Senator because Star Trek woman's former husband was removed by having their sealed divorce records opened by a judge.

He is a White Sox fan who could not name one member of their World Series winning team.

Luckily he can avail of AA so that nobody will notice this.

3/19/13, 9:49 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It is extrordinarily rare for whites to commit pranks, much less crimes, against the elderly. That kind of depravity is almost exclusively a black thing."

That's certainly not true in the UK. Tormenting the elderly or the disabled tends to be a native thing, usually by underclass youths. Young black men do kill old people, but generally in street or doorstep robberies.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021122164913/http://www.right-now.org/articles/rn2702.htm

In the UK, the old asylums where "simples" or "naturals" once lived are all sold for housing sites, and the mentally challenged have been living "in the community" - where they're exposed to some of the other people who live there. Half a dozen people with "learning disabilities" have been beaten or tortured to death in the last few years.

http://ukcommentators.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/yet-more-torture-in-community.html


3/19/13, 12:48 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Gould's vast success at closing minds politically stemmed from his controlling the past. He picked out some scientist that had been dead for over a century to make up nonsense about. In contrast, I wish Gould were around now to defend himself.

3/19/13, 3:06 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"That's certainly not true in the UK. Tormenting the elderly or the disabled tends to be a native thing, usually by underclass youths. Young black men do kill old people, but generally in street or doorstep robberies."

This says otherwise.

3/19/13, 3:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I believe that Gould's propensity for being biased extended even into some of his solely biological research. His 1989 paper on the terrestrial gastropod Cerion makes claims that are not supported by the data nor the analysis. Persons with excessive self-regard are most pitiful when their record is reviewed posthumously.

3/19/13, 4:45 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's certainly not true in the UK. Tormenting the elderly or the disabled tends to be a native thing, usually by underclass youths. Young black men do kill old people, but generally in street or doorstep robberies.

I have to agree. There is a long tradition in Anglo-Saxon communities of sending off their elderly, disabled, and neuro atypical to some cornfield or another, for their own protection of course. Ethnic peoples have a little more respect.

3/19/13, 9:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As Jensen said in the end of his interview for Race Intelligence and Genetics, Gould's prejudice probably came from being raised Jewish by communist parents in New York City.

But who really believes that Gould did not misrepresent this on purpose?

3/20/13, 12:06 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"As Jensen said in the end of his interview for Race Intelligence and Genetics, Gould's prejudice probably came from being raised Jewish by communist parents in New York City."

Prolly true. But we have to cut him some slack in regards to his feelings. He was born in 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR and was on the verge of winning.

Though there's been a lot of respectable pseudo-scientific anti-race-ism since WWII, there was plenty of pseudo-scientific race-ism in the first half of the 20th century, and this sort of thing became the official doctrine of the most powerful nation in Europe and was enforced all over Europe where Nazis gained control. Result? Millions of Jews were massacred.
So, from that angle, I can understand Gould's emotional than merely ideological allergy to racial ideas.

He was a fraud but also human.

3/20/13, 8:12 AM

Blogger Marc B said...

"It was also self-consciously stuffed with baseball references as if to say: hey, I am a regular american guy - I like baseball".

It's also a particularly popular sport with ethnics from the Northeast, especially Jews. He may have been using baseball references to make his text resonate with regular readers, but his love of baseball was probably sincere.

3/20/13, 9:44 AM

Blogger Dennis Dale said...

But who really believes that Gould did not misrepresent this on purpose?

The apologists are stopping just short of saying he did, but it's okay because of those "angels" (has anyone consulted them?.

Note how Tattersal assumes Morton as carryng the "baggage" of his era despite that "baggage" having not influenced his science--his errors worked against his thesis (suggesting perhaps a deliberate effort on his part to avoid bias, by trimming the sails of his expectations).

Tattersal would have you believe Gould and Morton were acting with equal integrity, when in fact the former was essentially lying, and the latter was not.

I think it reveals Tattersal and his ilk have come to believe that convention--at least the convention of the present, their convention--has empirical value, even as they praise Gould's supposed revelation of that subconscious bias! What Tattersal is saying is "our God is greater than your God".

3/20/13, 11:10 AM

Blogger Artur said...

I remember reading one of Gould's prefaces to "Mismeasure."

I was shocked and horrified to discover that this obviously biased and angry little man, filed the pages of that Introduction with vulgar terms such as "bulls**t".

Later I cam to understand that this vulgar borderline scatological style was something common among members of the Tribe.

"Mismeasure" was a fantastically fraudulent anti-white, anti-realism hoax whose debunking was a Gifty from God for the high-information class, i.e. those reading and commenting here.

Stephen Jay Gould: Burn in Hell, you miserable, lying , hateful little worm.

4/16/15, 6:37 PM

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