At the end of the debate, Johnson hugged Gould and he noticed in the embrace that Gould was nervously shaking. Johnson debated the evolutionary paleontologist and agnostic Stephen Gould at Harvard University before a select audience of elite American intellectuals in a closed door event not open to the public. In his view, proponents of religion can believe whatever they want as long as they concede that their beliefs have no relevance to the objective measurements of science.
This distinction was Gould's approach to making an accommodation between religion and science and allow them to live and grow side by side. He claimed that in each of these fields either religion or science reigned supreme and that the other should not, indeed could not, set foot therein. He is also well known for his concept of non-overlapping magisteria, which suggested that science and religion occupy two entirely separate "magisteria". The book was widely praised by many academics on the left as making an important statement against racism, but criticized as politically-driven junk science by experts in the field. It is an attack on the idea that intelligence is a single, physically real and objectively measurable phenomenon, and argues that attempts to measure intelligence as such are fundamentally unscientific, racist, and contrary to liberal ideals. Gould's most popular work, by far, was his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. Eleanor, Steve's late mother, was an atheist." Due to Gould's view of evolution being in sharp contradiction with those of ultra-Darwinists such as W.Hamilton and E.Wilson, science writer R.Wright dismissively labeled Gould as " the accidental creationist". Shearer wrote: "For the record, my late husband, Stephen Jay Gould, told me many times that he was an agnostic and not an 'atheist'.
Along with his evolutionary theories, he is perhaps best known as a historian of science.Īlthough there is a certain degree of public confusion as far as the whether or not Gould was an atheist or agnostic, his late widow Dr. Gould also wrote The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. He was known for his regular columns in Natural History magazine, collected in dozens of books.
Stephen Gould was one of the originators of the theory of punctuated equilibrium within the theory of evolution, a position that has led to confrontations with other evolutionists. Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) was an American paleontologist, author, and professor at Harvard University.
0 kommentar(er)
