Publisher's Synopsis
Published weeks before his death in 2002, Stephen Jay Gould's magisterial The Structure of Evolutionary Theory laid down his argument about evolution, about what Darwin means in the age of genes and memes and why, contra Richard Dawkins, evolution by natural selection is only one of many ways of explaining us and our world. Dawkins is yet to respond. Is this legendary feud finally over? Science has had its fair share of punch-ups over the years but few as vitriolic as that between these two leading lights of evolutionary science. Kim Sterenly moves beyond the caricatures of the Dawkins and Gould camps and shows that this conflict extends beyond evolution to their very beliefs in science itself; and, in Gould's case, to domains in which science plays no role at all. A fully revised, indexed, updated and longer edition with more diagrams and illustrations, this is ideal background reading for anyone interested in the most heated debate in science today.
