In the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has a good obituary of the great biologist E. O. Wilson. Predictably, there’s also a new hit piece on him (courtesy of Scientific American) claiming Wilson was racist. Jerry Coyne does a fine job tearing it apart. Which wasn’t hard since it’s so bad. For example “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” Yes. The writer is so bad at math she believes a Gaussian distribution has something to do with who is declared a normal (default?) human.
Excellent. I crossed Scientific American off my list long ago as a high school term paper level of originality. Enough with the snarkiness. In 1975 as a high school senior I was tasked with reading "on the origin of species". Needless to say that read combined with subsequent reading of Sociobiology, The Sociology of Religion, and lived experience of patriarchy, academic egoism, and religiosity leave me at this point in time to conclude that Wilson has done the finest job possible of putting authentic thought on the table in the sincerest way possible. People should go back and read On Human Nature 2x over to find the core of his thinking about the brain's wiring for mythology and focusing it on the infinite mysteries that will always be there, even as we explain previously unexplainable phenomenon.
Excellent. I crossed Scientific American off my list long ago as a high school term paper level of originality. Enough with the snarkiness. In 1975 as a high school senior I was tasked with reading "on the origin of species". Needless to say that read combined with subsequent reading of Sociobiology, The Sociology of Religion, and lived experience of patriarchy, academic egoism, and religiosity leave me at this point in time to conclude that Wilson has done the finest job possible of putting authentic thought on the table in the sincerest way possible. People should go back and read On Human Nature 2x over to find the core of his thinking about the brain's wiring for mythology and focusing it on the infinite mysteries that will always be there, even as we explain previously unexplainable phenomenon.