Richard Dawkins contra Stephen Jay Gould

The history of science is full of rivalries and conflicts: Newton argued with Leibniz about the nature of space, Edison and Tesla were protagonists of the famous "war of currents", Einstein publicly contested Bohr's quantum theory..., and In the field of biology, the dispute between Dawkins and Gould is famous because of its intensity, its duration (more than two decades) and its scientific relevance. Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, conceives of evolution as a struggle between genetic lineages. Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote The Wonderful Life and The False Measure of Man, sees it as a struggle between organisms. For Dawkins, the principles of evolutionary biology apply the same to humans as they do to other living beings; for Gould, sociobiology is wrong and dangerous. Dawkins has been described many times as a crazed reductionist, capable of reducing the variety and complexity of life to the struggle for existence between blind and selfish genes. Instead, Gould has been used -wrongly- by creationists to reject the fundamental principles of Darwinism. In this book, Kim Sterelny guides us through the main differences between Dawkins and Gould's conceptions of evolution and science and offers us a new opportunity to rediscover the universe of evolutionary biology.