Stephen Jay Gould was (he died in 2002) a celebrated evolutionist and writer, someone who was called a Living Legend by the US Library of Congress in honor of his many literary achievements. Richard Lewontin, a fellow Harvard Professor when Gould was alive, is known for his pioneering research into the genetics of variation within populations as demonstrated by gel electrophoresis, a technique that shows just how much hereditary variation there is in the populations of living things.
Both men deeply opposed the work of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, two groups of researchers who use the adaptationist approach, which involves employing natural selection theory as the basis for investigations into the possible adaptive value of behavior. One expression of their resistance to this approach came in an extremely influential paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Gould and Lewontin 1979) on the supposed failures of adaptationism. This paper has been...
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Alcock, J. (2018). Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1376-1
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