REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 45
pattern—uniformly warm in the serious popular press, predictably
various in technical journals of psychology and the social sciences.
Most of the leading mental testers in the hereditarian tradition
wrote major reviews, and one might well guess their thrust. Arthur
Jensen, for example, did not like the book. But most other profes-
sional psychologists wrote with praise, often copious and unstinting.
The nadir certainly arrived (with a bit of humor in the absurdity)
in the Fall 1983 issue of an archconservative journal, The Public
Interest, when my dyspepsic colleague Bernard D. Davis published a
ridiculous personal attack on me and the book under the title "Neo-
Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press." His thesis may be easily summa-
rized: Gould's book got terrific reviews in the popular press, but all
academic writers panned it unmercifully. Therefore the book is
politically motivated crap, and Gould himself isn't much better in
anything he does, including punctuated equilibrium and all his evo-
lutionary ideas.
Lovely stuff. I firmly believe in not answering unfair negative
reviews, for nothing can so disorient an attacker as silence. But
this was a bit too much, so I canvassed among friends. Both Noam
Chomsky and Salvador Luria, great scholars and humanists, said
essentially the same thing: never reply unless your attacker has
floated a demonstrably false argument, which, if unanswered, might
develop a "life of its own." I felt that Davis's diatribe fell into this
category and therefore responded in the Spring 1984 issue of the
same journal (my only publication in journals of that ilk).
As I explained and documented, Mr. Davis had only read a few
reviews, probably in publications that he liked, or that had been sent
to him by colleagues sharing his political persuasions. I, thanks to
my publisher's prodigious clipping service, had all the reviews. I
picked out all twenty-four written by academic experts in psychol-
ogy and found fourteen positive, three mixed, and seven negative
(nearly all of these by hereditarian mental testers—what else would
one expect?). I was particularly pleased that Cyril Burt's old periodi-
cal The British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, had
written one of the most positive accounts: "Gould has performed a
valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most
important debates in the social sciences, and this book should be
required reading for students and practitioners alike."
The book has sold strongly ever since publication and has now