The Culture Business

Look Who's Stalking

This winter, after a brief silence, Wright has come back into Gould's life with a vengeance. To coincide with the publication of Nonzero, Wright has orchestrated a flurry of bylined pieces in The New Republic, Time, and the New York Times. But it was his New Yorker article that drew blood. "Other people have attacked me before," Gould says. "But this was different. I've read The New Yorker my whole life; I consider it a friend. And this did feel, emotionally, like a betrayal by a friend."

If Wright's editors there, Dorothy Wickenden and editor-in-chief David Remnick, knew Wright was using their pages to promote Nonzero and reignite his dormant feud, they aren't saying. Neither responded to multiple phone calls and e-mails about the article. But others have complained. "I read the article," says Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a longtime ally of Gould's. "I thought it was dumb." Other evolutionists, even those who've been critical of Gould in the past, expressed shock at what they saw as Wright's disingenuousness. "No one has explained evolution to the public better than Gould," says Berkeley's Padian. "It strikes me as really tragic that The New Yorker, of all publications, would devote that much space to character assassination."

For his part, Wright still insists he's the aggrieved party. "The motivation at Gould's end is very much political," he says, referring to accusations that evolutionary psychology is just social Darwinism in disguise. "And you know, one could argue that I have my own political agenda -- but it definitely isn't the agenda Gould is reflexively attributing to me." Which is? "Which is that I want poor people to starve!"

Gould can take comfort in the fact that even some of Wright's allies are wincing at the New Yorker attack and Nonzero's wackier claims -- among them the imminent emergence of a global "superbrain," facilitated by the Internet and global media, as the next step in cultural and biological evolution. This is Wright's version of the famously amorphous "noosphere," or "thinking envelope of the earth," posited by mid-twentieth-century Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

"Teilhard is generally regarded as a hopeless romantic, deeply wrong, and sort of a pathetic figure," says Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has sided with Wright against Gould in the past. "Anyone trying to resurrect him is swimming upstream, no question."

Gould, meanwhile, doesn't feel like the winner. "I still can't understand why The New Yorker ran that article," he says. And though he's been asked to review Wright's book, so far he has declined the invitation.