Origin of Specious:

In the heated, often venomous battle over Charles Darwin’s legacy, (Stephen Jay) Gould faced a redoubtable crew from the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetics and philosophy. What’s more, many of these individuals, including E.O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright, have literary and polemical talents rivaling his own. Science will decide the relative merits of their arguments over topics such as punctuated equilibrium, speciation and the nature of complexity. But the cultural stakes of the dispute are obvious already. Gould’s opponents advocate one form or another of a digital Darwinism. Their grand syntheses are unimaginable without the computer revolution. Their reductionist emphasis — and their hopes for a single, internally coherent theory of everything from mitochondria to the human mind — draws heavily on the tools, methods and examples of digitalization. Gould’s views, on the other hand, owed next to nothing to computers. His Darwinism would have sounded much the same without computer code, artificial intelligence (AI) or the Internet. The American Prospect