I was happy with Dawkins book until being told, by a geneticist if I remember right, that he wasn't very serious, that Gould was serious reading but Dawkins was not completely so. I'd be glad to know if it's right or not.
Wow, you asked the WRONG geneticist. Gould is regarded as worthless and possibly dishonest by many/most professional evolutionary biologists (which is not quite the same thing as genetics).
John Maynard Smith, possibly the preeminent evolutionary theorist of our era:
"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
Thanks. I was thinking about dropping stronger hints of this, actually -- I distinctly recall seeing various arguments of Gould's being torn to shreds by Dawkins and/or Dennett, and I have gradually developed the habit of taking my extensive collection of Gould's books (given to me as gifts), stacking them in a little pile on my shelf, and then actually reading something else -- but I am neither educated enough in evolutionary biology nor recent enough in my reading to pull a specific quote, and the last thing we need is more heat and less light from a total non-biologist like myself.
Also, I haven't read an essay that is quite so direct as this one that you link to. I'd point out that this link illustrates my point: When scientists get down to business and talk about each other's work, they do not mince words. It's kind of refreshing, actually.
You're going to need to ask more specific questions. This is science. The closer to the rock face you get, the more criticism flies about.
The three guys I named have various disagreements on one thing or another, so it wouldn't surprise me to find that each has his partisans. Also note that science writing for the public is a completely different art than science, itself. Gould may well be taken more seriously as a practicing scientist, but that shouldn't necessarily matter to me as a reader of his popuLar works. Isaac Asimov was a great science writer, but his scientific career was brief and undistinguished.
I'm sorry I didn't understand what "closer to the rock face" means.
As far as I know, Dawkins' books give his version of evolution, that is somewhat non-standard and not yet proven. Gould used to write about evolution more as it was widely accepted by scientists on his time. I know they both have disagreements, but as far as I know Dawkins is faster in writing about not very accepted subjects as widely accepted science.
Hm, perhaps I am misusing that metaphor. Let me try a different metaphor: As you move from well-established, abstract, general principles to newly-proposed ideas that are still being tested against a bunch of specific data, you'll find scientists disagreeing with each other more and more. At the very edge of science, where new hypotheses get started, the put-downs can get pretty sharp. Just because Scientist A calls Scientist B a statistically-ignorant fool doesn't necessarily mean, in any objective sense, that Scientist B is a statistically-ignorant fool. They may just be embroiled in one of those academic debates.
As for your generalizations: I think they're way too sweeping. Gould and Dawkins have written hundreds of thousands of words. Some of those words are probably too daring, others not daring enough; some are words about cutting-edge subjects, some are about classic works in their fields. Some of their words have caught fire in the popular imagination to a much greater extend than their authors intended, i.e. Dawkins' "meme" concept was originally intended as a half-joking metaphor, and he himself doesn't take it too seriously.
Indeed, “meme” is a stupid name for what was completely understandable when simply called an “idea”. The analogy of ideas to genetics is not particularly insightful, and at this point quite worn through.
People congratulate themselves when they have an idea. A group doesn't get an idea. You get a meme from someone else, and it seems to survive on its own. Not all ideas are memes, and not all memes are ideas.
But finding a meme these days is like mentioning the long tail. It seems a little antiquated and cutesy.
Getting a song stuck in your head (commonly called "earworm", but I think that's a terrible name for it. I think "memelody" makes more sense) when you hear the tune or someone says something that reminds you of it I think qualifies as a meme but not an idea, especially if there is some shared culture reference that makes multiple people think of the same tune from similar stimuli.
