The Origin of Specious  Stephen Jay Gould, who died of cancer at
the age of 60 this past May, defined a place in American culture
likely to remain vacant now that he is gone. He was, of course,
the country's foremost opponent of creationism and champion of
Darwinism, with a unique ability to bring the HMS Beagle and
baseball batting averages together in a perfect paragraph or
two. But what we may come to value most about him is the lonely
stance he took in the Darwin wars.  In the heated, often
venomous battle over Charles Darwin's legacy, 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 dispu