Speak not ill of the dead-is not something we honor here.... Paul Gross, co-author of the anti-postmodernist tract Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, reviews the career of Stephen Jay Gould in The New Criterion. Some excerpts:

Alternative accounts? In 1972, Niles Eldredge and S. J. Gould, paleontologists, published “Punctuated Equilibria: an Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.” By this they meant that macroevolution—effectively, speciation—does not happen slowly and continuously, but rather by abrupt large jumps separated by long periods of stasis. This was contrasted with Darwin’s (supposedly) mistaken emphasis upon “gradualism”—evolution via the accumulation of small changes over time. Erected into theory, belabored, “punk-ek” became familiar in the business. Unfortunately, it is not a contrast or an alternative to the standard science ... As description, punk-ek was interesting; as a revolution in theory, well, it wasn’t. ... Among examples of sham inquiry were Gould’s celebrated assaults on IQ. The opening broadside was his 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man. Everywhere except in reviews by qualified psychologists it received frantic acclaim, and in due course a National Book Critics Circle award. Gould exorcised the psychometricians, who study the meaning and heritability of cognitive performance—intelligence—as measured in tests. Gould’s late re-issue of Mismeasure had more demons from cognitive educational psychology, as used for example by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their widely denounced book The Bell Curve. Journalists and non-specialist critics, writing in lay journals, affixed the laurels to Gould’s brow. Their relief was exquisite upon learning that there is no such thing as measurable intelligence. Experts, on the other hand, offered as usual mixed opinion, negative predominant. ...

On an aside, one of the science teachers I had in high school basically presented punctuated equilibria as the "next big thing" and "Darwinism" as old news.