At 04:14 AM 5/10/02 -0400, Joe Schwartz wrote:


>Perhaps I should have explained by what I meant by crap. I don't take
>kindly to this kind of language used to describe the work of colleagues I
>respect and with whom I am agreement.
>
>>"In "Alas Poor Darwin" (hereafter APD), Steven and Hilary Rose and the other
>>contributors to this edited volume accuse evolutionary psychologists of sins
>>both scientific and political, in prose filled with self-righteous rage,
>>smug
>>dismissals, and unremitting invective. "
>>
>>It must indeed be a strange formation to have Bob Young associated with
>>this kind of review. He and a number of others of us in the BSSRS
>>Sociobiology study group co-authored one of the first critiques of
>>sociobiology in New Scientist years ago.
>>Joe Schwartz

I thank Joe Schwartz for this piece of good sense. My old friend and
comrade, the physicist George Salzman, kindly put me on this SfP list a
while ago, when I thought SfP was long gone. I have to admit that the
traffic, with a few exceptions, is barely worth the subscription, and it
seems to have lost the spirit of the old SfP, or, across the water, Bob
Young and company's RSJ (and I would include Steven and Hilary Rose in that
milieu). Some of the traffic, as Joe says, is positively crap; perhaps the
masthead, with its hysterical capitalization, sets the tone.
But as long as George, and folks like Joe, are in the conversation, I shall
stay on board; heaven knows, we have never been more in need of a critical
sociology of science and technics. As Mumford, that vitalist windbag and
constructive luddite, put it long ago: "There is much to unbuild and much
more to build."

Iain Boal
Dept of Geography
UCBerkeley