I am very sorry to have attributed a criticism to you of Maynard Smith. There is no LBO archive, and there were some negative comments on the use of game theory. For some reason, this made me think of Maynard Smith, not Dawkins who uses neither game theory nor any quantative techniques in his argumentation. You were critical of Dawkins and I should have stuck to that. Or Stephen Rose's criticism of Dawkins and Maynard Smith and other ultra Darwinists in his *Lifelines*.
As for Lott, his "psycho-analyzing" Sokal and Bricmont as resentful white males is out of bounds. And I am not willing to hate Sokal because he keeps questionable company, though I did agree with Lewontin's criticism of Gross/Levitt. I also think EO Wilson's new chapter on the social sciences in Consilience is simply terrible.
There is a whole history of how the critique of science has been substituted for the critique of bourgeois society or how the denigration of science is understood as an attack on the highest form bourgeois society and thus a root and branch critique of it(from Croce to Marcuse?) To me this is what is at the heart of the debate, not the division between equally idealized and mythified Old and New Lefts (the substitution of science for bourgeois society as the object of critique goes back much further than the New Left--well at least back to Martin Heidegger?)
At any rate, to the extent this substitution has been made and positivism, empiricism, science, reason, verification, and objectivity have become dirtier words than wage labor, capital and the state (note how Lott capitalizes the former kind of words as if such a juvenille act constitutes a criticism), then it is farcical that these critics don't even understand the science they have made the focal point of their attack. Nor do we seem to be keeping clear the distinction between a critique of science and the critique of technology; of course Aronowitz does refer to techno-science as his object of critique (and I do think there is a lot of value in his book The Jobless Future--here I may disagree with Doug).
But why isn't anyone getting mad at the "anti science" left professors for having taken critical intellectual work down this path and built academic centers for it (no doubt at the expense of other kinds of criticism and centers) and absorbed critical graduate students into them and then jeopardizing the whole venture--as well as the integrity,if not the careers, of their own graduate students--by a profound ignorance in the very field on which they *decided* to concentrate?
It's similar to the left getting taken in by the neo mercantalists and making protectionism their number one issue and then getting the rug taken out from under them by Krugman, leaving the left even worse off than before. Krugman is doubtless a nasty ideologue, but he did show Stephen Cohen and Clyde Prestowitz to be in inadequate command of the facts. So if the left can't defend its anti science and pro protectionist or neo mercantalist positions, it is bound only to damage critique in the long run. And this is what the left has done. The sad truth is simply that the left is as responsible for the weakness of oppositional thought and politics as the right.
At any rate, if by showing up their scientific ignorance Sokal can stimulate a debate about whether the left should go on identifying or collapsing these forms of critique of science and bourgeois society or science and technology or even stimulating more rigorous critiques of science, then I think the enduring effect will have been salubrious.
I offer my apologies once again. And since I have been unable to download your Science and Society review of Lifelines, I will track down the hard copy so I know what the real Frances Bolton thinks.
yours, rakesh