In a recent Irish Times review of Susan Sontag’s collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, Terry Eagleton drew an old but serviceable line between intellectuals and mere academics. “Academics are concerned with ideas, whereas intellectuals busy themselves with the bearing of ideas on a whole social order,” wrote Eagleton. “And while academics are largely confined to industrial production units known as universities, intellectuals seek to occupy a more public sphere, as journalists, political commentators and opinion shapers.” Judge Richard Posner more or less adopted this same taxonomy in his recent, contemptuous assessment of the state of public intellectualism.

Posner’s argument in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline—neatly proven with pseudoscientific tables and methodologically haphazard correlation studies—is that academics lose their rigor when they leave the trenches and enter the realm of public discourse. From their bully pulpits of tenured professorship they gush inane essays, op-ed columns, and even books on subjects in which their PhDs reflect no expertise. And they get paid handsomely to do it.

Among the academics Posner heartily pummels for writing profusely outside of his field of expertise is Stephen Jay Gould, the top-rated scientist on Posner’s list of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. What’s so ironic about Posner’s reproach is that Gould’s status as a first-rate academic is a debatable—and oft debated—matter; where he really shines is in his popular essays and cross-disciplinary writings—the very public intellectualism that Posner disparages.

Several of Gould’s most important ideas about evolution are still—even 20 or 30 years after their proposal—considered highly controversial, and he stands largely in obloquy among many of his peers. John Maynard Smith, one of the elder statesman of evolutionary biology took an infamous swipe at Gould in a 1995 New York Review of Books essay: “Evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed [Gould's] work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with.” Others have been no less callous.

Another of Gould’s ardent detractors, Robert Wright, wrote in Slate in 1996 that, “among top-flight evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest—not just a lightweight, but an actively muddled man who has warped the public's understanding of Darwinism.” Wright also devotes a chapter of his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny to denouncing Gould’s misguided ideas about the relationship between complexity and the directionality of evolution. Gould likes to stress that evolution is a highly contingent process, often driven by chance events. If the “tape of life” were rewound and replayed, he claims, chances are you wouldn’t see human intelligence again. Wrong, says Wright. If life were allowed to evolve again from the beginning, you might not get Homo sapiens, but thanks to general feedback processes that keep complexity constantly increasing over evolutionary history, you would get human-level intelligence in some form. This debate is far from resolved.

The most complete and coherent case against Gould’s academic work was made by Daniel Dennett in the 1995 National Book Award Finalist, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Dennett dubbed Gould “the boy who cried wolf” for falsely trumpeting several of his ideas as revolutionary upheavals of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. In fact, claims Dennett, Gould’s attacks on the status quo have either proven plain wrong or not all that revolutionary in the first place.

In The Structure of Evolutionary Biology, Gould’s 1,433-page cinderblock of a magnum opus published in March, he senses a whiff of jealousy motivating his hordes of detractors. Indeed it’s sometimes hard not to notice the ad hominem nature of the assaults on Gould’s ideas. One particularly dishonest line of criticism favored by some of Gould’s critics is to claim that his theories are tainted by Marxist politics. No doubt Gould’s famously irascible temperament and professional arrogance invite many of these attacks.

But if as an academic Gould is considered controversial or even “hardly worth bothering with,” his work as a public intellectual polymath capable of tying together disparate fields of study for popular consumption ought to earn him praise and admiration. And it has. But not by Richard Posner, who lays into two of Gould’s most popular works of public intellectualism, his books Rocks of Ages and The Mismeasure of Man. The former represents Gould’s attempt to reconcile the age-old sparring partners of science and religion by assigning them each separate, non-overlapping domains. Science, he argues, can answer questions only about the natural world and religion has sole dominion over matters of values. The argument is an impossible pill for most atheists to swallow, but it’s certainly not the fallacious waste of time Posner makes it out to be. Posner would also have us throw out The Mismeasure of Man, Gould’s critically acclaimed history of science’s misemployment through the ages to justify racism. Though the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (and is taught in some Yale intro psychology courses), Posner quickly and simply condemns it for merely disagreeing with other work in the field of IQ theory. Though Rocks of Ages and The Mismeasure of Man both sold well and were greeted by mostly warm reviews, Gould’s principal forum as a public intellectual has been the essays he contributed over the course of 25 years to Natural History magazine, which have since been collected in 10 volumes. These discursive essays, which brim with anecdotal ornamentation and intellectual furbelow, are the kind of erudite writing that causes my head to sink into my pillow with jealousy. Gould is an exceptional raconteur, who seems to possess at his fingertips an endless catalogue of literary quotes and historical references that he can drop into his essays at exactly the appropriate moment. He has written luminously on topics as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci, physics, Vladimir Nabokov, Frederic Church, the millennium, and of course, baseball. Reading Gould, who describes himself as a “naturalist by profession and a humanist at heart,” I always find myself asking, how can this guy be so well read and know so much? Posner would just as soon silence this extracurricular writing. But what a loss that would be. Unfortunately, Gould penned his 300^th and last Natural History column last year, and I’m not the only one who wishes it weren’t so.