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Good articleStephen Jay Gould has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
April 6, 2007Good article nomineeListed
July 3, 2009Good article reassessmentKept
Current status: Good article

Page Views

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GA Reassessment

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This discussion is transcluded from Talk:Stephen Jay Gould/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.

This is a GA review conducted by the sweeps process to assess older GA articles to determine whether they are still up to the quality as when they were promoted to GA. I believe that this article is well written, well-referenced, detailed, and is NPOV. This article remains a GA. OhanaUnitedTalk page 16:25, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Gould's political views

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I cited some comments by Gould and colleagues stating that he was a Marxist; @Generalrelative undid my edit as redundant. I would question this - the current page nowhere describes Gould as a Marxist, and indeed strongly implies that he was not, by contrasting him with his father. Is this not worth mentioning? Tamunro (talk) 14:28, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The sources state that Gould explicitly denied being a Marxist. Generalrelative (talk) 18:50, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can you point to a quote in which Gould explicitly denied being a Marxist?
The closest quote I can find in the current article and its sources is taken from this sentence:
"I said nothing about my political beliefs (very different from my father’s, by the way, and a private matter that I do not choose to discuss in this forum)"
Far from an explicit denial of being a Marxist, this is one of his many explicit refusals to state his political beliefs. Nor is it implicit, either: almost all Marxists would say their beliefs are "very different" than Stalin's, for example. He likewise avoids clearly stating his beliefs in the deposition quoted.
His actions indicate that he was indeed a Marxist:
"He was on the advisory boards of the academic journal Rethinking Marxism and the Manhattan-based Brecht Forum. The latter is the sponsor of the New York Marxist School ... where Gould sometimes spoke. Gould was also a speaker at ... a forum on The Future of the Left to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1998."
I think a fair summary for the purposes of the article would be that he didn't publicly confirm or deny being a Marxist, but Marxist friends and colleagues described him as one, and that he donated his time to Marxist organizations. Tamunro (talk) 20:46, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]