Not the book, but the lecture I attended was due to the book's popularity or in anticipation of the books release or as a promo of the book. The timing is kind of hazy. Gould titled the lecture in the form of a debate topic, which are contrived such that they can be negated. Something like, "Resolved that intelligence and race are correlated."

The lecture was at the University of Southern Mississippi, which probably seemed ironic to him as 60 years previously the entire university would have pilloried the uppity fat Jew for promoting racial equality.

What I found ironic was that a fair number of students present, black and white, after sitting through the whole lecture, never got past the title. They thought Gould really was promoting racial differences. It was stunning that they sat there for 45 minutes of carefully documented history of (mis)measurements and generally bad science culminating in several modern studies that failed to find a significant difference among races, and STILL wanted to argue about his title. I felt embarrassed for the ignorant, closed-minded kids. They are just as resistant to ideas as their parents and grand-parents.

I'll just give one example of how silly they were. Gould showed a slide of a 18th or 19th century drawing of a "Hottenton" woman that caricatured the racial differences between whites and blacks. Apparently this drawing was used as scientific evidence in some study demonstrating the close similarity between apes and negroes. Well, THAT is what people got incensed about, as though Gould had argued in favor of that study.

I own one of Gould's books, an early compilation of his contributions to "Natural History" magazine. I liked Gould's natural history work but found his social stuff tedious in a way consistent among paternalistc northeastern ivy-league socialist intellectuals.