1. About her work, on YouTube (3 minutes).
2. Podcast of her first Massey lecture, about Quebec separatism (34 minutes).
3. To the extent I could figure out her intellectual likes and dislikes, I always agreed, with one glaring exception: She liked Stephen Jay Gould’s work, whereas I thought it was awful. This informative post reminded me of this disagreement; I learned that people in Gould’s field (evolutionary biology) agree with me. One reason I didn’t like Gould’s work was his dismissal of evolutionary explanations as “ just-so stories“.
Hmmm, I understand what your saying about Gould’s and Jacobs apparent dismissal of evolutionary explanations.
But doesn’t experimentation take priority over the inward theoretical debates of evolutionary scientist. It’s true you can go to scientist and back up your SLD experiment with an evolutionary explanation. But the breakthrough appeared to come when you confronted a daily life problem (overeating) with an experiment. The evolutionary explanation is a secondary effect.
I think Jacobs also had much stronger faith in daily problems solving rather than the abstract theoretical debates which evolutionary scientist often engage in. Jacobs argues that solutions usually arise on the ground level where people are more intimately connected with their environment. To borrow a term Hayek used, there is a “spontaneous order” to our lives, outside the boundaries of human knowledge.
I think Jacobs just liked Gould’s Natural History columns. Evolutionary ideas helped me decide what experiments to do; that’s how they were useful. Much as correlational evidence helps decide what experiments to do.