But when she wrote The Chalice and the Blade in 1987, she had only a B.A. from UCLA in sociology (hint: that's why it's "sociology" and not something more specific!) and then, after a couple years at RAND's System Development Corporation as a "junior social scientist" (her words), she got a law degree.

And then, after twenty years practicing law, she, um, came out with a book on, basically, comparative historical anthropology? Huh? And contradicted quite a number of actual experts at the time? A crank, giving opinions on things she has little training in!

If you counter that she did a lot of literature review and thereby collected a lot of evidence, well, I can just counter that Pinker did too. (He obviously did; even his critics charge that he needed to collect even more, not that he had none--and Eisler's critics made that charge of her, too. For instance, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, writing the Oct. 4 1987 NYT's review of the book, said, "Crete did manifest a disquieting social stratification, but since it developed under female hegemony it does not provoke Ms. Eisler's critical scrutiny [...] Inconvenient details do not figure prominently in her account.")

Eisler addressed the U.N.. Pinker was one of Time Magazine's most influential 100 people. And we learn from this...what? Aside from the fact that they're both prominent?

None of this is reliable. It isn't the shape of things that is particularly informative. It's the content. One has to evaluate the actual evidence (is it there at all? is it complete? relevant?) and interpretation (does it support the thesis? is it consistent with others?), or stay largely agnostic, to maintain intellectual integrity. Experts can help marshal the evidence and justify the interpretation.