The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER’S POX

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Preface

  I - THE RITE AND RIGHTS OF A SEPARATING SPRING

  Chapter 1 - Newton’s Light

  Chapter 2 - Scientific “World-Making” and Critical Braking

  Chapter 3 - So Noble an Hecatombe: The Weight of Humanism

  Chapter 4 - The Mandate of Magister Medice: The Threat of Suppression

  II - FROM PARADOXICAL AGES OF BACON TO SWIFT SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

  Chapter 5 - The Dynasty of Dichotomy

  BACON’S PARADOX, NEWTON’S APHORISM, AND THE ADULT USE OF MOTHER GOOSE

  DICHOTOMOUS PERILS IN FOUR SEQUENTIAL STAGES

  HOW NOW DICHOTOMY—AND HOW NOT

  Chapter 6 - Reintegration in Triumphant Maturity

  Chapter 7 - Sweetness and Light as Tough and Healing Truth

  III - A SAGA OF PLURIBUS AND UNUM The Power and Meaning of True Consilience

  Chapter 8 - The Fusions of Unum and the Benefits of Pluribus

  THE FUSIONS OF UNUM

  THE BENEFITS OF PLURIBUS

  Chapter 9 - The False Path of Reductionism and the Consilience of Equal Regard

  A CLASSICAL PROGRAM OF HUMANE REDUCTIONISM: A BEST TRY AT A LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY

  THE TWO CHIEF FALLACIES OF REDUCTIONISM AND THE ORIGINAL MEANING AND INTENT OF CONSILIENCE

  WHEWELL’S RESTRICTED MEANING OF CONSILIENCE, AS PROPERLY USED BY WILSON

  THE ULTIMATE INADEQUACY OF REDUCTIONISM WITHIN THE SCIENCES

  WHY REDUCTIONISM CANNOT ENCOMPASS (OR EVEN SUFFICIENTLY INCORPORATE) THE ...

  WHEWELL’S CONCEPT OF DISCIPLINES, AND A BRIEF ON THE CONSILIENCE OF EQUAL ...

  EPILOG

  THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER’S POX

  [To view this image, refer to

  the print version of this title.]

  STEPHEN JAY GOULD

  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England

  Copyright © 2003 by Turbo, Inc.

  Foreword copyright © 2003 by Leslie Meredith

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published by arrangement with Harmony Books, an imprint of

  The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  First Harvard University Press edition, 2011.

  Design by Lynne Amft

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gould, Stephen Jay.

  The hedgehog, the fox, and the magister’s pox : mending the gap

  between science and the humanities / Stephen Jay Gould.

  —1st Harvard University Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Harmony Books, c2003.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-674-06166-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  eISBN : 978-0-674-06340-2

  1. Science—Social aspects. 2. Science and state. I. Title.

  Q175.5 .G69 2011

  303.48’3—dc21 2011017925

  For the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a truly exemplary organization, serving so well as the “official” voice of professional science here and elsewhere. With thanks for allowing me to serve as their president and then chairman of the board during the millennial transition of 1999–2001. This book began as my presidential address in 2000. The address is then traditionally published in Science magazine, the association’s official organ, and America’s best general journal for scientific professionals. And with apologies to the editor, Don Kennedy, one of the finest people I have ever known in the world of intellectuals. I promised to follow the tradition, but failed because I soon realized that I needed to write at greater length than I could ever ask you to publish. Thus, I now present the printed version of my presidential address (obviously greatly expanded, for I did not filibuster on your podium), and I dedicate this book to AAAS. It was truly a pleasure and privilege to serve—a line often intoned as the boilerplate of a meaningless cliché, but stated, this time in a heartfelt manner, by a quintessential non-joiner who enjoyed the work and truly gained more than he could ever give.

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox is the last of the seven books that Stephen Jay Gould contracted to write for Harmony Books. It was my privilege to be his editor, and it is an honor to have been asked to write a brief note for this signal volume.

  Several years ago, I received a catalog for an auction of decommissioned museum pieces. Being especially interested in amber and fossils, I flipped through the catalog pages, marveling at the amazing variety of pieces that included triplets of trilobites and other vanished creatures frozen in tumbling poses like puppies in strange prehistoric attitudes of play. In the middle of the catalog, I came upon a letter penned by Charles Darwin to an unknown correspondent. I have an enormous admiration of the great man, instilled in me by dedicated science teachers and by years of reading Gould’s essays and books, but I had never imagined that such a relic could be owned and contemplated by a layperson. I had to have it.

  Months later, having happily triumphed in the auction, I received the letter, framed with glass on both sides to enable a full view. I was excited, yet, as I tried to read it, was immediately dismayed to find that I could barely make out two words in succession. Darwin’s penmanship was atrocious. After poring over the letter and drawing up a map of those words that I felt sure I’d interpreted correctly, juxtaposed with many guesses and question marks and not a few blanks, I still had very little sense of the meaning of my prized possession.

  At that time, I was working with Steve on his book Rocks of Ages. I mentioned my acquisition as well as my frustration to him; he was interested to see the letter and generously agreed to try to help me figure it out. He told me that Darwin was renowned for his illegible script and that he was one of the few people who had ever had the talent for deciphering it. This he did for me, writing the missing words on my map in his own (somewhat) clearer hand, along with a couple of notations, reproduced here in brackets.

  Down Bromley Kent

  Ap 30/81

  My Dear Sir

  I must send you a line to thank you for your “Ice & Water” which I also saw with interest very much [This sentence doesn’t make much sense, so I may well be wrong here. I think everything else is pretty surely right. The “also saw” words are particularly badly scrawled]; though I believe we split a little about solid glacier ice and icebergs.—Thanks, also for extract out of newspaper about Rooks and Crows—[Leslie: This must be right. Darwin was interested in the taxonomy and names of these birds] I wish I dared trust it. I see in cutting pages half-an-hour ago, that you fulminate against the skepticism of scientific men.—You would not fulminate quite so much, if you had had my many wild-goose chases after facts stated by men not trained to scientific accuracy. I often vow to myself that I will utterly disregard every statement made by any man who has not shown the world he can observe accurately. I wish I had space to tell you a curious History, which I was fool enough to investigate on almost universal testimony of Beans growing this year upside down.—I firmly believe that accuracy is the most difficult quality to acquire.—I did not, however, intend to say all this.—I very thoroughly enjoyed my half-hour’s talk at your pleasant House.—I have been corresponding with Mr. Davidson on the genealogy of Brachiopods; and he will someday, I believe, discuss subject as we wish. He has seen Galton�
��s talk of species grouped like a tree. Mr. D is not at all a full believer in great changes of species which will make his work all the more valuable.—I have also written to Mr. Jamison, urging him to take up Glen Roy. My dear Sir Your very sincerely C Darwin

  As Steve told me, it’s a “nice letter, a good letter, an interesting letter,” although not an important letter. “But, it was written only a couple days before an important letter.” He was happy to have had the opportunity to read it. Along with his translation, he sent me a photocopy of a catalog page and wrote, “This is the author Darwin refers to in your letter—Davidson/ Brachiopods. Pretty pricey and a classic work.” Indeed, T. Davidson’s British Fossil Brachiopods, with 234 plates, six volumes in seven, cloth, 1851–86, was priced at 490 pounds sterling about four years ago, confirming another Darwinian prediction.

  Steve’s death still seems impossible. He was at the fulcrum of so much activity. For almost a decade, I’d been speaking with him and his literary agent, Kay McCauley, about a book he planned to write, centered on the intense, early twentieth-century correspondence, which he owned, of two paleontologists. He also planned to write about realized geniuses unrecognized in their time. But these are the unrealized books of a recognized genius. It is a tragedy for readers that we have lost Stephen Jay Gould, the great writer, the irreplaceable teacher, the pioneering researcher and creative thinker, the champion and defender of scientific education. Even given the wealth of brilliant work he has left us, his death is made worse by our loss of his unwritten thoughts, his unrecorded insights, the connections that only he could make, but had yet to make. To borrow a verse, “Gould thou shouldst be living at this hour, The world hath need of thee . . . ”

  Yet Stephen Jay Gould has indisputably left behind many great treasures, one of the last of which you hold in your hands. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox is of particular interest because it is an original book, not a collection of his previously published essays from Natural History magazine, and his last book on natural history. Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, his baseball memoir, also remains to be published. Steve also left his biological family, his many friends, an extended family of students, colleagues, and readers whom he inspired, his intellectual line, which, like the description of evolution in Full House, will prove to be “a copiously branching bush with innumerable present outcomes, not a highway or ladder with one summit.”

  Steve’s brilliant and challenging works, his amazing energy and insights, and his urge to examine that which had yet to be explained will continue to inspire readers, students, and other scientists for generations to come. In his dedication for his book Rocks of Ages, Steve wrote to his two sons that they “will have to hold on beyond their father’s watch.” We, his readers, have to hold on, too, as Steve writes in his preface to this book, to our ethical principles, our commitment to the great experiment of democracy, and our commitment to many paths of intellectual inquiry in the sciences and the humanities “that make our lives so varied, so irreducibly, and so fascinatingly, complex.”

  In Stephen Jay Gould’s books, his voice and purpose are beautifully preserved, clearly visible, literary amber. With my Darwin letter, I also acquired several pretty little pieces of amber in which float flower fragments, a flower bud, and a tiny complete flower and leaves. Whenever I look at these bits, I flash to exchanges I had with Steve that revealed his extraordinary mind, his generosity as a teacher, his joy in discovery and knowledge, and his Darwin-like scrupulousness in observation, writing, and research. I long to hear a disquisition by Steve on these botanicals, just as he translated my Darwin letter and put it into historical context. But it will be up to me to investigate the amber without his guidance and to ferret out the important letter related to my letter, and the evolutionary and humanistic forces they reveal. And it is up to you, the reader, to investigate these final writings of Steve’s without his last ministrations and corrections. For Steve died before he could proof the manuscript for this book, before he could double-check his facts and figures, before he could correct the page proofs. So if there are any errors floating in the text, think of them as bits in amber left for you to decipher and puzzle over, and perhaps correct, left by one of the greatest forces in scientific thought and writing with whom we have been privileged to live and from whom we have been privileged to learn for a while, and, through his books, forever.

  Leslie Meredith

  Senior Editor

  November 2002

  PREFACE

  Introducing the Protagonists

  I PREFER THE MORE EUPHONIOUS RUSSIAN BEGINNING FOR FAIRY TALES to our equivalent “once upon a time”—zhili byli (or, literally, “lived, was”). Thus I begin this convoluted tale of initial discord and potential concord: “Zhili byli the fox and the hedgehog.” In his Historia animalium of 1551, Konrad Gesner, the great Swiss scholar of nearly everything, drew the initial and “official” pictures of these creatures in the first great compendium of the animal kingdom published in Gutenberg’s era. Gesner’s fox embodies the deceit and cunning traditionally associated with this important symbol of our culture—poised on his haunches, ready for anything, front legs straight and extended, hindquarters set to spring, ears cocked, and hair erect down the full line of his back. Above all, his face grins enigmatically and throughout, from the erect eyelashes to the long smirk, ending at the tapered nose with widespread whiskers—all seeming to say, “Watch me now, and then tell me if you’ve ever seen anything even half so clever.”

  The hedgehog, by contrast, is long and low, all exposed and nothing hidden. Spines cover the entire upper surface of his body; and his small feet neatly fit under this protective mat above. The face, to me, seems simply placid: neither dumb nor disengaged but rather serenely confident in a quiet, yet fully engaged manner.

  I suspect that Gesner drew these two animals to emphasize these feelings and associations in a direct and purposeful way. For the Historia animalium of 1551 is not a scientific encyclopedia in the modern sense of presenting factual information about natural objects, but rather a Renaissance compendium for everything ever said or reported by human observers or moralists about animals and their meanings, with emphasis on the classical authors of Greece and Rome (seen by the Renaissance as the embodiment of obtainable wisdom in its highest form), and with factual truth and falsity as, at best, a minor criterion for emphasis. Each entry includes empirical information, fables, human uses, and stories and lists of proverbs featuring the creature in question.

  The fox and the hedgehog not only embodied their separate and well-known symbols of cunning versus persistence. They had also, ever since the seventh century B.C., been explicitly linked in one of the most widely known proverbs about animals, an enigmatic saying that achieved renewed life in the twentieth century. Gesner clearly drew his fox and hedgehog in their roles as protagonists in this great and somewhat mysterious motto.

  In Gesner’s time, and ever since for that matter, any scholar in search of a proverb would turn immediately to the standard source, the Bartlett’s beyond compare for this form of quotation: the Adagia (adages, or proverbs) compiled, and first published in 1500, by the greatest intellectual of the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). Gesner, of course, directly used and credited Erasmus’s exhaustive discussion of the linking proverb in both his articles, De Vulpe (on the fox) and De Echino (on the hedgehog) of his 1551 founding treatise.

  This somewhat mysterious proverb derives from a shadowy source, Archilochus, the seventh-century B.C. Greek soldier-poet sometimes considered the greatest lyricist after Homer, but known only from fragments and secondary quotations, and not from any extensive writings or biographical data. Erasmus cites, in his universalized Latin, the Archilochian contrast of fox and hedgehog: Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum (or, roughly, “The fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy”).

  I use this well-trodden, if enigmatic, image in two important ways (and in the book’s
title as well) to exemplify my concept of the proper relationship between the sciences and humanities. I could not agree more with the vital sentiment expressed by my colleague E. O. Wilson (although Part III of this book will also explain my reasons for rejecting his favored path toward our common goal): “The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities” (from his book Consilience, Knopf, 1998, page 8). I use Archilochus’s old image, and Erasmus’s extensive exegesis, to underscore my own recommendations for a fruitful union of these two great ways of knowing. But my comparison will not be based on the most straightforward or simpleminded comparison. That is, I emphatically do not claim that one of the two great ways (either science or the humanities) works like the fox, and the other like the hedgehog.

  Of my two actual usages, the first is, I confess, entirely idiosyncratic, fully concrete, and almost as enigmatic as the proverb itself. That is, I shall refer, in a crucial argument, to the specific citation of Erasmus’s explication of Archilochus’s motto as preserved in one particular copy of Gesner’s 1551 book. Moreover, although I regale you with foxes and hedgehogs in this introduction, this first usage will now disappear completely from the text until the very last pages, when I cite (and picture) this passage to make a closing general point with specific empirical oomph. As to the equally mysterious Magister who shares titular space with the fox and hedgehog, he will make a short intermediary appearance (in chapter 4) and then also withdraw until his meeting with the two animals on the closing pages.