The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities

As a long-time reader of Stephen Jay Gould's books and his years of monthly articles in Natural History, I found this title to be an excellent representation of SJG's best ideas and thoughts on Science and the Humanities. As always SJG's choice of words and phrases is impeccably precise, and lends an aura of anticipation to the next paragraph. SJG does bring a consilience to the dichotomous world of Science and the Humanities and Gould's book "The Hedgehog, The Fox, and The Magister's Pox" deserves a much wider audience.

This is Stephen Jay Gould's final book, published posthumously. I am a bit in love with the lovely Gould (even if he is dead)and his approach to science and life so I was really excited.Unfortunately, like many truly great thinkers, and people, he does have little foibles and pet peeves that left unchecked drive me insane and can stop me reading him for a while, such as:1.He does bang on a bit, and can repeat himself ad nauseum, as if we haven't understood his point2. Some of his personal narrative accompanying his science is somewhat self-serving3. Too many baseball correlations for this Anglo-Australian womanEditing is the answer.In previous books these foibles seem to have beencontrolled enough to keep this an occasional thing. Dear reader: I threw this book down too many times shouting STOP IT, for it to have been entirely enjoyable. The editors seem more intimidated of him dead than alive.Nevertheless: it's still more interesting, more compassionate and more solid than most books. Ever. Read it if you love Gould and, like with a great friend, you can put up with his unedited tics because they're, well, his own.

Truly enjoy the book, a passionate humanistic scientist in action! However, I do have some problems about the logic and arguments of the book:1. Gould contributes the initial contention between science and the humanities to the turf battle and the power struggle between the Renaissance humanism and the rise of modern science, more specifically, to the Modern vs. Ancient debate in the 17th & 18th centuries. I suspect the historical accuracy of such analysis and doubt that it has any significant impact on the contention today. Maybe Gould himself commits to a fictional dichotomy which he argues against all along.2. It seems to me that there is a significant inconsistency between chapter 5 in which he reveals the fallacious and fictional dichotomies between science and the humanities and chapter 6 in which he admits of the real tension between scientism and the critic of scientism (see pp. 113-115). It confirms my impression that "science wars" are for real and should be taken seriously, not just extremists' paranoid illusions.3. What bothers me the most is an apparent paradox between Gould's fundamental assumption of the epistemic status of science (a magisterium about fact or IS) and the humanities (a magisterium about value or OUGHT) on the one hand and his relentless call for integration of these two "non-overlapping magisterial" (in brief, NOMA) as his overarching goal of the book on the other. First of all, if science and the humanities belong to two non-overlapping domains of discussion with logically totally different aims, methods and objects, then how could they be integrated since there is no any commonality between them??? Gould did try to answer this charge in chapter 8 in terms of a metaphor "one from many," but without any success in my humble judgment. Secondly, I believe that the above paradox is due to Gould's beloved separationism between science and the humanities (religion included), i.e., his thesis of NOMA as he defended fiercely in his Rocks of Ages. Ironically, it is the same Gould -- who warns us to guard against any dichotomous oppositions between science and the humanities throughout the book -- who introduces a more dangerous dichotomy between fact and value through the backdoor. As anyone who are familiar with the recent development of Science Studies and comparative studies of science and religion (all start from Thomas Kuhn) already knows, there is no such sharp distinction between fact and value. As Gould himself has admitted from time to time when he dismisses the myth of objectivity (p. 116ff), science is heavily value-laden. So besides the myth of objectivity of science, Gould has to give up his myth of fact/value dichotomy too! Otherwise his "divine" goal of integration between science and the humanities is doomed.

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The points made in this book are excellent ones: the sciences and the humanities can learn from each other, there are different methods of approaching problems that are equally valid, and reductionism is not the answer. The historical stories told to illustrate these points are enjoyable and informative, highlighting characters and corners of the past of which I at least was unaware. The style is also enjoyable, methodical, and erudite, with many footnotes providing additional context.All that said, the introduction states that this was a book-length extension of a talk the author gave. It also states that the book was not complete when the author died, and was not edited further after his death. Boy do both of those things show - this is one of those cases where many words were used where less words would have sufficed. As for the editing choice, it was reasonable enough to not try and adjust the facts the author presented, but a copy-editing pass could have been done to at least catch things like a typo in a reference to the author's own previous book. I also thought the book was really let down by the choice to provide the figures in black and white on the same paper as the rest of the text. This is even something the author mentions, that this choice was made for cost reasons, but these are detailed images with small text and color, and the reproductions are of very poor quality. In addition, some of them have odd grey horizontal bars over sections of them, which look to be image rendering issues, as though the image had not fully loaded at the time of printing. It would have been so much nicer to have had these as full-color inserts on glossy paper, where one could have actually seen and appreciated all the detail referred to in the text.

As ever with Gould wise thinking beautifully written

Great collection of essays by an amazing author.