The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister鈥檚 Pox by Stephen Jay Gould, Harmony/Jonathan Cape, $25.95/拢18.99, ISBN 0609601407/022406309X Reviewed by Maggie McDonald
鈥淭HE common goal of human wisdom, achieved through the union of natural knowledge and creative art,鈥� says Stephen Jay Gould, is what unites the sciences with the humanities. The springboard for this, his last book, begins in the ancient world with a proverb about the fox and the hedgehog. The cunning of the fox lies in its ability to change its strategies again and again to achieve its goal 鈥� escaping from hunting dogs is the example 鈥� while the hedgehog has a single tactic: curl up and play dead. Flexibility or persistence seems to be the choice facing us all.
Gould says that this is a false dichotomy. Knowledge and creativity are best served by combining both attributes. He discusses Isaac Newton and Roger Bacon, the false claim by some scientists that they pursue a superior form of knowledge, rather than part of the whole. He points out that all kinds of human wisdom stand on 鈥渁 bedrock of nature鈥檚 randomness鈥�.
Advertisement
It is, perhaps, the quintessence of modernity that the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty itself. We have moved from the world of the steadfast fact to the world of probability. At the heart of physical sciences, for example, lie randomness and the juggling of probabilities. Darwin, says Gould, understood this: 鈥渆volution makes coordinated sense of a set of observations鈥�, as opposed to creationism where all is separate, 鈥渄istinct and wondrous鈥�. Forsome, as Robert Graves put it in his poem In Broken Images, this is 鈥渁 new confusion of his understanding鈥�, for others it鈥檚 revelatory: 鈥渁 new understanding of my confusion鈥�. And that revelation informs and frames the book, whether Gould is arguing about consilience with E. O. Wilson, or pointing out the dangers of reductionism.
The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister鈥檚 Pox is based upon the antique in another way. Gould has used passages from his collection of antiquarian books to illustrate his argument.
- Published in May in Britain