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

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Basically the censor did little more than blot out names, thousands upon thousands of them, usually several per page, and with no interesting change or deletion of content whatever. Erasmus surely ranked as his greatest challenge and bugbear, for Gesner wrote pages about proverbs for each organism, and Erasmus served as the master source for proverbs. Moreover, Gesner, unlike some modern historians, quoted his sources meticulously. I don’t know how many thousands of times Erasmus’s name received explicit citation in Gesner’s book, but the bedeviled censor had to blot the offending letters out each and every time.

  How, ultimately, could the poor censor prevail against Gesner’s unconscious but joint employment of the strategies of both fox and hedgehog—so many places and ways to insert offending names, thus decreasing the proba-bility of finding every last one (the fox’s flexible strategy); and so many simple and mind-numbing repetitions of the same name in the same basic context, Erasmus on proverbs, Erasmus on proverbs, Erasmus on proverbs (the hedgehog’s one stubborn mode). The poor man just couldn’t be perfect against such an onslaught of dull heresy. And guess where he fell?

  Figure 32.

  If we turn to the page on proverbs in Gesner’s chapter De Echino (on the hedgehog), we find the name of Erasmus, dutifully blotted out four times (see figure 32). But there, right smack in the middle of Gesner’s discussion of Erasmus’s exegesis of Archilochus’s old legend about the fox and the hedgehog, our man in Pisa finally slipped and let Erasmus’s name pass through in the most symbolic spot of all. So let the unblotted name of the great Erasmus of Rotterdam, discussing the old and enigmatic motto of the fox and the hedgehog, represent the necessary victory of our best intellectual (and ethical) inclinations, provided that we stick together in our broad and useful diversity, following the ways of both creatures as we exploit all honorable paths to the hedgehog’s one great thing of wisdom.

  I ended the main body of this book with a reference to America’s most famous Enlightenment statement by the estimable Mr. Jefferson (see page 260). I will now truly finish by citing the even more estimable Mr. Franklin, our greatest Enlightenment hero, in one of the finest English puns ever minted. As he stated for the people of America, and for the thirteen colonies of e pluribus unum—and as I say for the wonderful and illuminating differences between the sciences and the humanities, all in the potential service of wisdom’s one great goal—we had better hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.

  1 Moreover, as a Catholic with a surname that precluded any forgetfulness of such apostasy in Anglican Britain, Pope’s popularity at the abbey probably stood about as high as the poet’s own stature of four feet six inches!

  2 Seventeenth-century English used a very flexible and often inconsistent system of spelling. These texts also capitalized many words that would not receive such treatment in modern English, and used far more punctuation (particularly placing commas and semicolons where we would use no punctuation marks). Any scholar faces a dilemma in trying to devise a “best way” for presenting such quotations in general works for modern readers. I have opted for the decision most commonly adopted by my colleagues. I see no sense in slavishly copying the original spellings (which are inconsistent in any case). Thus I use modern spellings, punctuations, and capitalizations. But I strictly follow the actual wording, even when archaic (which I generally find charming in any case). If an archaic wording might confuse modern readers, I retain it anyway and add an immediate explanation in brackets. This procedure, I believe, retains the full flavor and entirely accurate wording of the original, while only modernizing the fluid conventions of typography. (In the few cases of citation from a modern secondary source, rather than from the original document—as in the lines from Dryden on page 12, taken from H. Floris Cohen’s 1994 book, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry—I have reprinted the quotation exactly as I found it in the secondary text—hence the archaic retentions in the Dryden quote, because Cohen so presents it.)

  3 I confess that some of my affinity for this statement rests upon its irrelevant but peculiar property of including six words in a row with only two letters each.

  4 Unfortunately, too much of modern science, although now so long, and so clearly, beyond any need thus to mark its territory of distinction from humanistic study, has retained and intensified this attitude into an active distaste for stylistic felicity in writing—as if the factual content of a work becomes debased if an author also possesses a fortunate talent for decent prose (a true perversion of the hedgehog’s claim for one great way—a doctrine never intended to restrict synergistic approaches to the same good end—the hedgehog’s true goal). Thus we may identify in Ray’s last line a source of later trouble, a claim that would subsequently be read as arrogance and parochialism once the tables turned. I must also add the ironic observation that, despite his expressed judgment (or perhaps, one ought to say, in spite thereof), Ray happened to be an excellent writer, and his good prose certainly furthered his purposes.

  5 Sometimes, to be fair, the justice of this scrutiny cannot be gainsaid because scientists, particularly after winning power and authority as members of a central and established institution, have often ventured beyond their sources of genuine expertise and claimed special insight into ethical issues for the logically invalid reason of superior factual knowledge about questions relevant to the debate at hand. (My technical knowledge of the genetics of cloning gives me no right, or expertise, to dictate legal or moral decisions about the politics, sociology, or ethics of creating, say, a genetic Xerox copy of a grieving couple’s dead child.) But I speak, in this chapter, of legitimate claims by scientists for protection of intellectual work in their own magisterium of nature’s factuality and causal operation.

  6 As an odd footnote to history, Mr. Draper (then so influential, but now largely forgotten) had previously surfaced within my world of evolutionary biology at a particularly dramatic moment in 1860. We all know the famous story of T. H. Huxley’s confrontation with Bishop Samuel (aka “Soapy Sam”) Wilberforce over Darwin’s heresy, published the year before, in 1859—although we usually tell the tale in apocryphal form as yet another triumph of advancing science in its dichotomous warfare with religion. (Indeed, the conservative Wilberforce had no love for evolution, but many liberal theologians could be counted among Darwin’s strongest supporters.) This confrontation has usually been described as a planned and formal debate between the antagonists. In fact the exchange occurred as a spontaneous altercation (if not entirely unexpected, given the characters involved and their anticipated attendance) during the discussion period following a formal address by the same Mr. Draper at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Draper spoke on “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.”

  7 The rest of this section, and the portion of the next section on Bacon’s idols, have been taken in part from the technical article that I wrote to initiate the Millennium series of Science magazine on “Pathways of Discovery” (issue of January 14, 2000). This general name, chosen by the editors for this highly unusual historical series in America’s leading journal for professional scientists, does, I confess, underscore the valid concerns of humanists. For this title highlights an assumption about history as a march to true answers (pathways, construed as basically straight), thus bypassing the insights gained by historians of science about social embeddedness and construction. Moreover, the fact that our key journal deigns to feature a historical series only as a millennial “frill” does underscore the peripheral status of the enterprise in the consciousness of most scientists. This article served as the inspiration and outline for the present book. And I justify this double-dipping into my own work thereby.

  8 I take all quotes from my copy of Gilbert Wats’s translation (1674) of Bacon’s Novum Organum, originally written in Latin for accessibility to all European intellectuals in the only shared language of Bacon’s time. In an irony of grow
th and recursion, this valuable commonality disappeared with the decline of Latin and the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century. Only now has the notion of an international scientific language gained ground again, almost to the point of effective establishment. This time, however, the choice is English—good for us, and galling for some others!

  9 Lest we doubt that deeply rooted, or virtually unquestioned, assumptions about the structure of social practices or human relationships can change with alarming speed and unanticipated directionality (in ways that we either welcome or deplore), who in my generation would ever have imagined that smoking would shift from the chief public and “harmless” pleasure of more than half the adult world to the leading social vice of our time. Have you ever noticed how, in movies form the 1930s, at least half the cast puffs away at any given moment. Folks my age will also remember—while our children will scarcely credit the claim—that small packs of cigarettes used to arrive gratis on every airplane meal tray. And one dared not ask the passenger in the adjacent seat to refrain from lighting up, for such a request, unless apologetically backed up with a doctor’s note about your peculiar respiratory problems, would have ranked as the height of chutzpah or impolite assault upon inalienable democratic rights. To illustrate our improvement on an even more important social question (leaving ever so much room for further melioration), I well remember the words of my egalitarian father when, in 1950 or so, I saw a young mixed-race couple walking hand in hand down the streets of Manhattan (scarcely a segregationist bailiwick), and I gawked at a sight I had never seen before: “Steve, don’t feel guilty that you stared in surprise. Some day, as the world improves, such a mixture will seem no more strange than a romantic pairing of a blonde and a brunette.” My dad, something of a Pollyanna, rarely predicted social change with accuracy, but I am glad that he made a correct forecast in this case.

  10 Biologists, in their narrowness, often think that their inventions, so cleverly contrived, have then spread to other disciplines—whereas, in reality, we have usurped someone else’s innovation or terminology. In my favorite example, Linnaeus awarded the name Primates—meaning “first” in Latin—to the mammalian order of monkeys, apes, and humans, in obvious reference to their superior mentality. Since all biologists regard this term as our property, we become amused when we encounter the ecclesiastical usage of “primate” as the chief bishop among all others in a nation or larger region—for we can only conjure up an image of a holy man with a miter, scratching himself on all fours in a cage at the local zoo. But the church rightly owns the term by priority of several centuries over Linnaeus’s borrowing. At least some ecclesiastics keep a good sense of humor about our usurpation. A wonderful letter from the spokesperson of the Primate (chief Anglican bishop) of Canada to the hapless compilers of a questionnaire about monkeys and apes at local zoos has been copied and widely circulated among biologists throughout the world. The spokesperson reports that his reverend boss is not in captivity, does not care for bananas, and lives in a house with his wife and kids.

  11 At this early stage in the history of printing, publishers had not yet fully recognized the advantages and transforming power of movable type. This printed book, from 1487, still uses cryptic and extensive abbreviations for many words, converting the entire text into a form of shorthand. These conventional abbreviations had greatly boosted the speed of production for texts, when each copy had to be written out by hand, but saved little time, and perhaps a little more space—but only at the cost of great ambiguity and difficulty in reading—when the type for each word only needed to be set once. Thus these abbreviations slowly faded from use, leading to our modern conventions of writing texts in full. But the old abbreviations still prevail, though set in type, in this book from 1487. Thus, for example, the word potentia becomes pona both in the printed type and in my reader’s marginal annotations.

  12 The remainder of this chapter is an edited version of my previous essay, inevitably titled “Sweetness and Light,” and published in my book Dinosaur in a Haystack (New York, Harmony Books, 1995).

  13 The closing tales of this section include some material from previously published essays: Nabokov from I Have Landed (Harmony Books, 2002), Thayer from Bully for Brontosaurus (W. W. Norton, 1991), and Poe from Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony Books, 1995).

  14 I learned to appreciate Thayer’s point viscerally when I recognized the same principle behind one of the triumphs of modern architecture: the John Hancock Building, Boston’s tallest. This glass tower rises high over Copley Square, right next to H. H. Richardson’s magnificent Trinity Church. One would think that such a tall building, of such radically different style, would ruin and overwhelm the setting of one of Boston’s finest, and basically late-Victorian to early-twentieth-century, public spaces. But one day I looked up and recognized that the Hancock Building, a very narrow parallelogram in plan view, has been cleverly sited so that, from nearly every crucial vantage point, one sees only the two dimensions of a single wall of glass (or just two of the sides as they meet at a highly obtuse angle, with no shadow cast across). And even though this wall rises more than sixty stories above the ground, the utter flatness renders the building effectively invisible, or at least entirely unobtrusive, if not actually enhancing as a blank “canvas” of sky to highlight the low buildings of Copley Square.

  15 As I confessed a personal reason for citing Andersen above, I would not be following norms of proper disclosure (despite my personal distaste for “confessional” writing) if I did not include a few lines about my collegial history with E. O. Wilson. First of all, and to admit something in myself that I can only deem petty, I was a bit peeved when Wilson chose Consilience as the title to his 1998 book. In my own work on the history and philosophy of science, with my particular focus on Darwin and the Victorian period in general, I had studied Whewell’s concept of consilience, and had used the term and idea prominently in two papers, as the centerpiece for describing Darwin’s historical methodology (Gould, 1986) and in defending my own style of empirical documentation in a major monograph on the taxonomy of a particularly difficult group of land snails (Gould and Woodruff, 1986). I thought that I was the only living evolutionary biologist who had ever discovered and used Whewell’s term. (I guess I mention this to give readers ammunition for suspecting a personal motivation that might legitimately be called mean-spirited if you feel that I have gloated a bit too much in arguing that Wilson misconstrues Whewell’s motives and intentions.)

  It is also scarcely a secret that Ed Wilson and I have had our disagreements on some theoretical issues in evolutionary biology, centered upon the roles of adaptation and the applications of traditional Darwinian arguments to certain forms of human social behavior. Since people assume that intellectual heat must breed emotional fire, I believe that many people assume hostility between us. I can only say that I have never experienced any personal difficulties or animosity with Ed Wilson, that I do not remember a harsh word ever passing between us in any verbal exchange, and that our relationship has always been entirely collegial and respectful, although we have (I suspect for reasons of common temperament as notorious loners) never became friends in a personal sense.

  I also wish to comment on one incident that continues to fill me with chagrin, although I believe that both Ed and I acted entirely honorably—with far more honor to him, as I have long regretted an action I did not take. At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ed and I participated in a tough and wide-ranging session of criticism on his theory of sociobiology. In these times of more radical student politics, a group of juvenilistic ideologues (I will not dignify their actions with the name of any serious political or scientific theory), arguing that sociobiology spread racism (a nonsensical charge since the theory deals with putative human universals, and not with the causes of geographically based variation, the pseudoscientific substrate for racism), rushed the stage, and “demonstrated” with chants and charges. One student, yelling “Racist Wilson,
you’re all wet,” took a cup of water and poured it over Wilson’s head. The group then left the stage and the hall. (I was seated right next to Ed and got pretty wet myself.)

  The incident, ugly enough already, for obvious reasons both general and specific, became even uglier because Wilson, at the time, had his ankle in a cast and would not have been able to defend himself physically, had the necessity arisen. I praise Wilson over me for two reasons. I took the microphone and denounced the protestors who had so sullied and destroyed our attempt to present a serious and respectful, if intellectually tough, critique of sociobiology. I cited one of their own supposedly canonical documents against them—Lenin’s pamphlet describing “left-wing communism” (a similar movement of his time, based on silly show rather than serious theory) as “an infantile disorder.” Ed simply wiped himself off and continued his talk. His silent dignity beat my impassioned outrage by an order of magnitude. He was also the target of their attack and had real reason for fear.

  My chagrin requires a personal confession as well: I have never, in my adult life, hit another human being (well, maybe I once gave one of my kids a really light potch on the tochas after a particularly outrageous outburst). But I would give a great deal to have that one moment back—to alter contingent history with a different action that I could and should have taken, that would have made no difference whatever in the outcome, but that would have made me feel ever so much better for its primal rightness. You see, I saw that

  young man with the cup of water and I realized what he was about to do. I thought about standing up and just knocking the cup out of his hand, but the incident ended in a second, and I just didn’t move quickly enough. Oh, if I had followed my deeply repressed instinct, someone else—probably more people—would have thrown more water on more participants. Maybe a few punches might have been thrown. But so what? The “brave” protestors were poseurs. They presented no threat. Now, I am the very antithesis of a violent man, even for such a largely symbolic action. Yet I long for another shot at that moment, so I could act faster and knock that little cup of water right back into that idiot’s face. (Incidentally, folks, stories of this type always “grow” with time. Most reports speak about big pitchers of ice-cold water. Many accounts have even stated that the demonstrators poured blood all over Wilson. It doesn’t make a particle of difference because the incident was maximally ugly merely for happening at a scientific meeting at all—but I was there, and the offending item was a small cup of water, thrown by a smaller-minded poseur.)