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Rating: 
Summary: Bridging words and facts
Review: A good book for any reader in the 21st Century. How do words and facts bridge? Science fiction is fast becoming science fact. This book shows that there is a strong relatioship between science and the humanities-- wish they had taught that to us in college?? Should be required reading for any freshman of any major. Maybe engineering schools should make this a pre-requisite??
Rating: 
Summary: Mating a fox and a hedgehog.
Review: E. O. Wilson observed in his classic book, CONSILIENCE (Knopf, 1998, p. 2), "the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanties." Although he ultimately rejects Wilson's path toward this end, it is this same enterprise paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould undertakes in his final book, THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER'S POX.Employing the fox and the hedgehog as symbols of the "cunning" of science and the "persistence" of the humanities (p. 2), Gould debunks the perceived dichotomy between the two disciplines. Drawing from the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, the false dichotomy between science and the humantities, Gould argues, "probably lies deep within our neurological wiring as an evolved property of mental functioning, once adaptive in distant ancestors with far more limited brain power, but now inhereited as cognitive baggage" (p. 107). For Gould, the humanities and religion are not inferior to science. Rather, he takes a more "integral approach" to find the common ground shared by the two two disciplines (to borrow a phrase from Ken Wilber). "The wonderful and illuminating differences between the sciences and the humanities," he asserts, all serve in the potential service of one wisdom (p. 265). Along the way, it is a truly fascinating spectacle to watch Gould in his attempts to mate a fox and a hedgehog. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Well, yeah... but so what?
Review: Having picked up this book basically on Gould's reputation, I expected some analysis worthy of such a creative title. Indeed, a brief glance through the material made it seem like I would be getting a lot of erudite historical references and some interesting thoughts on a subject I find personally quite important. After slogging through it, however, it's pretty clear that Gould's ideas don't really merit the kind of space and attention given to them in this book. They could have easily been better presented in a five-paragraph essay.
Gould spends most of his time talking about three things, all of which is underpinned by his criticism of what he feels is a natural human tendency to apply a binary filter to everything ("The Dynasty of Dichotomy"). He spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing what he sees as the overblown nature of the early Church hostility to science, the conflict between Ancients and Moderns, and the "science wars", before he ever gets to "mending" any gap between science and the humanities. Besides the brief "science wars" section, most of the book is centered around historical oddities from his personal library, which he readily admits are not truly central to the issues but merely interesting to him. If you have time to kill, you might appreciate such forays into the wilderness of his imagination. But if you actually want some kind of discussion related to the title of the book, just read Chapter 9, "The False Path of Reductionism and the Consilience of Equal Regard", and skip the rest. This is the only chapter with any real new analysis and it's still not entirely satisfactory, claiming as it does that because of emergent behavior (and other non-additive properties) science will never be able to unify or understand the humanities, or even many new scientific disciplines. He simply asserts that while he finds it wistfully pleasant to imagine a Wilsonian "consilience" of the humanities and science, it just isn't going to happen as their domains are quite separate. They have much to offer each each other (no really?), but they're just destined for separate ways. Most of his thought seems to rationalize already held beliefs. With such a difficult and intangible subject, it's easy to fall prey to these faults. Unfortunately, Gould hasn't escaped it either.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Idea Translated Into an Episodic Essay.
Review: Having read E.O. Wilson's book "Conscilience," and (seemingly) having the same blanching reaction to it that Gould did, I was hoping from the outset to give five stars to to this book. But alas, by the time I finished reading it, though I agreed with all of its major points, my conscience only let me give the book 3 stars. Here's why.
First, the book was published with little editing. This, of course, is hardly Gould's fault. While he lived to write the book (and I'm still very glad he did), he passed away before doing much editing. Be that as it may, the book would have seriously benefitted from having someone look it over. In many chapters, Gould meanders, tosses irrelevant asides, and strays regularly from promising lines of thought. That accounts for one star (that I subtract cautiously because, as i say, it is hardly Gould's fault here).
The other two stars are subtracted because of Gould's strange use of historical anecdotes. Gould, of course, is known for this and many collections of his essays find him historically preoccupied. Be that as it may, the subject of this book seemed more to demand the type of abstract and polemical discussion that Gould avowedly is trying to avoid here. Some of the anecdotes (bringing up Nabokov as a legitimate 'straddler' between science and the humanities) are great as case-bolstering asides, but many simply left me befuddled (a) as to why they were relevant; and (b) why they took up entire chapters.
The reason I dwell on the superfluity of Gould's anecdotal preoccupation is because the chapters I enjoyed most were the chapters where he hardly used anecdotes at all. One chapter finds Gould offering a mighty persuasive case that the science wars are themselves a 'social construction.' He recounts that not many of his scientist friends are even aware that there ever was such a thing, while none of his humanities friends have ever held (anything close to) the views sardonically attributed to them. No historical anecdotes in this chapter, and the chapter was all the better for it.
The chapter that really earns its keep, however, is the last one which sees Gould taking E.O. Wilson politely to task for his view that conscilience is tantamount to scientific reductionism - that the science/humanities "divide" can be ameliorated only by scientifically explaining the humanities. Gould recognizes that Wilson's argument here is nothing but an overly-optimistic and exhorbitantly doubtful pipe-dream. Given such seemingly impenetrable scientific failures as: (a) the inability to explain consciousness in stricly neurological and non-subjective terms, and (b) the naturalistic fallacy, whereby a factual "is" doesn't per se translate to an ethical "ought," Gould concludes that at least on some level, the humanities and the sciences will always occupy seperate places in the human condition.
While this concluding chapter was only about 35 pages, it seems to contain virtually all of the main points in the book. That made and makes me wonder why, then, we were presented with so many maundering chapters on this and that historical anecdote to get to one chapter that succinctly makes and argues every promised point in the book!
That is why I gave the book 3, rather than my hoped for 5 stars. Buy the book, especially if you want a useful counterpoint to Wilson's "Conscilience." Also check out Mary Midgley's "Science and Poetry" for many of the same points argued more succinctly.
Rating: 
Summary: Gould's Last Hurrah
Review: I'm not sure just where to start with this review. Let's try this - The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox is the most egotistical, self centered, pedantic, ostentatious, pontifical book I have ever managed to gag down. There. How's that for a start? As to style, Gould forsakes his usual clear and beautiful prose for a wordy, redundant, repetitive monologue, and besides that he keeps saying the same thing over and over again and repeats himself a lot, if you see what I mean. He's dense in spots, but I don't necessarily fault him for that. Sometimes, constructing a logic on a difficult topic simply results in dense prose, and the reader has to pay attention. As to content, the first thing that impressed me was the number of obscure original medieval texts on science and philosophy that Gould has acquired. That was Gould's intention, as far as I can tell. Gould seems to be very impressed with his library, and wants you to be too. Every single time that he uses an example from his collection, and there are lots of them, he is careful to point out that it was translated from his book. Great. I'm a bibliophile too, and I'd love to own some of those volumes, but I'd like to think I'd be a little more humble about it. Who knows - maybe I wouldn't be. He has also taken the time and trouble to learn Latin, and medieval writing conventions, which are not simple. Good on you, Stevie boy. I have to admit it - I've been lazy, having forgotten most of the Latin I learned as an alter boy, and I haven't had the self-discipline to actually learn the language properly. Gould is counting on that apparently. Every time he offers us a bit of Latin, he is careful to point out that he did the translation. Again, a little humility would go a long way. But he is also careful to add plenty of Latin phrases untranslated. I'm not sure what the message here is - perhaps it's I know Latin and you don't? Or maybe it's I've written a lot of popular texts, and this one is for the intelligentsia? More likely, if I had to guess, the message is E.O. Wilson doesn't read Latin and I'm a Renaissance man and he's not. Ostensibly, the book is about the limits of reductionist thinking, its role in the humanities, and a contrast of Gould's and Wilson's views on the topic. Gould rambles, three sheets to the wind for 150 or so pages of flotsam, and every time you think he's going to heel her over and dip a rail in the water, he luffs. But, when he finally beaches himself on the mainland of his thesis, he goes after it with a vengeance. Or maybe I should say a vendetta. Wilson started the whole thing with his book Consilience. If you haven't read it, it's not bad, but I am rather inclined agree with Gould that Wilson kind of goes off the deep end towards the end of his book. Wilson seems to think that in the not too distant future science will be able to derive True Love and the Meaning of Meaning from first principals. I doubt it, but that's OK. He's an old man, he's done a lot, and if he wants to write stuff like this at his age he's entitled, and I think we should have the good grace to humor him, at least until he's dead. Then we can pick on him. Although Gould presents this book as a standard scholarly discourse, it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that this book was written solely because Steve doesn't like Ed very much to start with, and besides that, Dr. Wilson stole Dr. Gould's favorite obscure word. Consilience. That pissed Gould off big time. He's not shy about telling you how mad he is about it either. And, adding injury to insult, Gould feels like Wilson misused the word by extending its meaning beyond it original rigorously defined domain. Gould goes to great lengths to make this case. Now I'm not as smart as Gould, but I am smart enough not to argue bananas with a 500-pound gorilla, and if Gould says he researched the history, and this is the way it is, well then, that's good enough for me, by golly. But English is nothing if not flexible, and I don't think that Wilson really deserves the hiding Gould gives him for stretching consilience a bit. It's a good and useful word, and when it is finally incorporated into our lexicon, I'll bet we use a definition closer to Wilson than Gould and Whewell. Gould writes paragraph after paragraph about how he really kind of likes `ol Ed, and this diatribe shouldn't be mistaken as a fit of pique. OK by me Steve, but me thinks the lady doth protest too loudly (no, I don't own the original, but I did do the translation myself.) All in all, if the topic interests you, it has been hashed and rehashed for the last 3,000 years by the boys over in the philosophy department, and neither Gould nor Wilson offers us any new insights. However, if you wanted to, you could argue the main propositions of both sides by yourself tomorrow morning while you're sitting on the throne having a smoke and a cup of coffee. If you present the cases clearly, and don't get too hung up on the semantics, you should be able to hit all of the salient points and still have time for the comics.
Rating:
Summary: Gould's Last Hurrah
Review: I'm not sure just where to start with this review. Let's try this - The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox is the most egotistical, self centered, pedantic, ostentatious, pontifical book I have ever managed to gag down. There. How's that for a start? As to style, Gould forsakes his usual clear and beautiful prose for a wordy, redundant, repetitive monologue, and besides that he keeps saying the same thing over and over again and repeats himself a lot, if you see what I mean. He's dense in spots, but I don't necessarily fault him for that. Sometimes, constructing a logic on a difficult topic simply results in dense prose, and the reader has to pay attention. As to content, the first thing that impressed me was the number of obscure original medieval texts on science and philosophy that Gould has acquired. That was Gould's intention, as far as I can tell. Gould seems to be very impressed with his library, and wants you to be too. Every single time that he uses an example from his collection, and there are lots of them, he is careful to point out that it was translated from his book. Great. I'm a bibliophile too, and I'd love to own some of those volumes, but I'd like to think I'd be a little more humble about it. Who knows - maybe I wouldn't be. He has also taken the time and trouble to learn Latin, and medieval writing conventions, which are not simple. Good on you, Stevie boy. I have to admit it - I've been lazy, having forgotten most of the Latin I learned as an alter boy, and I haven't had the self-discipline to actually learn the language properly. Gould is counting on that apparently. Every time he offers us a bit of Latin, he is careful to point out that he did the translation. Again, a little humility would go a long way. But he is also careful to add plenty of Latin phrases untranslated. I'm not sure what the message here is - perhaps it's I know Latin and you don't? Or maybe it's I've written a lot of popular texts, and this one is for the intelligentsia? More likely, if I had to guess, the message is E.O. Wilson doesn't read Latin and I'm a Renaissance man and he's not. Ostensibly, the book is about the limits of reductionist thinking, its role in the humanities, and a contrast of Gould's and Wilson's views on the topic. Gould rambles, three sheets to the wind for 150 or so pages of flotsam, and every time you think he's going to heel her over and dip a rail in the water, he luffs. But, when he finally beaches himself on the mainland of his thesis, he goes after it with a vengeance. Or maybe I should say a vendetta. Wilson started the whole thing with his book Consilience. If you haven't read it, it's not bad, but I am rather inclined agree with Gould that Wilson kind of goes off the deep end towards the end of his book. Wilson seems to think that in the not too distant future science will be able to derive True Love and the Meaning of Meaning from first principals. I doubt it, but that's OK. He's an old man, he's done a lot, and if he wants to write stuff like this at his age he's entitled, and I think we should have the good grace to humor him, at least until he's dead. Then we can pick on him. Although Gould presents this book as a standard scholarly discourse, it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that this book was written solely because Steve doesn't like Ed very much to start with, and besides that, Dr. Wilson stole Dr. Gould's favorite obscure word. Consilience. That pissed Gould off big time. He's not shy about telling you how mad he is about it either. And, adding injury to insult, Gould feels like Wilson misused the word by extending its meaning beyond it original rigorously defined domain. Gould goes to great lengths to make this case. Now I'm not as smart as Gould, but I am smart enough not to argue bananas with a 500-pound gorilla, and if Gould says he researched the history, and this is the way it is, well then, that's good enough for me, by golly. But English is nothing if not flexible, and I don't think that Wilson really deserves the hiding Gould gives him for stretching consilience a bit. It's a good and useful word, and when it is finally incorporated into our lexicon, I'll bet we use a definition closer to Wilson than Gould and Whewell. Gould writes paragraph after paragraph about how he really kind of likes 'ol Ed, and this diatribe shouldn't be mistaken as a fit of pique. OK by me Steve, but me thinks the lady doth protest too loudly (no, I don't own the original, but I did do the translation myself.) All in all, if the topic interests you, it has been hashed and rehashed for the last 3,000 years by the boys over in the philosophy department, and neither Gould nor Wilson offers us any new insights. However, if you wanted to, you could argue the main propositions of both sides by yourself tomorrow morning while you're sitting on the throne having a smoke and a cup of coffee. If you present the cases clearly, and don't get too hung up on the semantics, you should be able to hit all of the salient points and still have time for the comics.
Rating:
Summary: Attempt to reconcile natural science and the humanities
Review: In this posthumous publication, Gould provides a thorough historical overview of the development of scientific thought in various fields. He attempts to bridge the gap between the humanities/social sciences and the traditional idea of science as it finds expression in the natural sciences like astronomy, physics, geology etc.
The title refers to hedgehogs that establish themselves so successfully in a particular field that they can forever keep their competitors at a distance, and to foxes that in their turn spread the seed of knowledge through their genius and versatility. The fox and the hedgehog are the models of how the sciences and humanities should interact, because Gould believed that neither single strategy would work.
But a fruitful merger of these seemingly polar opposites could, with the necessary goodwill and restraint, be conjoined into a diverse but common enterprise of power and unity. The book is a plea for increased understanding between the humanities and the natural sciences.
He encourages natural scientists to improve their communication skills and to read beyond their field of specialty, and he criticizes those in the humanities who have no knowledge or understanding of the natural sciences. This can lead to the embarrassing stupidities so well documented in the book Intellectual Impostures (Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox is an engaging text and a stimulating read. It is accessible enough for the general reader and although not considered an example of his best writing, definitely worth a read.
Rating: 
Summary: Fireworks of prose - which fizzle out
Review: The Satin Bowerbird spends time and energy building a structure of dried grass. Decorating it with meaningless baubles to enhance appearance, broken glass and shell pieces add visual attraction, but not strength. An impressive effort, designed to lure another Bowerbird by its delightful display, the bower is abandoned after mating. It's still dazzling, but meaningless. This book rather emulates that bower of straw and glitter. Gould's prose skills, sometimes entertaining and often informative, fail here. Worse, his theme is misdirected and his points so cluttered with arcane or self-serving asides, you begin to wonder why the book was written. His title is a circumlocution - the hedgehog being a single-purpose plodder contending with the more flexible and enterprising fox. Gould begins claiming that historians label the 17th Century as "The Scientific Revolution", when most scholars apply the broader "The Enlightenment" to that era. Having begun on a false note, Gould then builds a dichotomy using a succession of writers, many lost to sight today. That, of course, was Gould's specialty - the restoration of forgotten literary, philosophical or scientific figures. He calls upon this phalanx to show how science and the humanities have diverged. Science, "the upstart" competed for pride of place against the "long-established" studies of the humanities. Science, the "hedgehog" with its narrow focus on facts, eschewed the sweeping assertions of the humanities - the "fox". Over the centuries, the divergence grew as the objective pursuit of evidence proved ill-adapted in philosophical studies. He repeatedly notes that many early scientists were theologians, merging his two "magisteria" of science and religion [He ignores the fact that education of any type remained in the hands of churches, Roman Catholic or Protestant, until very recently]. Although he offers a feeble statement of intent at the opening of the book, it is well into the text before we are confronted with the book's purpose. That, simply stated, is another assault on the father of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson. Gould attempts to invalidate the thesis of Wilson's book "Consilience" in which he urged that science and the humanities must merge. Wilson's argument rests on the idea that science's methodology will inevitably demonstrate its usefulness to the humanities. The two will come together in a "new science of the humanities" with both sacrificing some elements while adopting others across disciplines. Gould offers a largesse of faint praise to Wilson's ambitious effort, but in the last analysis simply declares he can't agree with Wilson's proposal. His disagreement rests, as it has for a generation, on his failure to accept evolutionary roots for human thinking and behaviour. The research achieved during that generation is loftily ignored. "Separate but equal" was Gould's aim. He's offered the rationale before - science and the humanities can operate in harness - "e plurbus unum" [of course!] but retain separate identities. He leaves to others how to bring this coalition of the willing about. It's a shame this final statement of a fine writer exhibits such a paucity of reasoned consideration. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating:
Summary: A book every true scientist should read!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A book every true scientist should read!
Review: 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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