The Mismeasure of science: in his last book Stephen Jay Gould argues it is a mistake to judge the "magisterium" of science for its failure to engage ethical questions

Michael Ruse

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities by Stephen Jay Gould Harmony Books, 2003; $25.95

My most vivid memories of Stephen Jay Gould date back to December 1981. The place was Little Rock, Arkansas, and the scene was a courtroom where evolution was under attack by so-called scientific creationists. The two-year interregnum in Bill Clinton's five-term gubernatorial leadership was at its midpoint, and had left the state with a governor whose surprise at gaining office was matched only by his inadequacy for the post. The creationists had managed to get the Arkansas house and senate to pass a bill mandating the teaching of both evolution and Genesis in publicly funded school biology classes, and the governor had signed it into law. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately sprang into action to have the law declared unconstitutional, arguing an unwarranted breach of the separation of church and state. Steve and I served as expert witnesses, testifying that evolution is genuine science and that creationism is old-time religion.

In the end the ACLU won the case handily, but at first things were tense. The state's attorney-general hammered away at the pro-evolution witnesses and, as happens in these cases, a certain amount of mud was thrown, and some of it stuck. But by the end of the third day it was clear that we were starting to come out on top. The Arkansas schoolteachers proved to be the most impressive witnesses of all, simply by demonstrating why they could never teach Genesis as biology, no matter what their religious beliefs. (As I remember the episode, all of them were Christians.)

That evening all the ACLU supporters--lawyers, expert witnesses, hangers-on--were relaxing in one of the superb restaurants of Little Rock. A lot of wine was drunk. Then the singing began--instigated by some rather angelic-looking law clerk. The only songs most of us knew in common were the Christian hymns of our childhood, so that was the way we went. And I'll never forget Steve Gould--Harvard professor, secular Jew, eminent evolutionist--belting out "Amazing Grace," especially those lines about being in heaven and praising God's grace for the first ten thousand years, at which point: "We've no less days to sing God's praise/Than when we'd first begun."

For me those recollections epitomize what Stephen Jay Gould was all about: First, that he was there at all--many other prominent figures, beginning with Carl Sagan, had been too busy to take time out to go to the South and fight the creationists. But Steve felt it was his public duty, and he never gave it another thought. Second, that he could fight a good fight. Guess who had just roughed up the lawyers for the state? Guess who had just given them a science lesson that they must remember to this day? Third, that he acted as part of a community, willing to share in the group's tensions as well as its triumphs. And fourth, that he could, and would, sing. Steve was well-known for his love of oratorio, and appreciated its power to move people's hearts.

Personally, Steve had no time for creationism, or for evangelical religion generally, but he understood why others were attracted to it. He was a genius, tremendously creative, and, to the regret of those of us who knew him, terribly arrogant at times. Yet ironically, one of his strengths lay in his capacity to empathize with regular folk, because he was regular folk--he was a born and bred New Yorker whose daddy had been a court reporter, who loved baseball, whose aged relatives could never understand why he hadn't become a "real" doctor. Those things stayed with him.

Stephen Jay Gould is gone now. Those of us who knew him, and many who didn't, are pained by the thought that he died too young, and yet inspired by the example of his personal courage: twenty years ago (shortly after the Arkansas trial), he fought back a particularly vile form of cancer and then continued writing, teaching, and lecturing for another two decades.

Now we have Gould's final book on science, published posthumously. The title--The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities--is a bit misleading. Frankly, I am still unsure how "the magister's pox" fits in. But "the hedgehog" and "the fox," Gould tells us, refer to some lines attributed to the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy." The sentiment might lead you to think Gould chose his title to differentiate between science on the one hand (perhaps foxlike in its many ways of going at things) and the humanities on the other (hedgehoglike in sticking to one theme or topic). But that reading doesn't hold up for long: foxlike behavior and hedgehoglike behavior, Gould says later on, characterize both fields, and neither approach can be considered entirely right or entirely wrong.

Not that the distinction matters terribly much. In several passages throughout the book Gould seems to remember the hedgehog-fox theme he started with, but only somewhat guiltily, at the ends of chapters. No doubt much of this textual confusion would have been addressed in a final rewriting, but Gould died before there was time for that. Because the publisher has seen fit to issue the book anyway, the text as it now stands demands a more interpretative reading than one would ordinarily expect to accord it.

Recognizing this practicality and its pitfalls, I see Gould posing and tackling three interrelated questions: First, is there a divide between science and the humanities? If there is, what is its nature and how did it come about? Finally, what, if anything, should people do about it?

On the first question Gould is surprisingly ambivalent. He properly focuses on the essay "The Two Cultures," written in the late 1950s by the English novelist and physicist C.P. Snow. The scientists and the humanists, Snow argued, are practitioners of the two distinct cultures, and they don't talk to each other--to the particular detriment of the humanities. The average scholar of a subject such as English literature knows nothing of quantum mechanics, and the world and its governance are the poorer for it.

Snow was attacked--brutally--by British humanists when his essay was published. But Gould, though uncomfortable with some of Snow's more venomous critics, is by no means content to toe the "scientist" party line in defending Snow. Snow's complaint that humanists are ignorant of basic science, Gould charges, was grossly exaggerated, overgeneralized to the entire Western world on the basis of the highly limited form of education Snow was familiar with in mid-twentieth-century England. (I can personally attest, though, that Snow was right about England: one began specializing at the age of fifteen, effectively ignoring everything that was not related to one's chosen field.)

More important, Gould seems reluctant to embrace Snow's contention that such a divide exists in England, or that it goes very deep. And even if it does, Gould acknowledges, the English cannot be held responsible for single-handedly keeping science separate from the humanities. The so-called science wars between scientists and humanists in the past decade demonstrate that the divide exists in North America as well.

On one side of those wars are scientists who remain convinced that they are objectively mapping reality--in the immortal words of Howard Cosell, they "tell it like it is." Their patron saint is Sir Karl Popper, the Austrian-born English philosopher who spoke of science as "knowledge without a knower," meaning that it rises above the individual and his or her culture. On the other side of the science wars are historians and sociologists of science and various others, particularly in departments of English and cultural studies, who think that science is as subjective as religion or philosophy. Their patron saint is the French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault, who believed that true objectivity is as untenable in science as it is anywhere else.

In that rancorous debate Gould the scientist seems to be at war with Gould the historian. On the one hand, he clearly thought that science makes it possible for people to discover truths about reality. He would have claimed that punctuated equilibrium--a theory he developed in 1972 with the evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History, to explain the jerky nature of the fossil record--genuinely says something about the real world. On the other hand, Gould the historian--for instance, in his account of the sorry history of I.Q. testing, in his book The Mismeasure of Man--was at the forefront of those showing that people can be as creative about finding "objective" support for their positions as their pernicious ideology demands.

Gould's second question in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is, What is the divide between science and the humanities all about, and how did it come to be? Given his insightful earlier work, I do not find him as helpful on that topic in this book as one might have hoped. As I understand it from my reading of his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, his position is that, because science and the humanities deal with different kinds of issues and topics, neither their methodologies nor their conclusions can be the same.

Take the paired concepts of science and morality, or science and religion. Morality and religion--two concepts Gould often runs together--seem to belong to one domain and science to another (Gould calls these domains Magisteria). They are two world systems that cannot intercept each other, both because they ask different questions of different things and because the answers appropriate to one system are not the ones appropriate to the other. Although they can exist together (and, one hopes, in harmony) they cannot, by their nature, conflict.

Several times in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Gould makes approving reference to the philosopher David Hume's division of things into matters of fact and matters of obligation: "I have this," as opposed to, "It is right and proper that I have this." Gould also agrees with Hume's assertion that, logically, there is no way to get from one to the other. He goes on to argue (though with less force than he does in Rocks of Ages) that science answers factual questions, whereas religion deals with matters of feeling, sentiment, and obligation. Again, the two cannot conflict. I think this is Gould's position, but I'm not sure it's as conciliatory toward religious points of view as Gould, with his avowed ecumenical spirit, might have hoped.

Certainly history suggests that conflict between science and religion in particular, and science and the humanities in general, is nothing new. The breakdown began during and immediately after the scientific revolution, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I suspect, however, that much of the present divide can be traced to the epochal nineteenth-century battles between scientists and humanists, the latter often associated with powerful religious groups. A good example is the debate that erupted soon after the publication of Origin of Species between Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Such conflicts generated great tension on both sides of the science-humanities divide: to a large extent, we are still living with the legacy of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, and of similar hostile encounters. Would that I could sit down for an evening with Gould and argue the issue.

If Gould is less than forthcoming on the first two questions, he is eloquent and articulate about how people ought to respond to the divide. Science and the humanities will always remain separate, he says, because they belong to separate Magisteria, and any attempt to combine them is doomed to fail. His motto is: Separate but Equal, with Respect. But what about those who don't agree with this opinion? Gould concludes his book with an extensive, two-chapter critique of the position taken by his colleague at Harvard, the entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson.

Wilson wants to combine everything--science, politics, religion, ethics, you name it--within one massive framework. To capture his vision, Wilson borrows a word from the nineteenth-century English historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell (pronounced "Hule"). In speaking of Newtonian mechanics, Whewell praised it for bringing so much under so few hypotheses, and spoke of it as a "consilience of inductions." Wilson, too, wants a consilience, not just of all knowledge but especially of all knowledge about humans. He wants it all brought under, and explained by, evolution, particularly the part of evolution that pertains to brain science. For him, Hume's distinction between is and ought is something to be brushed away as irrelevant. What people ought to do is no more and no less than what our brains tell us, and what our brains tell us is what our genes, as naturally selected, dictate.

To Gould, that conclusion is anathema. It is false as science, fallacious as philosophy, and foolish as religion. Life is more than biology. Right and wrong, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, happiness and misery, and so much more may owe their existence to genes, but they also transcend them. To adopt Gould's most famous metaphor (referring in its literal sense to the triangular, often ornamented space on the exterior curve of an arch, sometimes seen atop columns in medieval churches), such emotions and concepts are, biologically speaking, "spandrels" things that seem to have a purpose but do not. As Gould argued at length in his 2002 book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, culture in some sense takes off on its own, and to pretend otherwise is to commit the sin (just about the greatest sin, in Gould's book) of reductionism.

As Gould acknowledges in a lengthy footnote, he and Wilson were at odds for many years. So in a way, it is a little unfortunate, and somewhat petty, that Gould should have gone out with yet one more diatribe against Wilson. But in another way, that's not such a bad thing. As Gould stresses, the differences are intellectual, not personal. At stake is the choice--an important choice--between two quite different visions of the way people think and, in consequence, of the direction research should take. Gould airs the two visions and once again defends his own stance--on balance, an excellent way to finish off a glorious career.

I confess that my own inclinations are with Wilson. Science really does matter; and it matters to everything, not excepting emotions and concepts, the most significant of human aspects and activities. Without going to the extreme of embracing the position of a philosopher such as Daniel C. Dennett--who thinks that once you know all about the brain, you know all about the mind--I just do not see how one can think seriously about the mind without paying at least some attention to the brain, to the physical. And that includes asking biological questions about how and why natural selection gave rise to the human brain.

The paradox is that, in major respects, Gould seems to agree with this position. He writes movingly of his older son, who is autistic, and about what a relief it is for parents to find that the cause of their child's affliction is biological, not bad parenting. At some level, Gould allows that biology does something important with the mind, and that if biology is not working properly, the mind does not work properly. The question is: How much further would Gould have been prepared to go?

Even though, as I mentioned, my inclinations are with Wilson, I think Gould is right in staying onside with Hume--I think one is always right in staying onside with Hume!--and arguing that Wilson is mistaken in claiming that ethics is simply a consequence of biology. At least Gould is right in maintaining that biology does not justify ethics--or, more pointedly, ethical lapses. What has evolved is not necessarily what is right and good. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in the movie The African Queen: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above."

So I find myself attracted to a position somewhere between Gould's and Wilson's: Wilson is right in thinking that biology can explain the origin and continued existence of ethics. Gould is right in thinking that biology does not justify ethics. And both are wrong in thinking that there is nothing more to be said on the matter. My philosophical instinct accords with Hume's: there can be no ultimate justification, whether it is provided (Wilson-style) by evolution or (Gould-style) by something other than evolution. Ethics just is.

By this point both Gould and Wilson would be after my hide, so this is a good point to draw to a close. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is not one of Gould's greatest books. In science, that honor belongs to Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Among essay collections, I would still opt for one of Gould's first books, Ever Since Darwin. Of his monographs, Wonderful Life is way ahead of the others, and for me wins the prize as the best book overall. But in everything Stephen Jay Gould wrote there was always an abundance--to read, to reflect on, to learn from. I mourn his passing. I give thanks for his life. And I rejoice in how he enriched all of our lives.

Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University. His most recent book is Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?

COPYRIGHT 2003 American Museum of Natural History
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group