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In his final book and his first full-length
original title since Full House in 1996, the eminent
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offers a surprising and
nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two
great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin
realms of knowledge that have been divided against each
other for far too long.
To establish his two protagonists, Gould
draws from a seventh century B.C. proverb attributed to
the Greek soldier-poet Archilochus that said roughly, "The
fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great
and effective strategy." While emphatically rejecting
any simplistic attempt to assign either science or the humanities
to one or other of these approaches to knowledge, Gould
uses this ancient concept to demonstrate that neither strategy
can work alone, but that these seeming opposites can be
joined into a common enterprise of tremendous unity and
power.
In building his case, Gould shows why the
common assumption of an inescapable conflict between science
and the humanities (in which he includes religion) is false,
mounts a spirited rebuttal to the ideas that his intellectual
rival E.O. Wilson set forth in his book Consilience,
and explains why the pursuit of knowledge must always operate
upon the bedrock of nature's randomness, The Hedgehog,
the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial discourse,
rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the
most erudite minds of our time.
Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most
influential evolutionary biologists and acclaimed science
essayists of the twentieth century. He died on May 20, 2002,
at the age of sixty.
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