 |
The Artist and the Scientist
By Beth WeinhouseBeth Weinhouse is a writer specializing in health. She co-authored "Outrageous Practices: How Gender Bias Threatens Women’s Health."
May 11, 2003
THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX AND THE MAGISTER'S POX: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, by Stephen Jay Gould. Harmony, 274 pp., $25.95.
Humans have a tendency to see things as dichotomies: black and white, right and wrong, east and west, and the more "primal" dualities of night and day, male and female.
But Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent Harvard paleontologist and prolific author who died last May at the age of 60, deplored this human tendency, and saw the world in infinite shades of gray. His 23rd (and last) book tackles the troublesome dichotomy by which our society has divided knowledge into one of two camps: the sciences or the humanities. (A previous book of Gould's, "Rock of Ages," looked at the divide between science and religion.)
According to Gould, the dichotomy between science and the humanities - which he argues was never truly real - has now outserved its purpose and actually hinders scholars in all fields of knowledge. "I rather suspect that this innate propensity [to see things as dichotomies] represents little more than 'baggage' from an evolutionary past of much simpler brains built only to reach those quick decisions - fight or flight, sleep or wake, mate or wait - that make all the difference in a Darwinian world of nonconscious animals."
Looking at the current state of scholarly research and academia, Gould argues that scientists and humanists need each other's viewpoints to expand and understand their own fields better. Advocating that there is "a time to break down, a time to build up," Gould urges the disciplines to learn from each other and take what is useful. For instance, Gould believes that scientists are not qualified to give moral interpretations of their findings, which are better left to humanists.
As an example, he poses the current controversy about when human life begins (and when and under what circumstances abortion is morally acceptable). He states that one cannot advocate any ethical definition of life's beginning until one understands the biology of conception - the scientist's jurisdiction. "But no study of the biology of conception and pregnancy can specify the ethical, theological or merely political 'moment' of life's legal or moral inception." Science should cede this territory, he says, and be the messenger, not the moralizer.
The discussion of the converse - why the humanities need the sciences - is more vague, and seems to consist mainly of urging humanists to accept the power of the sciences to increase the storehouse of knowledge and understanding of the universe. In particular, Gould praises scholarly undertakings that easily merge the sciences and humanities - scientific drawings that are also works of art, for instance, and great literature that is based on scientific fact.
He cites the work of Vladimir Nabokov, whose references to butterflies are not symbols - as many literary scholars have posited - but accurate scientific descriptions, as Nabokov (who was a curator of lepidopterology at Harvard) had always claimed. Nabokov, a scientist and a humanist, recognized the folly of keeping the disciplines separate. "There can be no science without fancy, and no art without facts," he said.