Hedgehogs and Foxes

There’s this famous 1953 idea called the Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin. It refers to how different people view the world.

“The hedgehogs are more the big idea people, more decisive," while the foxes are more accepting of nuance, more open to using different approaches with different problems.”

At first glance, it seems obvious that the foxes must be right, but in real life, hedgehogs are abundant (capitalism is the best system, everything boils down to physics, religious tolerance is the best course…).

 

Why do so many people become hedgehogs? The most common reason is that when you start to understand or appreciate an idea or theme, it can become like that famous line in the movie Inception:

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Everything is seen through the prism of that one “big idea”.

 

I remembered that when I was reading Freeman Dyson’s book, The Scientist as Rebel. At one point, he talks of the Cambrian explosion. Also called the Biological Big Bang, it refers to a tiny timeframe (tiny by biological standards) of 13-25 million years “when there was a sudden radiation of complex life and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record”. I have heard of this “event” in many poplar biology books, and they will acknowledge that it seems to violate how evolution works (slowly, not this fast; why at that point in time – just random or something else?), and then shrug (it happened, we don’t why/how) and move on to the theme of the book.

 

Turns out that Thomas Gold had a theory in an unrelated field (geology) that by coincidence, could explain the Cambrian explosion. In 1955, Gold said that it seemed like the earth’s axis of rotation “might occasionally flip over through an angle of ninety degrees within a time of the order of a million years”. This meant that the old north and south poles would move to the equator and the old points on the equator would move to the new poles.

 

In 1997, an expert on rock magnetism showed that such a ninety-degree shift in the axis of rotation did occur. In the early Cambrian era. Notice the timing? It aligns with the Cambrian explosion which raises a possibility:

“It is possible that the flip of the rotation axis caused profound environmental changes in the oceans and triggered the rapid evolution of new life forms.”

 

This example provides another reason for why people are often hedgehogs. Ignorance. With so many fields, how can anyone know enough of all the fields to become a fox? A biologist doesn’t track geological theories. A guy studying rock magnetism may not know of a geological theory. What are the odds of anyone putting it all together and seeing the interconnections?

 

I also noticed another revealing insight from this example. Today, we associate climate change with negative consequences (and rightly so). But step back a little, and common sense will tell you that need not be the case always. A massive environmental change will mostly be disruptive, but there is no law that says all massive changes must be bad. This is probably another reason why people are hedgehogs. Once you think of environmental changes as bad (as is the case today with what we humans have done), it is easy to extrapolate that all massive environmental changes are bad. And if you have internalized that idea long enough, as that Inception quote above says, it doesn’t even occur to check if the idea is indeed true – the idea has become a parasite that has taken over one’s way of thinking.