The Ascent of Man

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by J. Bronowski

  Title Page

  Foreword by Richard Dawkins

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE: LOWER THAN THE ANGELS

  CHAPTER TWO: THE HARVEST OF THE SEASONS

  CHAPTER THREE: THE GRAIN IN THE STONE

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE HIDDEN STRUCTURE

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

  CHAPTER SIX: THE STARRY MESSENGER

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE MAJESTIC CLOCKWORK

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DRIVE FOR POWER

  CHAPTER NINE: THE LADDER OF CREATION

  CHAPTER TEN: WORLD WITHIN WORLD

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: KNOWLEDGE OR CERTAINTY

  CHAPTER TWELVE: GENERATION UPON GENERATION

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE LONG CHILDHOOD

  Bibliography

  Index

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Dr Jacob Bronowksi’s The Ascent of Man traces the development of human society through our understanding of science.

  First published in 1973 to accompany the groundbreaking BBC television series, it is considered one of the first works of ‘popular science’, illuminating the historical and social context of scientific development for a generation of readers. In his highly accessible style, Dr Bronowski discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature.

  About the Author

  Dr Bronowski’s magnificent thirteen-part BBC television series The Ascent of Man traced our rise – both as a species and as moulders of our own environment and future. The book of the programmes covers the history of science, but of science in the broadest terms. Invention from the flint tool to geometry, from the arch to the theory of relativity, are shown to be expressions of man’s specific ability to understand nature, to control it, not to be controlled by it. Dr Bronowski’s rare grasp not only of science, but also of its historical and social context, gave him great advantages as an historian of ideas. The book gives us a new perspective not just on science, but on civilisation.

  Dr Jacob Bronowski, who was born in Poland in 1908, died in 1974. His family had settled in Britain and he was educated at Cambridge University.

  He was distinguished not only as a scientist but also as the author of books and broadcasts on the arts. Many viewers will remember his science programmes on television: he also wrote radio plays, including one which won the Italia Prize.

  Dr Bronowski, who was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, had lived and worked in America since 1964, as a Senior Fellow and Director of the Council for Biology in Human Affairs at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California.

  Other Books by J. Bronowski

  The Poet’s Defence 1939 & 1966

  William Blake and The Age of Revolution 1944 & 1965

  The Common Sense of Science 1951

  The Face of Violence 1954 & 1967

  Science and Human Values 1958

  with The Abacus and The Rose:

  A New Dialogue on Two World Systems 1965

  Selections from William Blake 1958

  The Western Intellectual Tradition

  (with Prof Bruce Mazlish) 1960

  Insight 1964

  The Identity of Man 1965 & 1972

  Nature and Knowledge:

  The Philosophy of Contemporary Science 1969

  FOREWORD

  by Richard Dawkins

  ‘Last renaissance man’ has become a cliché, but we forgive a cliché on the rare occasion when it is true. Certainly it is hard to think of a better candidate for the accolade than Jacob Bronowski. You’ll find other scientists who can parade a deep parallel knowledge of the arts, or – in one actual case – combine eminence in science with pre-eminence in Chinese history. But who more than Bronowski weaves a deep knowledge of history, art, cultural anthropology, literature and philosophy into one seamless cloth with his science? And does it lightly, effortlessly, never sinking to pretension? Bronowski uses the English language – not his first language, which makes it all the more remarkable – as a painter uses his brush, with mastery all the way from broad canvas to exquisite miniature.

  Inspired by the Mona Lisa, here is what he has to say about arguably the first and greatest renaissance man, whose drawing of the baby in the womb introduced the television version of The Ascent of Man:

  Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind. And the Mona Lisa is a very good example, because after all what did Leonardo do for much of his life? He drew anatomical pictures, such as the baby in the womb in the Royal Collection at Windsor. And the brain and the baby is exactly where the plasticity of human behaviour begins.

  How deftly Bronowski segues from Leonardo’s drawing to the Taung baby: type-specimen of our ancestral genus Australopithecus, victim – as we now know, though Bronowski didn’t when he performed his mathematical analysis on the tiny skull – of a giant eagle two million years ago.

  There’s a quotable aphorism on every page of this book, something to treasure, something to stick on your door for all to see, an epitaph, perhaps, for the gravestone of a great scientist. ‘Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’ Uplifting? Yes. Inspiring? Without doubt. But read it in context and it is shocking. The grave turns out to belong to an entire tradition of European scholarship, destroyed by Hitler and his allies almost overnight:

  Europe was no longer hospitable to the imagination – and not just the scientific imagination. A whole conception of culture was in retreat: the conception that human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. Silence fell, as after the trial of Galileo. The great men went out into a threatened world. Max Born. Erwin Schrödinger. Albert Einstein. Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Arturo Toscanini. Bruno Walter. Marc Chagall.

  Words so powerful don’t need a raised voice or ostentatious tears. Bronowski’s words gained impact from his calm, humane, understated tones, with the engagingly rolled Rs as he looked straight into the camera, spectacles flashing like beacons in the dark.

  That was a rare dark passage in a book that is mostly filled with light, and genuinely uplifting. You can hear Bronowski’s distinctive voice through this book, and you can see his expressive hand chopping down to cut through complexity and make a point. He stands before a great sculpture, Henry Moore’s The Knife Edge, to tell us,

  The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action. The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

  Bronowski was a rationalist and an iconoclast. He was not content to bask in the achievements of science but sought to provoke, to pique, to needle.

  That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

  That applies not just to science but to all learning, epitomised, for Bronowski by one of the world’s oldest and greatest universities – in Germany as it happen
s:

  The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.

  Bronowski treated the magical speculations of primitive man with sympathy and understanding, but in the end

  … magic is only a word, not an answer. In itself, magic is a word which explains nothing.

  There is magic – the right kind of magic – in science. There is poetry too, and magical poetry on every page of this book. Science is the poetry of reality. If he didn’t say that, it is the kind of thing he might have said, articulate polymath and gentle sage, whose wisdom and intelligence symbolises all that is best in the ascent of man.

  INTRODUCTION

  The first outline of The Ascent of Man was written in July 1969 and the last foot of film was shot in December 1972. An undertaking as large as this, though wonderfully exhilarating, is not entered lightly. It demands an unflagging intellectual and physical vigour, a total immersion, which I had to be sure that I could sustain with pleasure; for instance, I had to put off researches that I had already begun; and I ought to explain what moved me to do so.

  There has been a deep change in the temper of science in the last twenty years: the focus of attention has shifted from the physical to the life sciences. As a result, science is drawn more and more to the study of individuality. But the interested spectator is hardly aware yet how far-reaching the effect is in changing the image of man that science moulds. As a mathematician trained in physics, I too would have been unaware, had not a series of lucky chances taken me into the life sciences in middle age. I owe a debt for the good fortune that carried me into two seminal fields of science in one lifetime; and though I do not know to whom the debt is due, I conceived The Ascent of Man in gratitude to repay it.

  The invitation to me from the British Broadcasting Corporation was to present the development of science in a series of television programmes to match those of Lord Clark on Civilisation. Television is an admirable medium for exposition in several ways: powerful and immediate to the eye, able to take the spectator bodily into the places and processes that are described, and conversational enough to make him conscious that what he witnesses are not events but the actions of people. The last of these merits is to my mind the most cogent, and it weighed most with me in agreeing to cast a personal biography of ideas in the form of television essays. The point is that knowledge in general and science in particular does not consist of abstract but of manmade ideas, all the way from its beginnings to its modern and idiosyncratic models. Therefore the underlying concepts that unlock nature must be shown to arise early and in the simplest cultures of man from his basic and specific faculties. And the development of science which joins them in more and more complex conjunctions must be seen to be equally human: discoveries are made by men, not merely by minds, so that they are alive and charged with individuality. If television is not used to make these thoughts concrete, it is wasted.

  The unravelling of ideas is, in any case, an intimate and personal endeavour, and here we come to the common ground between television and the printed book. Unlike a lecture or a cinema show, television is not directed to crowds. It is addressed to two or three people in a room, as a conversation face to face – a one-sided conversation for the most part, as the book is, but homely and Socratic nevertheless. To me, absorbed in the philosophic undercurrents of knowledge, this is the most attractive gift of television, by which it may yet become as persuasive an intellectual force as the book.

  The printed book has one added freedom beyond this: it is not remorselessly bound to the forward direction of time, as any spoken discourse is. The reader can do what the viewer and the listener cannot, which is to pause and reflect, turn the pages back and the argument over, compare one fact with another and, in general, appreciate the detail of evidence without being distracted by it. I have taken advantage of this more leisurely march of mind whenever I could, in putting on paper now what was first said on the television screen. What was said had required a great volume of research, which turned up many unexpected links and oddities, and it would have been sad not to capture some of that richness in this book. Indeed, I should have liked to do more, and to interleave the text in detail with the source material and quotations on which it rests. But that would have turned the book into a work for students instead of the general reader.

  In rendering the text used on the screen, I have followed the spoken word closely, for two reasons. First, I wanted to preserve the spontaneity of thought in speech, which I had done all I could to foster wherever I went. (For the same reason, I had chosen whenever possible to go to places that were as fresh to me as to the viewer.) Second and more important, I wanted equally to guard the spontaneity of the argument. A spoken argument is informal and heuristic; it singles out the heart of the matter and shows in what way it is crucial and new; and it gives the direction and line of the solution so that, simplified as it is, still the logic is right. For me, this philosophic form of argument is the foundation of science, and nothing should be allowed to obscure it.

  The content of these essays is in fact wider than the field of science, and I should not have called them The Ascent of Man had I not had in mind other steps in our cultural evolution too. My ambition here has been the same as in my other books, whether in literature or in science: to create a philosophy for the twentieth century which shall be all of one piece. Like them, this series presents a philosophy rather than a history, and a philosophy of nature rather than of science. Its subject is a contemporary version of what used to be called Natural Philosophy. In my view, we are in a better frame of mind today to conceive a natural philosophy than at any time in the last three hundred years. This is because the recent findings in human biology have given a new direction to scientific thought, a shift from the general to the individual, for the first time since the Renaissance opened the door into the natural world.

  There cannot be a philosophy, there cannot even be a decent science, without humanity. I hope that sense of affirmation is manifest in this book. For me, the understanding of nature has as its goal the understanding of human nature, and of the human condition within nature.

  To present a view of nature on the scale of this series is as much an experiment as an adventure, and I am grateful to those who made both possible. My first debt is to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies which has long supported my work on the subject of human specificity, and which gave me a year of sabbatical leave to film the programmes. I am greatly indebted also to the British Broadcasting Corporation and its associates, and very particularly there to Aubrey Singer who invented the massive theme and urged it on me for two years before I was persuaded.

  The list of those who helped to make the programmes is so long that I must put it on a page of its own, and thank them in a body; it was a pleasure to work with them. However, I cannot pass over the names of the producers that stand at the head of the list, and particularly Adrian Malone and Dick Gilling, whose imaginative ideas transubstantiated the word into flesh and blood.

  Two people worked with me on this book, Josephine Gladstone and Sylvia Fitzgerald, and did much more; I am happy to be able to thank them here for their long task. Josephine Gladstone had charge of all the research for the series since 1969, and Sylvia Fitzgerald helped me plan and prepare the script at each successive stage. I could not have had more stimulating colleagues.

  J. B.

  La Jolla, California

  August 1973

  CHAPTER ONE

  LOWER THAN THE ANGELS

  Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.

  It is reported that when t
he Spaniards arrived overland at the Pacific Ocean in 1769 the California Indians used to say that at full moon the fish came and danced on these beaches. And it is true that there is a local variety of fish, the grunion, that comes up out of the water and lays its eggs above the normal high-tide mark. The females bury themselves tail first in the sand and the males gyrate round them and fertilise the eggs as they are being laid. The full moon is important, because it gives the time needed for the eggs to incubate undisturbed in the sand, nine or ten days, between these very high tides and the next ones that will wash the hatched fish out to sea again.

  Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations, by which an animal fits into its environment like one cog-wheel into another. The sleeping hedgehog waits for the spring to burst its metabolism into life. The humming-bird beats the air and dips its needle-fine beak into hanging blossoms. Butterflies mimic leaves and even noxious creatures to deceive their predators. The mole plods through the ground as if he had been designed as a mechanical shuttle.

  So millions of years of evolution have shaped the grunion to fit and sit exactly with the tides. But nature – that is, biological evolution – has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, by comparison with the grunion he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet – this is the paradox of the human condition – one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution – not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.