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chapter thirteen — THE LONG CHILDHOOD

 

I begin this last essay in Iceland because it is the seat of the oldest democracy in Northern Europe. In the natural amphitheatre of Thingvellir, where there were never any buildings, the Allthing of Iceland (the whole community of the Norsemen of Iceland) met each year to make laws and to receive them. And this began about AD 900, before Christianity arrived, at a time when China was a great empire, and Europe was the spoil of princelings and robber barons. That is a remarkable beginning to democracy.

But there is something more remarkable about this misty, inclement site. It was chosen because the farmer who had owned it had killed, not another farmer but a slave, and had been outlawed. Justice was seldom so even — handed in slave-owning cultures. Yet justice is a universal of all cultures. It is a tightrope that man walks, between his desire to fulfil his wishes, and his acknowledgement of social responsibility. No animal is faced with this dilemma: an animal is either social or solitary. Man alone aspires to be both in one, a social solitary. And to me that is a unique biological feature. That is the kind of problem that engages me in my work on human specificity, and that I want to discuss.

It is something of a shock to think that justice is part of the biological equipment of man. And yet it is exactly that thought which took me out of physics into biology, and that has taught me since that a man’s life, a man’s home, is a proper place in which to study his biological unique­ness.

It is natural that by tradition biology is thought of in a different way: that the likeness between man and the animals is what dominates it. Back before the year ad 200 the great classic author of antiquity in medicine, Claudius Galen, studied, for example, the forearm in man. How did he study it? By dissecting the forearm in a Barbary ape. That is how you have to begin, necessarily using the evidence of the animals, long before the theory of evolution comes to justify the analogy. And to this day the wonderful work on animal behaviour by Konrad Lorenz naturally makes us seek for likeness between the duck and the tiger and man; or B. F. Skinner’s psychological work on pigeons and rats. They tell us something about man. But they cannot tell us everything. There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Let us not beat about the bush. The horse and the rider have many anatomical features in common. But it is the human creature that rides the horse, and not the other way about. And the rider is a very good example, because man was not created to ride the horse. There is no wiring inside the brain that makes us horse riders. Riding a horse is a comparatively recent invention, less than five thousand years old. And yet it has had an immense influence, for instance on our social structure.

The plasticity of human behaviour makes that possible. That is what characterizes us; in our social institutions, of course, but for me, naturally, above all in books, because they are the permanent product of the total interests of the human mind. They come to me like the memory of my parents: Isaac Newton, the great man dominating the Royal Society at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and William Blake, writing the Songs of Innocence late in the eighteenth century. They are two aspects of the one mind, and both are what behavioural biologists call ‘species — specific’.



How can I put this most simply? I wrote a book recently called The Identity of Man. I never saw the cover of the English edition until the book reached me in print. And yet the artist had understood exactly what was in my mind, by putting on the cover a drawing of the brain and the Mona Lisa, one on top of the other. In his action he demonstrated what the book said. 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.

I have an object which I treasure: a cast of the skull of a child that is two million years old, the Taung baby. Of course, it is not strictly a human child. And yet if she — I always think of her as a girl — if she had lived long enough, she might have been my ancestor. What distinguishes her little brain from mine? In a simple sense, the size. That brain, if she had grown up, would have weighed perhaps a little over a pound. And my brain, the average brain today, weighs three pounds.

I am not going to talk about the neural structures, about one-way conduction in nervous tissues, or even about the old brain and the new, because that apparatus is what we share with many animals. I am going to talk about the brain as it is specific to the human creature.

The first question we ask is, Is the human brain a better computer — a more complex computer? Of course, artists in particular tend to think of the brain as a computer. So in his Portrait of Dr Bronowski Terry Durham has symbols of the spectrum and the computer, because that is how an artist imagines a scientist’s brain. But of course that cannot be right. If the brain were a computer, then it would be carrying out a pre-wired set of actions in an inflexible sequence.

By way of example, think of a very beautiful piece of animal behaviour described in my friend Dan Lehrman’s work on the mating of the ring-dove. If the male coos in the right way, if he bows in the right way, then the female explodes in excitement, all her hormones squirt, and she goes through a sequence as part of which she builds a perfect nest. Her actions are exact in detail and order, yet they are untaught, and therefore invariable; the ring-dove never changes them. Nobody ever gave her any set of bricks to learn to build a nest. But you could not get a human being to build anything unless the child had put together a set of bricks. That is the beginning of the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal, of the dome at Sultaniyeh and the Watts Towers, of Machu Picchu and the Pentagon.

We are not a computer that follows routines laid down at birth. If we are any kind of machine, then we are a learning machine, and we do our important learning in specific areas of the brain. Thus you see that the brain has not just blown up to two or three times its size during its evolution. It has grown in quite special areas: where it controls the hand, for instance, where speech is controlled, where foresight and planning are controlled. I shall ask you to look at them one by one.

Consider the hand first. The recent evolution of man certainly begins with the advancing development of the hand, and the selection for a brain which is particularly adept at manipulating the hand. We feel the pleasure of that in our actions, so that for the artist the hand remains a major symbol: the hand of Buddha, for instance, giving man the gift of humanity in a gesture of calm, the gift of fearlessness. But also for the scientist the hand has a special gesture: we can oppose the thumb to the fingers. Well, the apes can do that. But we can oppose the thumb precisely to the forefinger, and that is a special human gesture. And it can be done because there is an area in the brain so large that I can best describe its size to you in the following way: we spend more grey matter in the brain manipulating the thumb than in the total control of the chest and the abdomen.

I remember as a young father tiptoeing to the cradle of my first daughter when she was four or five days old, and thinking, ‘These marvellous fingers, every joint so perfect, down to the finger nails. I could not have designed that detail in a million years’. But of course it is exactly a million years that it took me, a million years that it took mankind, for the hand to drive the brain and for the brain to feed back and drive the hand to reach its present stage of evolution. And that takes place in a quite specific place in the brain. The whole of the hand is essentially monitored by a part of the brain that can be marked out, near the top of the head.

Take next an even more specifically human part of the brain which does not exist in animals at all: for speech. That is localized in two connected areas of the human brain; one area is close to the hearing centre, and the other lies forward and higher, in the frontal lobes. Is that pre­wired? Yes, in one sense, because if we do not have the speech centres intact we cannot speak at all. And yet, does it have to be learned? Of course it does. I speak English, which I only learned at the age of thirteen; but I could not speak English if I had not before learned language. You see, if you leave a child speaking no language until the age of thirteen, then it is almost impossible for it to learn at all. I speak English because I learned Polish at the age of two. I have forgotten every word of Polish, but I learned language. Here as in other human gifts the brain is wired to learn.

The speech areas are very peculiar in another way that is human. You know that the human brain is not symmetr­ical in its two halves. The evidence is familiar to you in the observation that, unlike other animals, men are markedly right-handed or left-handed. Speech also is controlled on one side of the brain, but the side does not vary. Whether you are right-handed or left-handed, speech is almost certainly on the left. There are exceptions, in the same way that there are people who have their heart on the right, but the exceptions are rare: by and large speech is in areas in the left half of the brain. And what is in the matching areas on the right? We do not exactly know, so far. We do not exactly know what the right-hand side of the brain does in those areas which are devoted to speech on the left. But it looks as if they take the input that comes by way of the eye — the map of a two-dimensional world on the retina — and turn it or organize it into a three-dimensional picture. If that is right, then in my view it is clear that speech is also a way of organizing the world into its parts and putting them together again like movable images.

The organization of experience is very far-sighted in man, and is lodged in a third area of human specificity. The main organization of the brain is in the frontal lobes and the prefrontal lobes. I am, every man is, a highbrow, an egghead, because that is how his brain goes. By contrast, we know that the Taung skull is not just that of a child that died recently and that we have mistaken for a fossil, because she still has a rather sloping forehead.

Exactly what do these large frontal lobes do? They may well have several functions, certainly, and yet do one very specific and important thing. They enable you to think of actions in the future, and wait for a reward then. Some beautiful experiments on this delayed response were first done by Walter Hunter round about 1910, and then refined by Jacobsen in the 1930s. The kind of thing that Hunter did was this: he would take some reward, and he would show it to an animal and then hide it. The results found in the darling of the laboratory, the rat, are typical. If you take a rat and, having shown it the reward, you let it go at once, the rat of course goes to the hidden reward immedi­ately. But if you keep the rat waiting for some minutes, then it is no longer able to identify where it ought to go for its reward.

Of course, children are quite different. Hunter did the same experiments with children, and you can keep children of five or six waiting for half an hour, perhaps an hour. Hunter had a little girl whom he was trying to keep amused while keeping her waiting, and he talked to her. Finally she said to him, ‘You know, I think you’re just trying to make me forget.’

The ability to plan actions for which the reward is a long way off is an elaboration of the delayed response, and sociologists call it ‘the postponement of gratification’. It is a central gift that the human brain has to which there is no rudimentary match in animal brains until they become quite sophisticated, well up in the evolutionary scale, like our cousins the monkeys and the apes. That human development means that we are concerned in our early education actually with the postponement of decisions. Here I am saying something different from the sociologists. We have to put off the decision-making process, in order to accumulate enough knowledge as a preparation for the future. That seems an extraordinary thing to say. But that is what childhood is about, that is what puberty is about, that is what youth is about.

I want to put my stress on the postponement of decision quite dramatically — and I mean the word literally. What is the major drama in the English language? It is Hamlet. What is Hamlet about? It is a play about a young man — a boy — who is faced with the first great decision of his life. And it is a decision beyond his reach: to kill the murderer of his father. It is pointless of the Ghost to keep on nudging him and saying, ‘Revenge, Revenge’. The fact is that Hamlet as a youth is simply not mature. Intellectually or emotionally, he is not ripe for the act that he is asked to perform. And the whole play is an endless postponement of his decision while wrestling with himself.

The high point is in the middle of Act III. Hamlet sees the King at prayer. The stage directions are so uncertain that he may even hear the King at prayer, confessing his crime. And what does Hamlet say? ‘Now might I do it — pat!’ But he does not do it; he is simply not ready for an act of that magnitude in boyhood. So at the end of the play Hamlet is murdered. But the tragedy is, not that Hamlet dies; it is that he dies exactly when he is ready to become a great king.

In man, before the brain is an instrument for action, it has to be an instrument of preparation. For that, quite specific areas are involved; for example, the frontal lobes have to be undamaged. But, far more deeply, it depends on the long preparation of human childhood.

In scientific terms we are neotenous; that is, we come from the womb still as embryos. And perhaps that is why our civilization, our scientific civilization, adores above all else the symbol of the child, ever since the Renaissance: the Christ child painted by Raphael and re-enacted by Blaise Pascal; the young Mozart and Gauss; the children in Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Dickens. It never struck me that other civilizations are different until I sailed south from here out of California, four thousand miles away to Easter Island. There I was struck by the historical difference.

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, H. G. Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island — why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality, even in terms of biology. Biologically, a human being is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to many environments, and not static. The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, the Holy Family.

When I was a boy in my teens, I used to walk on Saturday afternoons from the East End of London to the British Museum, in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands which somehow they had not got inside the Museum. So I am fond of these ancient ancestral faces. But in the end, all of them are not worth one child’s dimpled face.

If I was a little carried away in saying that at Easter Island, it was with reason. Think of the investment that evolution has made in the child’s brain. My brain weighs three pounds, my body weighs fifty times as much as that. But when I was born, my body was a mere appendage to the head; it weighed only five or six times as much as my brain. For most of history, civilizations have crudely ignored that enormous potential. In fact the longest child­hood has been that of civilization, learning to understand that.

For most of history, children have been asked simply to conform to the image of the adult. We travelled with the Bakhtiari of Persia on their spring migration. They are as near as any surviving, vanishing people can be to the nomad ways of ten thousand years ago. You see it every­where in such ancient modes of life: the image of the adult shines in the children’s eyes. The girls are little mothers in the making. The boys are little herdsmen. They even carry themselves like their parents.

History, of course, did not stand still between the nomad and the Renaissance. The ascent of man has never come to a stop. But the ascent of the young, the ascent of the talented, the ascent of the imaginative: that became very halting many times in between.

Of course there were great civilizations. Who am I to belittle the civilizations of Egypt, of China, of India, even of Europe in the Middle Ages? And yet by one test they all fail: they limit the freedom of the imagination of the young. They are static, and they are minority cultures. Static, because the son does what the father did, and the father what the grandfather did. And minority, because only a tiny fraction of all that talent that mankind produces is actually used; learns to read, learns to write, learns another language, and climbs the terribly slow ladder of promotion.

In the Middle Ages the ladder of promotion was through the Church; there was no other way for a clever, poor boy to go up. And at the end of the ladder there is always the image, the icon of the godhead that says, ‘Now you have reached the last commandment: Thou shalt not question’.

For instance, when Erasmus was left an orphan in 1480, he had to prepare for a career in the Church. The services were as beautiful then as now. Erasmus may himself have taken part in the moving Mass Cum Giubilate of the fourteenth century, which I have heard in a church that is even older, San Pietro in Gropina. But the monk’s life was for Erasmus an iron door closed against knowledge. Only when Erasmus read the classics for himself, in defiance of orders, did the world open for him. ‘A heathen wrote this to a heathen,’ he said, ‘yet it has justice, sanctity, truth. I can hardly refrain from saying "Saint Socrates, pray for me!" ‘

Erasmus made two lifelong friends, Sir Thomas More in England and Johann Frobenius in Switzerland. From More he got what I got when I first came to England, the sense of pleasure in the companionship of civilized minds. From Frobenius he got a sense of the power of the printed book. Frobenius and his family were the great printers of the classics in the 1500s, including the classics of medicine. Their edition of the works of Hippocrates is, I think, one of the most beautiful books ever printed, in which the happy passion of the printer sits on the page as powerful as the knowledge.

What did those three men and their books mean — the works of Hippocrates, More’s Utopia, The praise of Folly by Erasmus? To me, this is the democracy of the intellect; and that is why Erasmus and Frobenius and Sir Thomas More stand in my mind as gigantic landmarks of their time. The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book, and the problems that it set from the year 1500 have lasted right down to the student riots of today. What did Sir Thomas More die of? He died because his king thought of him as a wielder of power. And what More wanted to be, what Erasmus wanted to be, what every strong intellect wants to be, is a guardian of integrity.

There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority. How old, how bitter, came home to me when I came up from Jericho on the road that Jesus took, and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline as he saw it going to his certain death. Death, because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people, but he was facing an establishment in which religion was simply an arm of government. And that is a crisis of choice that leaders have faced over and over again: Socrates in Athens; Jonathan Swift in Ireland, torn between pity and ambition; Mahatma Gandhi in India; and Albert Einstein, when he refused the presidency of Israel.

I bring in the name of Einstein deliberately because he was a scientist, and the intellectual leadership of the twentieth century rests with scientists. And that poses a grave problem, because science is also a source of power that walks close to government and that the state wants to harness. But if science allows itself to go that way, the beliefs of the twentieth century will fall to pieces in cynicism. We shall be left without belief, because no beliefs can be built up in this century that are not based on science as the recognition of the uniqueness of man, and a pride in his gifts and works. It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that man and beliefs and science will perish together.

I must bring that concretely into the present. The man who personifies these issues for me is John von Neumann. He was born in 1903, the son of a Jewish family in Hungary. If he had been born a hundred years earlier, we would never have heard of him. He would have been doing what his father and grandfather did, making rabbinical comments on dogma.

Instead, he was a child prodigy of mathematics, ‘Johnny’ to the end of his life. In his teens he already wrote mathematical papers. He did the great work on both the subjects for which he is famous before he was twenty-five.

Both subjects are concerned, I suppose I should say, with play. You must see that in a sense all science, all human thought, is a form of play. Abstract thought is the neoteny of the intellect, by which man is able to continue to carry out activities which have no immediate goal (other animals play only while young) in order to prepare himself for long-term strategies and plans.

I worked with Johnny von Neumann during the Second World War in England. He first talked to me about his Theory of Games in a taxi in London — one of the favourite places in which he liked to talk about mathematics. And I naturally said to him, since I am an enthusiastic chess player, ‘You mean, the theory of games like chess.’ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’

And that is what his book is about. It seems very strange to find a book, large and serious, entitled the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in which there is a chapter called ‘Poker and Bluffing’. How surprising and how forbidding, moreover, to find it covered with equations that look so very pompous. Mathematics is not a pompous activity, least of all in the hands of extraordinarily fast and penetrating minds like Johnny von Neumann. What is running through the page is a clear intellectual line like a tune, and all the heavy weight of equations is simply the orchestration down in the bass.

In the latter part of his life, John von Neumann carried this subject into what I call his second great creative idea. He realized that computers would be technically important, but he also began to realize that one must understand clearly how real-life situations are different from computer situations, exactly because they do not have the precise solutions that chess or engineering calculations do.

I will use my own terms to describe John von Neumann’s achievement, instead of his technical ones. He distin­guished between short-term tactics and grand, long-term strategies. Tactics can be calculated exactly, but strategies cannot. Johnny’s mathematical and conceptual success was in showing that nevertheless there are ways to form best strategies.

And in his last years he wrote a beautiful book called The Computer and the Brain, the Silliman Lectures that he should have given, but was too ill to give, in 1956. In them he looks at the brain as having a language in which the activities of the different parts of the brain have somehow to be interlocked and made to match so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a grand overall way of life — what in the humanities we would call a system of values.

There was something endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann. He was the cleverest man I ever knew, without exception. And he was a genius, in the sense that a genius is a man who has two great ideas. When he died in 1957 it was a great tragedy to us all. And that was not because he was a modest man. When I worked with him during the war, we once faced a problem together, and he said to me at once, ‘Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualizing mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening on this photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient.’

As he said, that is not the way I think. However, I let him go to London. I went off to my laboratory in the country. I worked late into the night. Round about midnight I had his answer. Well, John von Neumann always slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, ‘Johnny, you’re quite right.’ And he said to me, ‘You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I’m right? Please wait until I’m wrong.’

If that sounds very vain, it was not. It was a real statement of how he lived his life. And yet it has something in it which reminds me that he wasted the last years of his life. He never finished the great work that has been very difficult to carry on since his death. And he did not, really because he gave up asking himself how other people see things. He became more and more engaged in work for private firms, for industry, for government. They were enterprises which brought him to the centre of power, but which did not advance either his knowledge or his intimacy with people — who to this day have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do about the human mathematics of life and mind.

Johnny von Neumann was in love with the aristocracy of intellect. And that is a belief which can only destroy the civilization that we know. If we are anything, we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed. And that distance can only be conflated, can only be closed, if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.

That seems a hard lesson. After all, this is a world run by specialists: is not that what we mean by a scientific society? No, it is not. A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work. But it is you, it is I, who have to know how nature works, and how (for example) electricity is one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.

We have not advanced the human problems of life and mind that once occupied John von Neumann. Will it be possible to find happy foundations for the forms of behaviour that we prize in a full man and a fulfilled society? We have seen that human behaviour is characterized by a high internal delay in preparation for deferred action. The biological groundwork for this inaction stretches through the long childhood and slow maturation of man. But deferment of action in man goes far beyond that. Our actions as adults, as decision makers, as human beings, are mediated by values, which I interpret as general strategies in which we balance opposing impulses. It is not true that we run our lives by any computer scheme of problem solving. The problems of life are insoluble in this sense. Instead, we shape our conduct by finding principles to guide it. We devise ethical strategies or systems of values to ensure that what is attractive in the short term is weighed in the balance of the ultimate, long-term satisfactions.

And we are really here on a wonderful threshold of knowledge. The ascent of man is always teetering in the balance. There is always a sense of uncertainty, whether when man lifts his foot for the next step it is really going to come down pointing ahead. And what is ahead of us? At last the bringing together of all that we have learned, in physics and in biology, towards an understanding of where we have come: what man is.

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. That is really crucial today. You can see it is pointless to advise people to learn differential equations, or to do a course in electronics or in computer programming. And yet, fifty years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist. The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today, and that is what we are engaged in.

And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into — into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory per­ception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self — knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civiliz­ation with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not. The ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken — but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are waiting to be somebody’s past too, and not necessarily that of our future.

We are a scientific civilization: that means, a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge. If we do not take the next step in the ascent of man, it will be taken by people elsewhere, in Africa, in China. Should I feel that to be sad? No, not in itself. Humanity has a right to change its colour. And yet, wedded as I am to the civilization that nurtured me, I should feel it to be infinitely sad. I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way that Homer and Euclid are.

I began this series in the valley of the Omo in East Africa, and I have come back there because something that happened then has remained in my mind ever since. On the morning of the day that we were to take the first sentences of the first programme, a light plane took off from our airstrip with the cameraman and the sound recordist on board, and it crashed within seconds of taking off. By some miracle the pilot and the two men crawled out unhurt.

But naturally the ominous event made a deep impression on me. Here was I preparing to unfold the pageant of the past, and the present quietly put its hand through the printed page of history and said, ‘It is here. It is now.’ History is not events, but people. And it is not just people remembering, it is people acting and living their past in the present. History is the pilot’s instant act of decision, which crystallizes all the knowledge, all the science, all that has been learned since man began.

We sat about in the camp for two days waiting for another plane. And I said to the cameraman, kindly, though perhaps not tactfully, that he might prefer to have someone else take the shots that had to be filmed from the air. He said, ‘I’ve thought of that. I’m going to be afraid when I go up tomorrow, but I’m going to do the filming. It’s what I have to do.’

We are all afraid — for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

 


 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

chapter one

 

Campbell,Bernard G., Human Evolution: An Introduction to Man’s Adaptations,Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1966, and Heinemann Educational, London, 1967; and ‘Con­ceptual Progress in Physical Anthropology: Fossil Man’, Annual Review of Anthropology,I, pp. 27-54, 1972.

Clark, Wilfrid Edward Le Gros, The Antecedents of Man, Edin­burgh University Press, 1959.

Howells, William, editor, Ideas on Human Evolution: Selected Essays, 1949-1961, Harvard University Press, 1962.

Leakey, Louis S. B.,Olduvai Gorge, 1951-61, 3 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1965-71.

Leakey, Richard E. F., ‘Evidence for an Advanced Plio-Pleistocene Hominid from East Rudolf, Kenya’, Nature, 242, pp. 447-50. 13 April 1973.

Lee, Richard B., and Irven De Vore, editors, Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1968.

 

chapter two

 

Kenyon, Kathleen M., Digging up Jericho, Ernest Benn, London, and Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1957.

Kimber, Gordon, and R. S. Athwal, ‘A Reassessment of the Course of Evolution of Wheat’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 69, no. 4, pp. 912-15, April 1972.

Piggott, Stuart, Ancient Europe: From the Beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity, Edinburgh University Press and Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1965.

Scott, J. P., ‘Evolution and Domestication of the Dog’, pp. 243-75 in Evolutionary Biology, 2, edited by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Max K. Hecht, and William C. Steere, Appleton — Century-Crofts, New York,1968.

Young, J. Z., An Introduction to the Study of Man, Oxford University Press, 1971.

 

chapter three

 

Gimpel, Jean, Les Bâtisseurs de cathédrales, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1958.

Hemming, John, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1970.

Lorenz, Konrad, On Aggression, Methuen, London, 1966.

Mourant, Arthur Ernest, Ada C. Kopec and Kazimiera Domaniewska-Sobczak, The ABO Blood Groups; comprehensive tables and maps of world distribution,Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1958.

Robertson, Donald S.,Handbookof Greek and Roman Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1943.

Willey, Gordon R., An Introduction to American Archaeology, Vol. I, North and Middle America,Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1966.

chapter four

Dalton, John, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, 2 vols, R. Bickerstaff and G. Wilson, London, 1808-27.

Debus, Allen G., ‘Alchemy’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Charles Scribner, New York, 1973.

Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, 1-4, Cam­bridge University Press, 1954-71.

Pagel, Walter, Paracelsus. An introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance,S. Karger, Basel and New York, 1958.

Smith, Cyril Stanley, A History of Metallography, University of Chicago Press, 1960.


 

chapter five

 

Heath, Thomas L., A Manual of Greek Mathematics, 7 vols, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1931; Dover Publications, 1967.

Mieli, Aldo, La Science Arabe, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1966.

Neugebauer, Otto Eduard, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Brown University Press, 2nd ed., 1957; Dover Publications,

Weyl, Hermann, Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952.

White, John, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, Faber, 1967.

 

chapter six

 

Drake, Stillman, Galileo Studies, University of Michigan Press,

Gebler, Karl von, Galileo Galilei und die Römische Curie,Verlag der J. G. Gotta’schen Buchhandlung, Stuttgart, 1876.

Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution, Harvard Univer­sity Press, 1957.

Thompson, John Eric Sidney, Maya History and Religion, Uni­versity of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

 

chapter seven

 

Einstein, Albert, ‘Autobiographical Notes’ in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Cam­bridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1952.

Hoffman, Banesh, and Helen Dukas, Albert Einstein, Viking Press, 1972.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis, Leipzig, 1684.

Newton, Isaac, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, London, 1687, edited by Alexandre Koyre and I. Bernard Cohen, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 1972.

 

chapter eight

 

Ashton, T. S., The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830, Oxford University Press, 1948.

Crowther, J. G., British Scientists of the 19th Century, 2 vols, Pelican, 1940-I.

Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; New American Library, 1965.

Schofield, Robert E., The Lunar Society of Birmingham, Oxford University Press, 1963.

Smiles, Samuel, Lives of the Engineers, 1-3, John Murray, 1861; reprint, David and Charles, 1968.

chapter nine

Darwin, Francis, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,John Murray, 1887.

Dubos, René Jules, Louis Pasteur, Gollancz, 1951.

Malthus, Thomas Robert, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society,J. Johnson, London, 1798.

Sanchez, Robert, James Ferris and Leslie E. Orgel, ‘Conditions for purine synthesis: Did prebiotic synthesis occur at low temperatures?’, Science, 153, pp. 72-3, July 1966.

Wallace, Alfred Russel, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, With an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley, Ward Lock, 1853.

 

chapter ten

 

Broda, Engelbert, Ludwig Boltzmann, Franz Deuticke, Vienna, 1955-

Bronowski, J., ‘New Concepts in the Evolution of Complexity’, Synthese, 21, no. 2, pp. 228-46, June 1970.

Burbidge, E. Margaret, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle, ‘Synthesis of the Elements in Stars’,


Reviews of Modern Physics, 29, no. 4, pp. 547-650, October 1957-

Segrè, Emilio, Enrico Fermi: Physicist, University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Spronsen, J. W. van, The Periodic System of Chemical Elements: A History of the First Hundred Years,Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1969.

 

chapter eleven

 

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, De generis humani varietate nativa, A. Vandenhoeck, Göttingen, 1775.

Gillispie, Charles C., The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas,Princeton University Press, 1960.

Heisenberg, Werner, ‘Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematick und Mechanik’, Zeitschrift für Physik, 43, p. 172, 1927.

Szilard, Leo, ‘Reminiscences’, edited by Gertrud Weiss Szilard and Kathleen R. Winsor in Perspectives in American History,II, 1968.

 

chapter twelve

 

Briggs, Robert W. and Thomas J. King, ‘Transplantation of Living Nuclei from Blastula Cells into Enucleated Frogs’ Eggs’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 38, pp. 455-63, 1952.

Fisher, Ronald A., The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1930.

Olby, Robert C., The Origins of Mendelism, Constable, 1966.

Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life?, Cambridge University Press, 1944; new ed., 1967.

Watson, James D., The Double Helix, Atheneum, and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

 

chapter thirteen

 

Braithwaite, R. B., Theory of Games as a tool for the Moral Philosopher,Cambridge University Press, 1955.

Bronowski, J., ‘Human and Animal Languages’, pp. 374-95, in To Honor Roman Jakobson, I., Mouton & Co., The Hague, 1967.

Eccles, John C., editor, Brain and the Unity of Conscious Experi­ence, Springer-Verlag, 1965.

Gregory, Richard, The Intelligent Eye,Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

Neumann, John von, and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,Princeton University Press, 1943.

Wooldridge, Dean E., The Machinery of the Brain, McGraw-Hill, 1963.


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