Jacob Bronowski - The Ascent Of Man

Dr Jacob Bronowksis 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.

Dr Bronowskis 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 mans specific ability to understand nature, to control it, not to be controlled by it. Dr Bronowskis 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.

The Poets 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

Last renaissance man has become a clich, but we forgive a clich on the rare occasion when it is true. Certainly it is hard to think of a better candidate for the accolade than Jacob Bronowski. Youll 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 Leonardos drawing to the Taung baby: type-specimen of our ancestral genus Australopithecus, victim as we now know, though Bronowski didnt when he performed his mathematical analysis on the tiny skull of a giant eagle two million years ago.

Theres 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 Schrdinger. Albert Einstein. Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Arturo Toscanini. Bruno Walter. Marc Chagall.

Words so powerful dont need a raised voice or ostentatious tears. Bronowskis 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 Bronowskis 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 Moores 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 worlds oldest and greatest universities in Germany as it happens:

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 didnt 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.