The Ascent of Man

J. Bronowski “The Ascent of Man” Little, Brown and Co., 1972, 438 pgs

Notice the copyright date?  Pretty old, huh?  The reason I read it was because of a comment from a character I admire in one of the podcasts I listen to.  He stated that this book has so impressed him that he still reads it over-and-over.  In any event, this book was first published to accompany the BBC television series of the same name.  Dr. Bronowski (a British mathematician, biologist, and science historian, born in 1908, died 1974) discusses human invention and discovery from flint tools to DNA; a complete history of the development of human society through our understanding of science.  The illustration and pictures in the book are extraordinary.  The book was well worth reading.

My Notes:

Pg. 19:  Among all animals, 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.  

Pg. 41:  Two million years ago we were not yet men.  One million years ago we were men, because by then a creature appears who can be called Homo erectus.  He spreads far beyond Africa.  The classical find of Homo erectus was in fact made in China (Peking man) about four hundred thousand years old, and he is the first creature that certainly used fire. 

Pg. 56:  Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that an animal can do.  Here we see the ability to visualize the future, to foresee what may happen and plan to anticipate it, and to represent it to ourselves in images, sometimes on walls in caves.  There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the center of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time.

Pg. 59:  Man has went through two types of evolution: biological and cultural.  It took at least two million years for man to change from the little dark creature with the stone in his hand, Australopithecus in Central Africa, to the modern Homo sapiens.  That is the pace of biological evolution. However, our cultural evolution was much faster.  In twenty thousand years we have become creatures that are artists and scientists, city builders and planners for the future, eager explorers, etc.  That is the pace of cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ration of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.

Pg. 64:  The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.  A burst of new vegetation at the end of the Ice Age (a hybrid wheat evolved) made this ascent possible.

Pg. 100:  Roads, bridges, messages in a great empire are always advanced inventions, because if they are cut then authority is cut off and breaks down—in modern times they are typically the first target in a revolution. 

Pg. 192:  Easter Island is over a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited island, which is Pitcairn Island, to the west.  Distances like this cannot be navigated unless you have a model of the heavens and of star positions by which you can tell your way.  Obviously the inhabitants of Easter Island got their by accident.  They couldn’t get off as there is no Pole Star in the southern sky.  Even birds use the Pole Star for migration.

Pg. 243:  Newton’s theories could only be put to practical use at sea if a clock could be made to keep time on a ship.  The principle is simple enough.  Since the sun rounds the earth in twenty-four hours, each of the 360 degrees of longitude occupies four minutes of time.  A sailor who compares noon on his ship (the highest position of the sun) with noon on a clock that keeps Greenwich time therefore knows that every four minutes of difference place him one degree further away from the Greenwich meridian. 

Pg. 247:  Einstein had a thought, in his teens: “What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light?”  Suppose you were on a tram and moving away from a clock—the time on that clock would have to remain frozen as you are travelling at the speed of light.  Time would have stopped.  For instance, suppose a clock behind me says ‘noon’ and I now travel 186,000 miles away from it at the speed of light; that ought to take me one second.  But the time on the clock, as I see it, still says ‘noon’, because it takes the beam of light from the clock exactly as long as it has taken me.  Thus: time is relative.

Pg. 252:  In a lifetime, Einstein joined light to time, and time to space; energy to matter, matter to space, and space to gravitation.

Pg. 260:  Roughly between 1760 and 1820, the customary way of running industry changed.  Before 1760, it was standard to take work to villagers in their own homes.  By 1820, it was standard to being workers into a factory.

Pg. 317:  Biology has been fortunate in discovering within the span of one hundred years two great and seminal ideas.  One was Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of evolution by natural selection.  The other was the discovery of how to express the cycles of life in a chemical form that links them with nature as a whole. The chemicals needed for life as we know it are not unique to earth; they have been found in the interstellar spaces: hydrogen cyanide, cyano acetylene, formaldehyde.

Pg. 388:  Life on earth has been going on for three billion year or more.  For two-thirds of that time organisms reproduced themselves by cell division.  Division produces identical offspring as a rule, and new forms appear only rarely, by mutation.  For all that time, therefore evolution was very slow.  The first organisms to reproduce sexually were related to blue-green algae.  That was less than one billion years ago.  Sexual reproduction begins first in plants, then in animals.  Since then its success has made it the biological norm, so that, for instance, we define two species as different if their members cannot breed with one another.

Pg. 390:  How the message of inheritance is passed from one generation to the next was discovered in 1953: DNA and its double helix spiral architecture.

Pg. 395:  Every cell in the body carries the complete potential to make the whole animal, except only the sperm and egg cells.  The sperm and the egg are incomplete, and essentially they are half cells: they carry half the total number of genes.  The fertilized egg is then a complete cell, and it is the model of every cell in the body.  For every cell is formed by division of the fertilized egg, and is therefore identical with it in its genetic make-up.