The Ascent of Man
Hyman, Steven E.
Book Review/Steven E. Hyman Mystifications for the Coffee Table •• It is a commonplace to note that we live n a world dominated by science and technology. From antibiotics to aerosol cans, he...
...Even in the universities sere is little commerce between the scinces and the humanities...
...but is not a heap of stones, and it is not just a jostle of people...
...374...
...1=1 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...He creates mysteries where there are none...
...He suggests, for example, that we do not know why in the evolution of the lemur (the earliest primate to arise and man's distant ancestor) "there has been selection against the sense of smell and in favour of the sense of vision" (p...
...It is a well-conceived structure, but unfortunately the book falls miserably short of its promise...
...This ignorance f what scientists do is unfortunate both -om the point of view of the layman who ves in a world suffused by science and -om the point of view of public policy...
...The lack of a good discussion of scientific method is a grave flaw in a book which claims to chart the great peaks of human discovery...
...Perhaps a more serious fault is that he either errs or falsifies in presenting historical facts...
...It is likely, in fact, that most of Galileo's experiments were only "thoughtexperiments," that is, convincing conceptual arguments for principles that Galileo had arrived at a priori, but not the groundwork of his thinking or even workable in practice...
...But Bronowski's book is often both misleading and mystifying, as both fact and interpretation drown in seas of empty rhetoric...
...In a popularization we must demand, Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 above all, accuracy and clarity: accuracy because the reader will not often have the opportunity to verify the facts presented him, and clarity because the whole idea of a popularization is to enlighten its readers...
...If science must be axiomatic and deductive like Euclid's Elements, biology is not now and may never be a science...
...A 'pical misunderstanding of the way in hich scientific knowledge emerges is vident in the frequent popular demandsfor "applied" rather than "basic" scientific research...
...Bronowski's scope is immense, tracing man's great scientific discoveries from prehistory to modern quantum mechanics and molecular biology...
...A city is stones and a city is people...
...It took later researchers to work out the truth, and the details are hardly so complex as not to merit inclusion in this book...
...That is patently absurd...
...But Bronowski quotes Oliver Cromwell, of all people, to make his point: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" (p...
...the scientist must always be open to the possibility that he is wrong...
...What Bronowski seems to imply is that 28 chromosomes will naturally produce aplumper head of seeds than will 14...
...Bronowski explains: "In terms of the genetic machinery that directs growth, it combined the fourteen chromosomes of wild wheat with the fourteen chromosomes of goat grass, and produced Emmer with twenty-eight chromosomes...
...Worse yet there are a plethora of misleading statements of which the following can serve as an illustration, Agriculture was not a terribly worthwhile enterprise until about 8000 B.C...
...That is what makes Emmer so much plumper" (p...
...But the scientific rorld itself remains a mystery to most of s. To many, the scientist is an inhuman nd forbidding figure, and scientific mguage is all but incomprehensible to le nonspecialist...
...He shows, moreover, that the history of science is not a unilinear progress from error and superstition to truth, but a changing parade of world-views, a parade which moves in fits and starts, often making progress against great odds, but making progress nonetheless: the very title, The Ascent of Man, shows the author's optimism about man's future...
...The way to recapture that is to walk into the streets of a city that none of us has seen, in a culture that has vanished...
...Book Review/Steven E. Hyman Mystifications for the Coffee Table •• It is a commonplace to note that we live n a world dominated by science and technology...
...It is typical of the work that Bronowski makes a beautiful abstract point near the end and then chooses the most inappropriate man possible to illustrate it...
...Hitler was certain that he had the true path...
...He argues for humility of intellect as one of the highest of values...
...Furthermore, Bronowski says of Newton's Principia that it is the first example of rigorous scientific method because of its axiomatic-deductive form...
...Bronowski's personal and historical approach to the subject matter is brilliant in conception, because it allows him to show that scientists have always been fully human—needing imagination, guesswork, and luck in order to be successful...
...Perhaps this would be more effective when recited by a mellifluous voice on television than it looks in print, but it would still say nothing...
...when a wheat hybrid occurred by chance...
...He claims that Galileo was the creator of modern scientific method, grounded in observation...
...The Ascent of Man began as a television series based on Kenneth Clark's very successful Civilisation series, and was then transcribed into a book...
...In the step from the village to the city, a new community organization is built, based on the division of labour and on chains of command...
...No mystery there...
...That hybrid, Emmer, yielded larger, fuller heads of seeds than earlier wild wheats...
...That is the prejudice of a geometer...
...The Ascent of Man with its clear typography and lavish plates will be a handsome decoration for any coffee table, but its intellectual content and mode of expression prevent it from filling any greater need...
...All this might seem like academic carping, but the sheer number of errors with which the unwary reader could leave Bronowski's book is upsetting...
...There is a great need for books which will try to demystify science and technology for the nonscientist...
...As good as he is at scientific biography, showing Galileo, Newton, and Einstein as fully-rounded, creative human beings, he is naive about scientific method...
...Actually Dalton assumed that the proportion was one to one...
...Bronowski was given a wonderful opportunity by the British The Ascent of Man by J acob Bronowski Little, Brown $15.00 Broadcasting Corporation to help breach this increasingly intolerable gap...
...Chromosome number per se has nothing to do with the structure of the resulting organism...
...From antibiotics to aerosol cans, he fruits of modern science have altered he quality of life for everyone—at least ri the Western world...
...For example, he discusses Machu Picchu, the ruined Inca city: "Stones make a wall, walls make a house, houses make streets and streets make a city...
...Whatever his other virtues, it is doubtful whether Cromwell, one of the most morally certain of men, ever applied this advice to himself...
...The late Dr...
...In fact if the lemur was to fill the evolutionary niche that it did fill, living almost entirely in trees, it required good binocular vision in order to get about, while smell is rather unimportant in the food gathering of an arboreal creature...
...He suggests that Dalton, the father of modern atomic theory, had discovered that water was composed of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
