“The Ascent of Man”, Forty Years On

In the late 1960’s, the British Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Jacob Bronowski to prepare a television series entitled “The Ascent of Man”. Apparently, the series was meant to be a scientific bookend to Kenneth, Baron Clark of Saltwood in the County of Kent OM CH KCB FBA’s “Civilisation” series, which was an historian’s view of how we ended up where we are.

Bronowski’s series aired across the world (and even this benighted high-school student watched it gobsmacked in Brisbane, Australia). Bronowski died in 1974, not long after the series was published. He also wrote a “book of the series”, which came out in 1973 (it is one of my treasured possessions, moth-eaten as it is).

A brief biography:

Jacob Bronowski was born in 1908 into a Jewish family in the Polish city of Lodz. His parents moved to Britain in 1920 and Bronowski pursued his senior studies in mathematics at Cambridge University. He later studied and conducted research in physics. He taught at the University College of Hull during the 1930s. During the Second World War, he conducted research on the effectiveness of Allied bombing campaigns, culminating in being part of a British Government survey of the results of the attack by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result of his experiences in Japan, he turned from physics to biology to try to understand the nature of violence in humans.

His subsequent career includes many writings on what knowledge means: he concerned himself with the epistemological question of “what can we reliably know?”. The Ascent of Man series seems to have been his attempt to answer this question.

(I may have his history wrong, in which case, I apologise).

If you wish to see what he said in the series, fragments of the Ascent of Man series are available on Youtube via a search for “Bronowski Ascent of Man”.

My question is this:

Now, after forty years, how much did Bronowski get right?

My personal view is that Bronowski is mostly right. My version of his argument is that we construct useful knowledge out of a combination of imagination and observation. Science is philosophy (what can be) constrained by evidence (what is).

I am interested to know what this community thinks about Bronowski’s work, with the benefit of forty years of hindsight.

(my thanks to Gregory for alerting me to my misattribution of the “Civilisation” series to Sir Arthur C Clarke CBE FRAS).

61 thoughts on ““The Ascent of Man”, Forty Years On

  1. I can only comment from the perspective of a layperson but I must say that Bronowski’s series seized and held my attention in a way that no science documentary series before or since has been able to do. He projected a combination of erudition, intellectual excitement, passion and compassion that has not been matched, in my experience, by anyone with the possible exception of David Attenborough. Was Bronowski wrong about anything? He was human so, yes, he will have been wrong but if anyone exemplifies what science is about and how scientists think and feel, it was him.

  2. timothya,

    I have never seen the series, but you and SeverskyP35 have motivated me to watch it. Thanks for the recommendation.

    (Here’s the link for fellow Netflix users. It seems to be available only on DVD, not via streaming.)

  3. SeverskyP35:
    I can only comment from the perspective of a layperson but I must say that Bronowski’s series seized and held my attention in a way that no science documentary series before or since has been able to do.He projected a combination of erudition, intellectual excitement, passion and compassion that has not been matched, in my experience, by anyone with the possible exception of David Attenborough.Was Bronowski wrong about anything?He was human so, yes, he will have been wrong but if anyone exemplifies what science is about and how scientists think and feel, it was him.

    I agree with the above evaluation of the series.

    But it was 50 years ago. And he was speaking to a popular audience. So he could have been wrong or incomplete because we learned more or he chose to omit details.

    Here are some developments of the last 50 years that I don’t recall him addressing in any detail (but that is based on memory and a quick scan of his book on science and human values):

    – the social aspects of science which got a kick start (at least in the English speaking world) from Kuhn’s book in the 60s and continued in various forms in work by people like Latour. Gregory can add a lot to this, I suspect, if he happens to be reading this thread and is interesting in doing so. This is related to but goes beyond the “science wars” controversies of the 90s.

    – new approaches to scientific anti-realism, such as van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism

    – different approaches to the nature of scientific explanation, eg using mechanistic models for biology rather the the mathematical laws approach of physics

    – Bayesian approaches to quantifying scientific reliability

    – new ideas in epistemology from psychology and neuroscience, eg the “thinking fast and slow” ideas of Kahneman et al.
    ETA: How these ideas have affected phil of mind and epistemology

    – in epistemology, Gettier challenges to justified, true belief and the resulting philosophical work on what it takes to make knowledge reliable

  4. I remember watching Bronowski’s series at the time and being impressed by his ability to communicate. Seeing this post, I wondered whether I was right to be impressed. On Youtube, I found a 10-minute excerpt from his series, on evolution and the origin of life. In it he just stands there and talks at the camera, while in the midst of lava, or an ice field, or a desert, There are a few other clips illustrating the Miller experiment. No animations or interviews with scientists — just Bronowski talking. Here it is.

    Dull? Wrong? Actually it was mesmerizing — they guy could communicate! He covered a lot of ground in 10 minutes, and most of the science is still sound today. There is a lot more to be said, of course (say, about RNA’s role), but you could say that of any popular science video.

  5. Hi Timothy

    I’ve been trying to think why I missed “Ascent of Man” when it was broadcast and in 1973 I was working unsocial hours.

    Just managed to watch the first episode here.

    Worth a look!

  6. Ah! It seems to go on! He hasn’t picked up on the sexual selection aspect of human evolution yet. 🙂

    ETA Yup! Seems for those who have the stamina, the whole twelve hours is available!

  7. For an interesting comparison, try Michael Polanyi. More accomplished as a scientist and in the opposition to communism through the Society for Freedom in Science. He didn’t make a t.v. series, but oh well. Science popularization (/infatuation) will continue beyond Sagan and most recently Tyson too.

    As for Kuhn (since his name and mine were mentioned in a paragraph above), the so-called kick start happened much earlier. In the English-speaking world it was with Robert Merton (“Science and the Economy of Seventeenth Century England,” 1939) – cf. Merton Thesis, who was a student research assistant of Pitirim A. Sorokin – sociology of science first appeared in Russia. Technically, however, one could argue the Bukharin delegation in London 1931 introduced ‘social aspects of science’ to English via Boris Hessen to J.D. Bernal (“The Social Function of Science” 1939) and others.

    The Polanyi vs. Bernal (free vs. planned) phenomenon is fascinating.

    Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who became a Christian. Bronowski was a Polish Jew who was/became an agnostic. They both appreciated science, though whose ‘story of science’ is more inspiring is up to the ‘person’ hearing it (nod to Polanyi’s “Personal Knowledge”). I’ve only seen one of the “Ascent of Life” episodes from the series, which is from before I was born (though I did read T.E. Goudge’s “Ascent of Life: A Philosophical Study of the Theory of Evolution” during my bachelor’s research, which was impressive).

    p.s. it wasn’t ‘Sir Arthur Clark,’ as the OP says, but Kenneth Clark.

  8. Gregory:

    As for Kuhn (since his name and mine were mentioned in a paragraph above), the so-called kick start happened much earlier. In the English-speaking world it was with Robert Merton (“Science and the Economy of Seventeenth Century England,” 1939) – c

    Thanks for the info.

    My background is limited to some introductory phil of science texts where Kuhn usually gets a lot of attention. But the Wikipedia article on Merton is clear on the contributions he made well before Kuhn.

  9. I saw it when it was new. At the time, my TV was a five inch B&W Sony. I appreciated all the talking. I detest the modern tendency to substitute irrelevant graphics and music for content.

    ETA:

    Found the book in my library.

    Neither frayed nor moth eaten.

  10. I detest the modern tendency to substitute irrelevant graphics and music for content.

    I saw much of Bronowski’s series when it was repeated on public television circa 1979 – 1980. I thought it was great then and recall his obvious erudition, but don’t really recall enough about it now to reassess it.

    Bronowski included his share of superfluous footage – witness the heaving lava flows in the clip linked above. I half expected the Fantasia dinosaurs to start battling across the screen (and Stravinsky vomiting in the corner).

  11. Alan Fox: Just managed to watch the first episode here.

    I gave up after 10 minutes.

    I did not watch the original series, and now I remember why. It is just too boring. (I guess we have different tastes).

  12. Never heard of him! did he contribute anything to science other then evolutionist propaganda?
    Was there rebuttal to the , no doubt, evolutionism zeal on these shows?
    Its people like that that have held back accurate scientific investigation into origins or anything since they start from settled presumptions.
    Thats why only today are evolution etc etc being overthrown by the present generation of thinkers called ID/YEC.
    Never mind old British tv shows. This is the modern world with better stuff.
    Keep the past and we will take the future.

  13. Neil Rickert: I gave up after 10 minutes.

    I did not watch the original series, and now I remember why.It is just too boring.(I guess we have different tastes).

    How can you not watch something and find it boring? Fair enough; the delivery is a bit portentous (almost soap opera speed) but I was interested in the content of the first couple of episodes to see how our thinking and knowledge of the entry of modern man into the world had changed in forty years.

    Taste? Plenty of sartorial lessons to learn. Those tan suits, those blue socks, those ties!

  14. Alan Fox: How can you not watch something and find it boring?

    You need only watch enough to conclude that it is boring. That’s a lot less that would be required to claim that you have watched it.

  15. Neil Rickert: You need only watch enough to conclude that it is boring.That’s a lot less that would be required to claim that you have watched it.

    Fair enough. Though I think “I found it boring” would have been a fairer way of putting it.

  16. Alan Fox: Though I think “I found it boring” would have been a fairer way of putting it.

    I’m not sure why you see that as different from “It is just too boring. (I guess we have different tastes).”

  17. It’s in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. Saying “it’s boring” rather than “I found it boring” suggests to me you think anyone else would, which is not the case. It may be that the subject matter is not of interest to person A but nonetheless is to person B

  18. BruceS,

    You’re welcome. Don’t forget Bernal either. Then there’s also Derek J. de Solla Price’s “Big Science, Little Science” (1963), which made a significant impact too.

    Kuhn is the most played song in the English speaking world, but in many ways the bigger attraction in ‘social aspects of science’ was played out to the east (e.g. Polanyi, Lakatos, Feyerabend, et al.) where more ‘socially-oriented politics’ was happening (i.e. in which ‘science’ was being conducted, thus, why SoS originated in Russia, not the USA). In case you’re interested, I find Kuhn’s earlier work “The Essential Tension” in several ways more provocative than his SSR. The book was published in 1977, but the paper (found in the book) was published first in 1959.

    This may partly explain N.R.’s ‘boring’ commentary; ‘what’s science got to do with people?’ is a very important question. Two ‘sceptic’ Moderators disputing what is ‘boring’ or not about ‘science’ at TSZ is actually funny. None of it matters in the longer run according to either of them anyway!

    It’s these darn specialists who can’t see past the ends of their noses yet who proclaim from the rooftops how ‘evolutionary’ and ‘naturalistic’ *everything* must be simply because they are naturalistic evolutionists that are most annoying and arrogant. I get the feeling that Bronowski, if he was pushed, would eventually just say “We don’t know” and shrug his shoulders, after willfully sending out his naturalistic paeon “The Ascent of Man” trying to celebrate “Science” without dehumanization. Now go read some poetry (try some vertical-mystical Blake) and be happy! 😉

  19. Alan Fox: It’s in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

    Right. I added that parenthetic remark about “taste”, in case that was not clear.

    Saying “it’s boring” rather than “I found it boring” suggests to me you think anyone else would, which is not the case.

    That’s just weird. I cannot think of a single case where “boring” would be used in that way. It seems to be part of normal usage, that “boring” is always a subjective judgment.

  20. Gregory: This may partly explain N.R.’s ‘boring’ commentary; ‘what’s science got to do with people?’

    You are making stuff up. I have not suggested that the science is boring. To spell it out, I find Bronowski to be boring.

  21. I would disagree. I think boring is used just like any other pejorative. It implies bad. If we say a movie is bad, we imply it is poorly made. If we say boring, we imply some defect, not just a matter of taste.

    Of course that goes out the window if you qualify it. But that requires another sentence, which would be superfluous if you qualified it in the original statement.

  22. Gregory: This may partly explain N.R.’s ‘boring’ commentary; ‘what’s science got to do with people?’ is a very important question. Two ‘sceptic’ Moderators disputing what is ‘boring’ or not about ‘science’ at TSZ is actually funny.

    Glad to be of service. I wasn’t disputing whether science is boring or not. It happens to be the only way to make sense of the world around us but that is no reason people have to find it interesting. I was just quibbling with Neil over his choice of words. He’s perfectly entitled to be bored by whatever bores him.

    None of it matters in the longer run according to either of them anyway!

    What matters?

  23. Neil Rickert: I find Bronowski to be boring.

    Fine! Prefacing it with “I find” makes it absolutely clear. I had to steel myself to start with at his affected speech, dress and manner but this is from over forty years ago so I made a mental allowance and let the words find their way through the presentation.

  24. Gregory: Now go read some poetry (try some vertical-mystical Blake) and be happy!

    Exactly! This is a whole aspect of humanity that is not receiving its due attention. Why do humans have such an artistic side to them?.

    ETA synonyms

  25. What does it matter that some find it boring? I would expect that to be the case. Especially since, even though Ascent was a popularized version of science, Bronowski did not dumb it down to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

    His affected and hesitant delivery comes about because he is improvising to camera. Remarkably, he is improvising in English, his second language, for which he developed a love and mastery greater than that of most native speakers.

    By comparison, in Cosmos, deGrasse Tyson, appears much smoother and easier. But that’s because he’s just reciting a script. He’s not groping for exactly the right word or trying to compose the most pithy phrase on camera.

    The sad thing is that a series like Ascent of Man could probably not be made today. When it was, words could still be the equal of pictures. Today they are little more than spoken subtitles to state-of-the-art CGI.

  26. What I find boring are tedious science or natural history programmes designed by people assuming that the stupidist are watching; ‘now the little critter is looking for mom’, ad nauseum. Brownowski never did that, actually neither does the BBC, Ken Clark, Attenborough etc.

    “Boring?” Consider yourself in a lecture theatre listening to a gifted teacher, and err, use your imagination.

  27. Gregory:
    You’re welcome. Don’t forget Bernal either. Then there’s also Derek J. de Solla Price’s “Big Science, Little Science” (1963), which made a significant impact too.

    Do you have a recommended overview text at undergraduate level that you would use if teaching an introductory course on your field of study?

    (BTW, I enjoyed your interview on EMT that I found while looking at your blog and linked sites to see if you mentioned any such books there; I’ll link to it in the KN post on intentionality and norms).

  28. Alan Fox: Really? No script at all?

    I assume there was a shooting script which laid out the series and mapped out the topics to be covered in each episode but Bronowski’s monologues to camera were unscripted from everything I have read about the show. To me, that is a considerable achievement in itself.

  29. SeverskyP35: I assume there was a shooting script which laid out the series and mapped out the topics to be covered in each episode but Bronowski’s monologues to camera were unscripted from everything I have read about the show.To me, that is a considerable achievement in itself.

    On Youtube there is a 1974 BBC interview with Bronowski made as part of the publicity for Ascent of Man. You could compare his spontaneous responses there. I concluded that part of the affected speech pattern was his normal public persona.

    There is also on Youtube an interesting (disclaimer: to me, anyway!) 2011 documentary made by Bronowski’s oldest daughter, the historian of science Lisa Jardine, in which she wrestles with discovering whether Bronowski’s World War II work doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command caused him any distress later. She concludes that the BBC interview shows him having signs of great stress when that general issue is touched on.

  30. Joe Felsenstein:
    There is also on Youtube an interesting (disclaimer: to me, anyway!) 2011 documentary made by Bronowski’s oldest daughter, the historian of science Lisa Jardine, in which she wrestles with discovering whether Bronowski’s World War II work doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command caused him any distress later.She concludes that the BBC interview shows him having signs of great stress when that general issue is touched on.

    Thank you for drawing our attention to that documentary. I hadn’t seen it before and it was fascinating.

  31. As it happens, the latest (February) post on my blog is “Bronowski, Michelangelo, Moore, and Einstein.” Here’s the intro:

    “I’m watching Jacob Bronowski’s documentary series The Ascent of Man. You’ll find in the following transcript a better account of how sculpture takes form than you’ll get from any intelligent-design theorist. The notion that there’s an independent design that the sculptor forces upon the stone is simply wrong. But to dwell on that would be to miss what Bronowski emphasizes, an interesting analogy of science to sculpture. On reflection, I saw the similarity of his remarks to some by Einstein, which I quote below. Hopefully someone out there will find the connection interesting.”

    http://boundedtheoretics.blogspot.com/2014/02/bronowski-michelangelo-moore-and.html

  32. Tom English:
    As it happens, the latest (February) post on my blog is “Bronowski, Michelangelo, Moore, and Einstein.”

    Tom, obviously we have been thinking about the same topics. A couple of comments.

    Bronowski left behind several memorable quotes from his series, including, “the hand is the cutting edge of the mind”, which has been re-used by a number of other authors. Less commonly included are the sentences following the quote, “Civilisation is not a collection of artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action”. I’ve often thought that Bronowski was sending out his Quiet Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Art Historians.

    That passage captures three ideas that Bronowski dwelt on throughout his series. First, that knowledge is a product of the interaction between imagination and action. Who could argue against that? But he goes further to assert the relationship between the two.

    Second, that human imagination seeks, via physical manipulation, “the grain in the stone”. That is to say, our ability to manipulate objects (literally!) helped our ancestors to uncover the regularities of nature hidden in materials. Bronowski argues that the roots of science lay in the immediate physical experience of trying to get natural materials to suit our purposes. The more recent history of science is the process of developing tools that extend our “hands” beyond what we can literally touch.

    Third, that a bipedal gait freed our primate ancestors’ hands to manipulate, which in turn set up an evolutionary feedback between the ability to handle objects and the development of a brain to take advantage of the new possibilities.

    The connection between tool-making and human brain evolution was a powerful current in palaeoanthropology throughout the last half of the 20th Century. As an explanation for the rise of modern humans, how well is it wearing today? Personally, I think it is still a powerful argument, albeit one that has now to incorporate other, independent factors in human evolution.

    Another comment: why was it possible for Bronowski to make such a successful documentary in the early 1970s? I don’t know of any earlier attempts to produce a television documentary-form argument for a lay audience about the history and importance of the scientific project (of course there were earlier written works, like H G Wells’ “The Outline of History” or Gordon Childe’s “Man Makes Himself”). Obviously, many other authors of the pre-television generation wrote for the audience interested in this topic. But here we are, with Bronowski still as a serious influence on how we think about science.

    My hypothesis is that what we would now call Big Science was entering a crisis at the end of the 1960s, and Bronowski proved to be an ideal response (not that such a calculating interpretation ever occurred to the programmers at the BBC or anywhere else).

    Think of the social circumstances. The 1950s and 1960s had seen the elevation of science and scientists to an almost mythic status (Harold Wilson’s “white-hot technological revolution”! The moon shot! Miracle grains abolishing poverty in the Third World!). Most popular coverage on television of “science” at the time was either news coverage of the latest technical advance in engineering, or expository shows of the “Why is it so?” or “Brains Trust” type (Bronowski was a staple expert appearing on the Brains Trust).

    At the same time we saw the rise of the counter-argument that exploitation of scientific knowledge unconstrained by social responsibility could be disastrous (Rachel Carson, the unleashing of US technical war-making prowess on Vietnam, the appalling experiments in inner-city high-density housing for workers across any of the world’s large cities).

    I read Bronowski’s work today as a plea to understand science as a profoundly human activity. Fallible, restricted within its disciplines by passion and inherited traditions, but liberated by imagination and enabled by history. I think his work remains popular today because of its essential humanism (he emphasises over and over that the achievements of science were created not by inspired heroes, but by real people, replete with their foibles).

    I think Bronowski’s work is an important contribution to our modern understanding of the role of science in society. Boring? If you think Bronowski is boring, you are, in my humble opinion, an unmitigated pillock.

  33. timothya,

    A voice crying in the wilderness said “Yes, but what drove that imagination, that artistry, that braininess? It’s sex!”

  34. Alan Fox:
    timothya,

    A voice crying in the wilderness said “Yes, but what drove that imagination, that artistry, that braininess? It’s sex!

    Sex drove the development of Physics? Chemistry? Biology? Say what? There is a point in human evolution where socially heritable human thought disconnected from genetically heritable human behaviour.

  35. timothya: Sex drove the development of Physics? Chemistry? Biology? Say what?

    Of course. It’s a valid argument that “excessive” braininess was driven by sexual selection. Try doing physics without a big brain.

    There is a point in human evolution where socially heritable human thought disconnected from genetically heritable human behaviour.

    Nobody threw a switch. Absolutely agree that the power of human cultural evolution is huge. Doesn’t rule out events in parallel. A ratchet is a powerful tool

  36. Alan Fox: Of course. It’s a valid argument that “excessive” braininess was driven by sexual selection. Try doing physics without a big brain.

    Nobody threw a switch. Absolutely agree that the power of human cultural evolution is huge. Doesn’t rule out events in parallel. A ratchet is a powerful tool

    Well yes, but you are drawing a long bow to connect sexual selection to a capacity for abstract thinking (do you have evidence that large brains are caused by sexual selection? As opposed to large tails or spectacular head crests?)

    BTW, there is some evidence that tails and head crests are selected for via sexual selection in separate lineages (birds, lizards for example). Do you have any evidence that abstract thinking is sexually selected?

  37. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine that (pre)human females would prefer (pre)human males who had the ability to prefigure the future by imagination. But how do you propose we reach back to the fossils to measure how important this behaviour was at the time (behaviours only fossilise in the modern era). Is there any evidence that this type of selection ever happened?

    Let us leave aside any modern notions of what current human males are capable, or what selection preferences modern human women might prefer. Surely you must grant that any antique genetic drives towards specific behaviours are likely obliterated by non-genetic social preferences.

  38. timothya,

    Have a look at the other thread as it may just cover some points you raise. I’ll come back to you this evening when I should have a bit more time.

  39. I think that arguments about “what causes what” should be judged as “good” by one measurable criterion. If you can twiddle the dials of your putative cause from minus infinity to positive infinity without changing the prediction of your model, then that is good evidence that your model is crap (it might be right, but your premises don’t support your argument).

  40. timothya,

    Briefly, I contend that the runaway expansion of the human brain (as indicated by examining fossil skulls) is already well under way with Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago. There is evidence of human artistry in cave painting, body painting, carving of not-obviously-useful items, ritual, burial and grave goods, musical instruments all well before the birth of human civilization. Not accepting “front loading” as much of a theory, I wonder why we developed such a large, costly brain and concomitant artistic skills and ability so rapidly and so much earlier than social evolution into large social groups. Now there is that analysis showing (apparently) that the roots of human language could lie with H. erectus as well.

    I don’t think survival selection is an adequate explanation and I think Miller’s proposal of a sexual selection element is an appealing hypothesis.

  41. Alan Fox: I don’t think survival selection is an adequate explanation and I think Miller’s proposal of a sexual selection element is an appealing hypothesis.

    I’ve see the argument that brain size in porpoises is driven by the need to strategize how to get the girl. There are lots of fish in the sea with tiny brains. They all get by with no hands, no fire, no cities, no planting. What are the brains for if not for getting laid?

    Perhaps off topic, but this was the topic of a speech by Robin Williams in the movie, Dead Poets Society.

    “So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”

    The book was written by a woman. I didn’t know that until I looked up the quote.

  42. Alan Fox:
    petrushka,
    Great find. Although I think Tom Schulman wrote the screenplay.Nancy H. Kleinbaum’s book was based on the film rather than the other way round.

    More stuff I didn’t know. The list is endless.

  43. Petrushka,

    There’s an important difference between “strategizing to get the girl” and “language was invented to woo women.”

    The former works whether or not it is visible to potential mates. The latter is an example of sexual selection in the peacock’s tail/bird crest sense — a visible feature that potential mates examine when choosing a partner.

    Miller (and Alan) are arguing that the latter kind of selection explains the huge increases in brain size in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens.

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