All those woodland walks and conversations came to a brilliant climax in 1927. Early that year Werner Heisenberg gave a new characterisation of the electron: yes, it is a particle, he said, but a particle which yields only limited information. That is, you can specify where it is at this instant, but then you cannot impose on it a specific speed and direction of setting off. Or conversely, if you insist that you’re going to fire it at a certain speed and a certain direction then you cannot specify exactly what its starting point is, or its end point. ibid.
Heisenberg called this the Principle of Uncertainty. ibid.
We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. ibid.
All knowledge, all information, between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. ibid.
All knowledge is limited. It’s an irony of history that at the very time this was being worked out, there should arise under Hitler and Germany and giants elsewhere a counter-conception, a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the Ascent of Man. Against the throwback of despotic belief to the notion that they have absolute certainty. ibid.
There are two parts to the human dilemma: one is the belief that the end justifies the means, that push-button philosophy that deliberate deafness to suffering has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit, the assertion of dogma that closes a mind and turns a nation of civilisation into a regiment of ghosts. ibid.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. ibid.
Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. ibid.
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. ibid.
The city of Vienna was the capital of an empire which held together a multitude of nations and languages. It was a famous centre of literature, music and the arts. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 12/13: Generation Upon Generation
Diversity is the propeller of evolution. ibid.
The genes are made of nucleic acid – that’s where the action is. ibid.
On 2nd April 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick sent to Nature the paper which describes this structure in DNA. ibid.
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance ... The child is an individual, the bee is not. ibid.
We are the only species in which the female has orgasms. ibid.
Justice is a universal of all cultures. Jacob Bronowski 13/13, The Ascent of Man: The Long Childhood
Man is alone in being a social solitary. ibid.
We spend more grey matter in the brain manipulating the thumb than in the total control of the chest and the abdomen. ibid.
The ability to plan actions for which the reward is a long way off is the central thing that the human brain has. ibid.
He is not ripe for the act he is asked to perform ... The tragedy is not that Hamlet dies, it’s that he dies exactly when he is ready to become a great king. ibid.
Easter Island ... These ancient ancestral faces; but in the end all of them are not worth one child’s dimpled face. ibid.
It is not the business of science to inherit the Earth, but to inherit the moral imagination. ibid.
All science, all human thought, is a form of play. The neoteny of the intellect. ibid.
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts; above all it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are. ibid.
he Ascent of Man will go on, but don’t assume that it will go on carried by Western civilisation as we know it. ibid.
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. ibid.
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. ibid.
Everywhere you look you can see evolution using Nature’s self-organising patterns. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, The Secret Life of Chaos, BBC 2011
They can simulate evolution: more precisely, computers can use the principles of evolution to shape and refine their own programs, in the same way the natural world uses evolution to shape and refine living organisms. ibid.
5,932. The power of self-organisation: it demonstrates that evolution is itself just like the other systems we’ve encountered: one based on simple rules and feedback from which complexity spontaneously emerges. ibid.
Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape? Soapy Sam Wilberforce, debate with Thomas Huxley
The principle of natural selection is completely incompatible with the word of God. The ideas are inconsistent with the fullness of his glory and present a dishonouring view of Nature. Soapy Sam Wilberforce
cf.
It is not who is right, but what is right that is of importance. Thomas Huxley
I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. Thomas H Huxley, replying to Soapy Wilberforce
Today all serious scientists agree that evolution has occurred. You should be forgiven that in 1938 this point should not need repeating. Unfortunately certain types of Christian propaganda still maintain that there is serious doubt about it. Let us use our science to finish the speculation. The superstition. The witchcraft. Proof for evolution. Proof for Darwin. This is the goal. It would be the achievement of the age. Julian Huxley, lecture Cambridge, cited Horizon: Wings of Angels, BBC 1999
No opinion can be heretical, but that which is not true ... Conflicting falsehoods we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any truth, either physical or moral, from whatever source that truth may be derived. (Evolution & Truth) Reverend Adam Sedgwick, address London Geological Society, 1831
Scene. In the fastnesses of Tennessee, the quiet of dawn is split asunder by wailing screams from a steam siren. It is the Dayton sawmill, waking up villagers and farmers for miles around. From 5 until 6.30 the blasts continue. The hamlet and the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war that is in progress there come slowly to life ...
Jury. A jury was sworn – ten farmers, a shipping clerk and a farmer-teacher, none of whom had ever read a book on Evolution or admitted a prejudice for or against it; all of whom, with the exception of one illiterate, had read the Bible.
Trial [Scopes]: Lawyer Bryan, palm leaf fan in hand, collarless, led the prosecution forces into Court shortly before 9 o’clock. A few of the more courageous clung to their coats, but the heat soon overcame their vanity, with the exception of foppish, double-breasted-coated Dudley Field Malone.
… Lawyer Darrow then began his long argument for the defense, basing it on the diversion of the caption of the act from the act itself and on the ambiguity of the indictment. ‘I am going to argue it [the case] as if it was serious ... The Book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat ... Religious ignorance and bigotry as any that justified the Spanish Inquisition or the hanging of witches in New England ... The State of Tennessee has no more right to teach the Bible as the Divine Book than it has the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Confucius, the Buddha or the Essays of Emerson ... Who is the Chief Mogul that can tell us what the Bible means?’ Time magazine article 20th July 1925, ‘Education: The Great Trial’
‘We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts,’ Professor Skinner states. ‘Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.’ ACLU advert all Tennessee newspapers
In 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act which made it a misdemeanour to teach the evolution of only one species – mankind – in the public schools. The evolution of 99.9999% of all other plant and animal life (about two million other species), or the evolution of the earth or the solar system, could all be taught as either compelling theory or proven fact without violating the Butler Act ...