There are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in The Ascent of Man: one is the analysis of the physical structure of the world, the other is the study of the processes of life. ibid.
The manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms, are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental. And yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities. ibid.
It cannot be an accident that the Theory of Evolution is conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture – the culture of Queen Victoria in England. ibid.
Species are not immutable. ibid.
When he was twenty-five Wallace decided to become a full-time naturalist. ibid.
Wallace had never been further than Wales but he was not overawed by the exotic. ibid.
Alfred Wallace returned from the tropics as Darwin had done, convinced that related species diverged from a common stock and nonplussed as to why they diverged. What Wallace did not know was that Darwin had hit on the explanation two years after he returned to England. ibid.
Darwin ... A mind that did not want to face the public. ibid.
Wallace ... The same book by Malthus, and had the same explanation flash on him that had struck Darwin. ibid.
Darwin received Wallace’s paper here in his study at Down House in June 1858. ibid.
Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species and published it at the end of 1859. ibid.
Each one of us traces back through that evolutionary process. ibid.
We look more deeply at the chemistry we all share. ibid.
The Theory of Evolution is no longer a battleground: that’s because the evidence for it is so much richer and more varied now than in the days of Darwin and Wallace. ibid.
Between me and the chimpanzee there is just one difference in an amino acid ... The number of amino acids differences which is a measure of the evolutionary distance between me and the other mammals. ibid.
Proteins are the constituents of all living things. ibid.
There are seven basic shapes of crystals in nature and a multitude of colours. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 10/13: World Within World
Of all the variety of crystals the most modest is common salt. ibid.
What makes these family likenesses among the elements? ibid.
What distinguished Mendeleev was not only genius but a passion for the elements. They became his personal friends. ibid.
Each element has a characteristic atomic weight. ibid.
Mendeleev didn’t have all the elements: 63 out of the total of 92 were known. ibid.
The underlying pattern of the atoms was numerical, that was clear. ibid.
J J Thomson in Cambridge discovers the electron. ibid.
The notion that there is an underlying structure – a world within the world of the atom – captures the imagination of artists at once. ibid.
The cubist painters for example are obviously inspired by the families of crystals. ibid.
Niels Bohr ... what he questioned was the structure of the world. ibid.
Ernest Rutherford who round about 1910 was the outstanding experimental physicist in the world. Rutherford was then at Manchester. And in 1911 he proposed a new model for the atom. ibid.
Energy must also come in lumps or quanta as well. ibid.
The ascent of man is a richer and richer synthesis. ibid.
Matter itself evolves. ibid.
Entropy is a measure of disorder. ibid.
Nature works by steps ... I call it stratified stability. ibid.
Physics in the twentieth century is an immortal work. ibid.
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. Once achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that aim is unattainable. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 11/13: Knowledge or Certainty *****
There is no absolute knowledge ... All information is imperfect. ibid.
The longest of the invisible waves are the radio waves. ibid.
The infra-red waves are heat waves. ibid.
White Light is a mixture of waves lengths. ibid.
The errors can’t be taken out of the observations. ibid.
Histories has many ironies ... The errors are inextricable bound up with the nature of human knowledge. ibid.
There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment. ibid.
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.
The 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.