Upward and Onward?

By Peter Stoler

THE ASCENT OF MAN

by J. BRONOWSKI

448 pages. Little, Brown. $15.

Anyone who has puzzled over such things as the mysterious menhirs of Stonehenge or shaken his head at the extravagant ugliness of a modern office building knows that man is unique--and not merely because, as Mark Twain once pointed out, he is the only animal who blushes, or has reason to. Unlike other animals, man leaves behind him not just footprints and skeletons but complex creations--stone and social structures that succeeding generations can reject, use or improve upon.

Two years ago, Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-born, English-educated mathematician, historian and biologist, traced man's scientific development in a widely acclaimed 13-part BBC television series, The Ascent of Man, which will reach U.S. TV audiences next season. Now he has adapted his scripts into a book. The result is a long (100,000 words), fascinating, beautifully illustrated essay about the qualities of curiosity, imagination and inventiveness that lead man to explore the world and the invisible laws that order it. The book is also an exercise in optimism. With so many scientists predicting that humanity will destroy itself, anyone who writes as enthusiastically about man as Bronowski does is practically inviting a pie in the face from his apprehensive colleagues.

Bronowski begins in the Great Rift Valley of Africa where, it is believed, the creature that was to become man first put his footprints on the earth. The book ends in the 20th century at the same location with Bronowski's fearful, yet hopeful look into the future. In between he leads the way through a catalogue of human accomplishment, from Pythagoras on the mathematical laws that govern the universe to the revolutionary observations of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo; from Newton's experiments on the diffraction of light to James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the key to the alphabet of life, the master molecule DNA.

Bronowski often bridges the gap between the two cultures, discoursing on everything from the Mona Lisa to the construction of Rheims Cathedral. He demonstrates how the flowering of art and architecture was a natural out growth of expanding knowledge in mathematics and the rules of perspective. Bronowski also corrects the popular notion that the Industrial Revolution simply forced man to give up rural pleasures for urban horrors. This revolution, he points out, freed man from age-old social strictures, creating a new aristocracy of talent.

The Industrial Revolution also gave science a conscience. Men like Galileo and Newton believed that science's only responsibility was to tell the truth. The idea that science is a social enterprise dates from the Industrial Revolution, when both scientists and politicians faintly began to grasp the impact of invention and technology on man and nature. "We are surprised that we cannot trace a social sense further back," writes Bronowski, "because we nurse the illusion that the Industrial Revolution ended a golden age."

The author wisely does not predict where man's skills will take him. As a scientist, he recognizes that human progress is governed by the same uncertainty principle that applies to the movement of electrons. Science can specify where a moving electron is at any given moment, but cannot tell where the electron started from or where it will stop. Nor can science be any more exact when it comes to man. His origins are shrouded in mystery. All that is certain is that man is still evolving and, if the past is really a prologue, ascending. . Peter Stoler

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