Jacob Bronowski: The Ascent of Man

“The Ascent of Man” (1973) was a 13-part BBC television series about the rise of science and invention. It was written and presented by mathematician Jacob Bronowski. It goes from the dawn of man to the 1950s and the discovery of DNA.

It was the idea of David Attenborough, then at BBC Two, who wanted a counterpart to Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” (1969), a series about the history of Western art and architecture.

Bronowski himself died a year after the show came out, but some of the producers and directors moved to Hollywood and later gave us Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” (1980).

Although I saw some of “The Ascent of Man” in the 1980s on the television station of the City College of New York and some more of it years later on YouTube, I mainly know it through the “companion volume” that came out at the same time, which I picked up for $2 (3.5 p) at a used book sale. It is almost word-for-word the same as what Bronowski says on the show – and quite a bit cheaper than the $79 (2.3 crowns) disc set.

All in all it is a good, painless history of science. It gives you not just the facts and dates and important things to know – Darwin, Galileo, Einstein and all that – but also something of the sort of thinking that goes into science, the philosophy of science, which Bronowski is big on. It also gets into what science tells us about the nature of man.

On top of that, Bronowski has this way of talking as if he is about to tell you something profound. It is probably the way he frequently pauses and talks slowly. And probably because sometimes he does in fact say something profound.

I have written a post on each chapter:

1. Jacob Bronowski: Lower Than the Angels – the dawn of man
2. Jacob Bronowski: The Harvest of Seasons – the rise of farming
3. Jacob Bronowski: The Grain in the Stone – the rise of civilization
4. Jacob Bronowski: The Hidden Structure – chemistry from metal-making up to Dalton (atomic theory)
5. Jacob Bronowski: The Music of the Spheres – astronomy before the 1500s
6. Jacob Bronowski: The Starry Messenger – the astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo; Galileo and the Catholic Church
7. Jacob Bronowski: The Majestic Clockwork – the physics of Newton (gravity, motion) and Einstein (relativity)
8. Jacob Bronowski: The Drive for Power – the rise of industry in the 1700s and 1800s
9. Jacob Bronowski: The Ladder of Creation – the biology of Darwin and Wallace (evolution)
10. Jacob Bronowski: World Within World – the chemistry of Mendeleev (periodic table of elements), Rutherford and Bohr: inside the atom
11. Jacob Bronowski: Knowledge or Certainty – the quantum physics of Heisenberg; the atom bomb; Hitler and the Holocaust
12. Jacob Bronowski: Generation upon Generation – the biology of Mendel (genes) and Watson and Crick (DNA)
13. Jacob Bronowski: The Long Childhood – conclusion: the nature of the human mind and of science. A bit on John von Neumann. Bronowski’s fears for the future of the West since it seems to be backing away from science.

See also:

• Jacob Bronowski: Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people – the best six minutes of the show
• science
• Darwin
• Dalton
• Mendel
• Einstein
• Newton
• Galileo
• Copernicus