Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
as thematic material for a historical narrative. Like their fictional counter-
parts, these documentaries employ biological evolution as a metaphor for
the human story writ large. As I noted earlier regarding Bronowski's title,
this shift from evolution into evolutionism is reflected in the word “ascent.”
While the professed subject of the series is the “ascent” of civilization, with
all its usual value associations, this term simultaneously denotes the merely
biological “ascent” revealed by evolutionary science. Bronowski needed to do
this, I would surmise, because science could not be history's hero if the
nomos
at stake was not also identified with something above the merely human—
with the evolving
cosmos
,
in this instance. Evolution thus is mythologized in
the same fashion as it is in the documentary's fictional counterparts.
By mythologizing evolution in his way, Bronowski elevates the scientist
as a romantic hero whose sacrificial devotion to learning enacts the rise
of civilization in parallel with the unfolding of nature. In Frye's language,
we would say that Bronowski has made science “analogous to the mythical
Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world.”
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Nature, through
evolution, has descended upon the world as science. This explains why the
opening scene of
The Ascent of Man
bears such a significant resemblance to
the first act of
2001
. As birth narratives, both episodes clarify the circum-
stances that set the scientific hero apart as a god-like actor. In Kubrick's tale,
science arises from the very same event of evolution that first set humans
apart from apes, and in Bronowski's story, this evolutionary separation is
depicted in precisely the same way. He begins his narrative of civilization
by returning to the same African scene of hominid evolution where science
is born in Kubrick's film. We are taught that progress is rooted in nature
because it was at that crucial juncture in human history when biological
evolution ramped up the power of the australopithecine brain that science
became possible. It was in the ancient savannahs that paleontologists now
excavate in eastern Africa that “scientific ideas” found their “origins in the
gifts with which nature has endowed man, and which make him unique.”
Science is the protagonist of civilized history because it alone can “express
what is essentially human in his nature,” and in this the whole course of
Bronowski's drama is foreshadowed.
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It is to be the story of continuous
struggle between those who faithfully pursue science, the “root from which
all knowledge grows,” and those who resist nature's course. Within science
“lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not
see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognize ourselves
in the past on the steps to the present.”
54
Those who abandon this gift turn
from nature and thus from progress as well.
