I begin this last programme in Iceland,
because this is the seat of the oldest democracy in Northern Europe.
In this natural amphitheatre,
where there were never any buildings,
met each year the Althing of Iceland -
the whole community of the Norsemen of Iceland -
to make laws and to receive them,
at a time when China was a great empire,
when Europe was the spoil of princelings and robber barons.
That's a remarkable beginning to democracy.
But there's something more remarkable about this misty, inclement site.
It was chosen, because the farmer who had owned it,
had killed
not another farmer, but a slave,
and had been outlawed.
Justice is a universal of all cultures.
It's a tightrope that man walks
between his desire to fulfil his wishes
and his acknowledgement of social responsibility.
No animal is faced with this dilemma.
An animal is either social
or solitary.
Man is alone in being a social solitary.
To me, that is a unique biological feature.
That's the kind of problem that engages me
and that I want to discuss in my home, in California.
It's something of a shock
to think that justice is part of the biological equipment of man.
And yet, it's exactly that thought which took me out of physics into biology.
And that's taught me, since then,
that a man 's life,
a man 's home,
is a proper place in which to study his biological uniqueness.
It's natural that, by tradition,
biology is thought of in a different way,
that the likeness between man and the animals is what dominates it.
Back, before the year 200AD,
the great classic of antiquity in medicine, Galen,
studied, for example, the forearm in man.
How did he study it? By dissecting the forearm in a Barbary ape.
That's how you have to begin.
And, to this day,
the wonderful work on animal behaviour by Konrad Lorenz,
naturally makes us seek for a likeness between the duck and the tiger and man.
Or BF Skinner's psychological work on pigeons and rats.
They tell us something about man.
But they can 't tell us everything.
There must be something unique about man,
because otherwise, evidently,
the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz
and the rats would be writing papers about BF Skinner.
Let's not beat about the bush.
The horse and the rider have many anatomical features in common.
But it's the human creature that rides the horse
and not the other way about.
The rider is a very good example.
Because man was not created to ride the horse.
There's no wiring inside our brain that makes us horse riders.
Riding a horse is a comparatively recent invention,
less than 5,000 years old.
And yet, it's had an immense influence,
for instance, on our social structure.
It's the plasticity of human behaviour that makes that possible.
It's what characterises us
in our social institutions, of course.
But naturally, above all, in books,
in the product, the interest, of the human mind.
Newton,
the great man dominating the Royal Society at the beginning of the 18th century.
Blake writing the Songs Of Innocence late in the 18th century.
They are two aspects of the one mind.
How can I put this most simply?
I wrote a book called The Identity Of Man.
I never saw the cover
until the book reached me.
And yet the artist had understood exactly what was in my mind,
by putting on the cover
the brain
and the Mona Lisa,
put one on top of the other.
Man is unique.
Not because he does science
and he's unique not because he does art,
but because science and art, equally,
are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.
The Mona Lisa is a very good example,
because, after all, what did Leonardo do for most of his life?
He drew anatomical pictures.
The baby in the womb.
And the brain and the baby is exactly where it begins.
I have an object which I treasure.
A cast of the skull of a child
that is...
...two million years old.
Of course, it's not strictly a human child
and yet, if she -
I always think of her as a girl -
if she had lived long enough,
she might have been my ancestor.
What distinguishes her little brain from mine?
In one sense, only the size.
That brain, if she'd grown up,
would have weighed perhaps a little over a pound
and my brain, the average brain today,
weighs three pounds.
I am not going to talk about the neural structure, about one-way conduction in nervous tissue,
because that's what we share with the animals.
I'm going to talk about the brain, as it is specific to the human creature.
The first question we ask is,
well, is the human brain a better computer, a more complex computer?
Of course.
Artists, in particular, tend to think of the brain as a computer.
Here is Portrait Of Dr Bronowski by Terry Durham.
Of course, the spectrum and the computer
is what he thinks into the mind of the scientist,
because that's how an artist thinks of a scientist's brain, a computer.
But, of course, that can 't be right.
If the brain were a computer,
then it would be carrying out
a pre-wired set of actions
in an inflexible sequence.
Think of a very beautiful piece of animal behaviour.
My friend Dan Lehrman 's work on the mating of the ring dove.
If the male coos in the right way,
if he bows in the right way,
then the female explodes in excitement,
all her hormones squirt
and she goes through a sequence
as part of which she builds a perfect nest.
Nobody ever gave her any set of bricks to learn to build a nest.
But you couldn 't get a human being to build anything...
...unless the child had put together a set of bricks.
That's the beginning of the Parthenon
and the Taj Mahal,
of the dome at Soltanieh
and the Watts Towers,
of Machu Picchu and...
and the Pentagon.
If we are any kind of a machine,
then we are a learning machine.
We do that in specific areas of the brain.
You see, the brain hasn 't just blown up to two or three times its size.
It has grown in quite special areas.
Where it controls the hand.
Where speech is controlled.
Where foresight and planning are controlled. Here.
One by one. The hand.
The evolution of man certainly begins with the development of the hand
and the selection for a brain,
which is particularly adept at manipulating the hand.
So that, for the artist,
the hand remains a major symbol.
The hand of Buddha,
giving man the gift of humanity,
the gift of fearlessness.
But also, for the scientist...
...the hand has a special gesture.
We can oppose the thumb to the fingers.
Well...
The apes can do part of that,
but we can oppose the thumb to the forefinger.
That's a very special human gesture.
And it's done...
...because there is an area in the brain,
which is...
Well, I can only describe its size to you in the following way.
We spend more grey matter in the brain manipulating the thumb,
than in the total control of the chest and the abdomen.
I remember, as a young father,
tiptoeing to the cradle of my first daughter when she was four or five days old and thinking...
These marvellous fingers.
Every joint so perfect.
The fingernails.
I couldn 't have designed that in a million years.
But, of course, it's exactly a million years that it took me,
a million years that it took mankind.
For the hand to drive the brain,
for the brain to feed back and drive the hand to reach its present stage of evolution.
That takes place in a quite specific place in the brain.
The whole of the hand
is essentially monitored
by a part of the brain that's up here.
Up here.
Take an even more specifically human area,
which doesn 't exist in animals at all.
Speech. That goes from here to here.
On this model, it goes from that sort of pinkish area
down here to this green area here.
Is that pre-wired? Yes.
Because if we don 't have this, we can 't speak, at all.
Does it have to be learnt? Of course it does.
I speak English, which I only learned at the age of 13.
But I could not speak English,
if I had not, before that, learned language.
You see, if you leave a child that speaks no language until the age of 13,
then it's almost impossible for it to learn, at all.
I speak English, which I learnt at the age of 13,
because I learnt Polish at the age of two.
I've forgotten every word of Polish,
but I learnt language.
On this model that's cut in half,
I can 't really show that, because the speech areas are very peculiar.
You see, the human brain is not symmetrical in its half.
Speech is on the left, here and here.
Whether you're right-handed or left-handed, speech is almost certainly on the left.
There are exceptions, the way there are people who have their heart on the right,
but the exceptions are rare.
By and large, speech is here.
And what's here?
Well, we don 't exactly know.
We don 't exactly know what the right-hand side of the brain does
in those areas which are devoted to speech on the left.
But it looks as if
they take the input that comes by way of the eye
of a two-dimensional world
and turn it, organise it, into a three-dimensional picture.
If that's right, then it's clear that speech is also a way of organising the world
into its parts and putting them together again.
The main organisation of the brain...
...is here,
in the frontal lobes and the prefrontal lobes.
I am, every man is,
a highbrow, an egghead, because that's how his brain goes.
We know that this skull is not just a child that died recently and that we've mistaken,
because she has a sloping forehead.
Exactly what do these frontal lobes do?
Well, they certainly do one very specific and important thing.
They enable you to...
...think of actions in the future...
...and wait for a reward then.
Those are beautiful experiments which were first done by Hunter, round about 1910,
and then refined by Jacobsen in the 1930s.
The kind of thing that Hunter did was this. He would take...
...some reward.
He would show it to an animal
and hide it.
Now, if you take a rat and do that and you let it go at once,
the rat, of course, goes to this hand immediately.
But if you keep the rat waiting for some minutes,
then it's no longer able
to identify where it ought to go for its reward.
Children are quite different. Hunter did the same experiments with children.
You can keep children of three or four for half an hour, for an hour.
Hunter had a little girl
whom he was trying to keep amused while keeping her waiting.
He talked to her and, finally, she said to him,
"I think you're just trying to make me forget."
The ability to plan actions
for which the reward is a long way off
is the central thing that the human brain has
to which there's no match in animal brains,
well, until they become quite well up in the scale,
like our cousins the monkeys and the apes.
That means that...
We are concerned,
in our early education,
actually, with the postponement of decisions.
We have to put off the decision -making process,
in order to accumulate enough knowledge
as a preparation for the future.
That seems an extraordinary thing to say,
but that's what childhood is about, that's what puberty is about, that's what youth is about.
I want to put this quite dramatically -
and I mean that literally.
What is the major drama in the English language?
It's Hamlet.
What is Hamlet about?
It's a play about a young man, a boy,
who is faced with...
...the first great decision of his life
and it's a decision beyond his reach.
To kill the murderer of his father.
It's pointless the ghost nudging him and saying, "Be revenged on me."
The fact is that Hamlet, as a youth,
is simply not mature intellectually, emotionally.
He's not ripe for the act that he's asked to perform.
The whole play
is an endless postponement of that decision,
while wrestling with himself.
The high point is in the middle of Act III.
Hamlet sees the King at prayer.
The stage directions are so uncertain
that he may even hear the King at prayer, confessing his crime.
And what does Hamlet say?
"Now might I do it, pat!"
But he doesn 't do it. He is simply not ready for an act of that magnitude in boyhood.
So, at the end of the play, Hamlet is murdered.
But the tragedy is not that Hamlet dies,
it's that he dies exactly when he is ready to become a great king.
In man, before the brain is an instrument for action,
it has to be an instrument of preparation.
For that, quite specific areas are involved.
For example, the frontal lobes have to be undamaged,
but, far more deeply than that,
it depends on the long preparation of human childhood.
In scientific terms, we are neotenous.
We come from the womb still as embryos.
Perhaps that's why our civilisation, our scientific civilisation,
adores above all else the symbol of the child,
ever since the Renaissance,
the Christ child painted by Raphael,
talked about by Pascal,
Mozart and Gauss,
the children in Rousseau and Dickens.
It never struck me that other civilisations are different,
until I sailed south from here, out of California,
4,000 miles away to Easter Island.
Every so often, some visionary invents a new Utopia.
Plato,
St Thomas More,
HG Wells.
Always, the idea is
that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, "for a thousand years".
But the heroic images always look like this.
Crude, dead, ancestral faces.
Why, they even look like Mussolini.
That's not the essence of the human personality,
even in terms of biology.
Biologically, a human being is changeable,
sensitive, mutable,
fitted to many environments
and not static.
The real vision of the human being is the child wonder,
the Virgin and child,
the Holy Family.
When I was a boy in my teens,
I used to go on Saturday afternoons from the East End of London to the British Museum,
in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands,
which, somehow, they didn 't get inside the museum.
So, I'm fond of these...
...ancient ancestral faces.
But in the end,
all of them are not worth one child's dimpled face.
I was a little carried away at Easter Island.
And yet with reason.
Think of the investment that evolution has made in the child's brain.
My brain weighs three pounds.
My body weighs 50 times as much as that.
But when I was born,
my body was a mere appendage to the head.
It weighed only five or six times as much as my brain.
For most of history,
civilisations have simply ignored that enormous potential.
In fact, the longest childhood
has been that of civilisation to understand that.
For most of history,
children have been asked simply to conform to the image of the adult.
We travelled with the Bakhtiari of Persia on their spring migration.
They are as near as any surviving vanishing people can be
to the nomad ways of 10,000 years ago.
You see it everywhere in such ancient modes of life -
the image of the adult shines in the children 's eyes.
The girls are little mothers in the making.
The boys are little herdsmen.
They even carry themselves like their parents.
Of course, history didn 't stand still between the nomad and the Renaissance.
The ascent of man has never come to a stop.
But the ascent of the young,
the ascent of the talented,
the ascent of the imaginative,
that became very halting many times in between.
Of course there were great civilisations.
Who am I to belittle the civilisations of Egypt, of China, of India...
...even of Europe in the Middle Ages?
And yet by one test they all fail:
They limit the freedom of the imagination of the young.
They are static,
and they are minority cultures.
Static because the son does what the father did,
and the father what the grandfather did.
And minority, because...
only a tiny fraction of all that talent that mankind produces
is actually used -
learns to read, learns to write, learns another language,
and climbs that terribly slow ladder of promotion
in the Middle Ages, through the Church.
And at the end of the ladder
there's always the image, the icon of the godhead, that says,
"Now you have reached the last commandment: Thou shalt not question."
~ GRUPPO POLIFONICO F. CORADINl: Credo from 14th century Mass: Cum Giubilate
The Mass is old enough for Erasmus to have heard.
The church is San Pietro in Gropina, and is older.
When Erasmus was left an orphan, in 1480,
he had to prepare for a career in the Church.
The services were as beautiful then as now.
But the monk's life was, for Erasmus, an iron door closed against knowledge.
~ Sanctus from Cum Giubilate
Only when Erasmus read the classics for himself, in defiance of orders,
was the world opened for him.
"A heathen wrote this to a heathen," he said,
"yet it has justice, sanctity, truth.
I can hardly refrain from saying, 'Saint Socrates, pray for me."'
Erasmus made two lifelong friends,
Sir Thomas More in England, and Johann Frobenius in Switzerland.
From Sir Thomas More, he got what I got when I first came to England -
the sense of pleasure in the companionship of civilised minds.
From Frobenius, he got a sense of the power of the printed book.
Frobenius and his family were the great printers of the 1500s.
This is the Galen.
This is Frobenius's Hippocrates...
...one of the most beautiful books ever printed,
in which the happy passion of the printer sits on the page
as powerful as the knowledge.
The is the democracy of the intellect.
And that's why Erasmus and Frobenius and Sir Thomas More
stand in my mind as gigantic landmarks of their time.
The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book.
And the problems that it set from the year 1500
have lasted right down to the student riots of today.
What did Sir Thomas More die of?
He died because his king thought of him as a wielder of power.
And what More wanted to be, what Erasmus wanted to be,
what every strong intellect wants to be,
is a guardian of integrity.
There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority.
How old, how bitter, came home to me
when I came up from Jericho on the road that Jesus took
and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline
as he saw it, going to his certain death,
because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people.
But he was facing an establishment for which religion was simply an arm of government.
And that's a crisis of choice that leaders have faced over and over again.
Socrates in Athens.
Jonathan Swift in Ireland, torn between pity and ambition.
Gandhi in India.
And Einstein when he refused the presidency of Israel.
I bring in the name of Einstein deliberately because he was a scientist,
and the intellectual leadership of the 20th century rests with scientists.
And that's a grave problem,
because science is also a source of power that walks close to government,
that the state wants to harness.
But if science allows itself to go that way,
the beliefs of the 20th century will fall to pieces in cynicism,
because no beliefs can be built up in this century
that are not based on science as the recognition of the uniqueness of man
and a pride in his gifts and his works.
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth,
but to inherit the moral imagination,
because man,
and beliefs, and science,
without that, will perish together.
I must bring that concretely into the present.
The man who personifies these issues for me is John von Neumann.
He was born in 1903,
the son of a Jewish family in Hungary.
If he'd been born 100 years earlier, we would never have heard of him.
He would have been doing what his father and grandfather did,
making rabbinical comments on dogma.
Instead, he was a child prodigy of mathematics -
"Johnny" to the end of his life.
In his teens, he already wrote mathematical papers.
He did the great work
on both the subjects for which he's famous
before he was 25.
Both subjects...
...are concerned...
...I suppose I should say, with play.
You see, of course, in a sense,
all science, all human thought, is a form of play,
the neoteny of the intellect,
man able to continue
to carry out activities which have no immediate goal
in order to prepare himself for long-time strategies and plans.
I worked with Johnny von Neumann during the war in England.
He first talked to me about the theory of games in a taxi in London...
...one of the favourite places in which he liked to talk about mathematics.
And I naturally said to him, since I'm an enthusiastic chess player,
"You mean the theory of games like chess?"
"Oh, no," he said.
"Chess isn 't a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation.
You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory
there must be a solution,
a right procedure, in any position."
"Now, real games," he said, "are not like that at all.
Real life is not like that.
Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics,
of asking yourself what is the other man going to do.
And that's what games are about."
And that's what his book is about.
It seems very strange
to find a book in which there is a chapter called Poker And Bluffing,
and moreover, to find it covered with equations - very pompous.
But mathematics is not a pompous activity,
least of all in the hands of extraordinarily fast and penetrating minds
like Johnny von Neumann 's.
What's running through the page is a clear intellectual line, like a tune.
And all the heavy weight of equations is simply the orchestration down in the bass.
In the latter part of his life,
he carried the subject into what I've called his second great creative idea.
He began to realise that computers would be technically important,
but he also began to realise that one must understand clearly
how real-life situations are different from computer situations,
exactly because they do not have the precise solutions
that strategies in chess or in engineering calculations do.
And in his last years,
he wrote a beautiful book - The Silliman Lectures
that he should have given, but was too ill to give, in 1956 -
called The Computer And The Brain.
In them, he looks at the brain as having a language
in which the activities of the different parts of the brain
have somehow to be interlocked and made to match
so that we devise a plan, a procedure,
as a grand overall way of life -
what in the humanities we would call a system of values.
There was something endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann.
When he died, in 1957, it was a great tragedy to us all.
And that was not because he was a modest man.
When I worked with him during the war...
...we once faced a problem together.
And he said to me at once,
"Oh, no, no. You're not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind isn 't seeing this.
Think of it abstractly.
What is happening on this photograph of an explosion
is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically,
and that's why you're seeing the trace of the second differential coefficient."
That's not the way that I think.
However, I let him go to London.
I went off to my laboratory in the country.
I worked late into the night.
Round about midnight, I had the answer.
Well,
Johnny von Neumann always slept very late.
So I was kind. I didn 't wake him until well after ten in the morning.
When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone from bed.
I said, "Johnny, you're quite right."
And he said to me,
"You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right?
Please wait until I'm wrong."
If that sounds very vain, it was not.
It was a real statement of how he lived his life.
And yet it has something in it which reminds us that he wasted the last years of his life.
He never finished the great work.
That has been very difficult to carry on since his death.
And he didn 't, really, because he became more and more engaged
in work for private firms, for industry, for government,
for enterprises which brought him to the centre of power
but which did not advance either his knowledge
or his intimacy with people who, to this day,
have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do
about the human problems of life and mind.
Johnny von Neumann was in love with the aristocracy of intellect.
And that's a belief
which can only destroy the civilisation that we know.
If we are anything, we must be a democracy of the intellect.
We must not perish by the distance
between people and government, people and power,
by which Babylon, and Egypt, and Rome failed.
And that distance can only be... conflated,
can only be closed,
if knowledge sits here, and not up there.
That seems a hard lesson.
After all, this is a world run by specialists.
Isn 't that what we mean by a scientific society?
No, it isn 't.
A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do
the things like making the electric light work.
But it's you, it's I, who have to know how nature works,
how electricity is one of her expressions, in the light, and in my brain.
And we are really here on a wonderful threshold of knowledge.
The ascent of man is always teetering in the balance.
There's always a sense of uncertainty as to whether,
when man lifts his foot for the next step, it's really going to come down ahead.
And what is ahead of us?
At last, the bringing together
of all that we've learnt in physics and in biology,
towards an understanding of where we have come, what man is.
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts.
Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are,
above all, of what we are as ethical creatures.
You can 't possibly maintain that
if you let other people run the world for you,
while you yourself continue to live...
...out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs.
That's really crucial today.
You see, it's pointless to advise people to learn differential equations,
or, "You must do a course in electronics or in computer programming."
Of course not.
And yet,
50 years from now,
if an understanding of man 's origins,
his evolution, his history, his progress,
is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist.
The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today,
and that's what we're engaged in.
And I'm infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the West
by a sense of terrible loss of nerve,
a retreat from knowledge into - into what?
Into Zen Buddhism.
Into profound questions about are we not just really animals at bottom?
Into extra-sensory perception.
Which simply do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know
if we devote ourselves to it -
an understanding of man himself,
self-knowledge,
at last bringing together the experience of the arts
and the explanations of science.
It sounds very pessimistic
to talk about Western civilisation with a sense of retreat.
I've been so optimistic about the ascent of man.
Am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not.
The ascent of man will go on.
But don 't assume that it will go on carried by Western civilisation as we know it.
We are being weighed in the balance at this moment.
If we give up, the next step will be taken, but not by us.
We have not been given any guarantee
that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given.
We are a scientific civilisation.
That means a civilisation
in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial.
Science is only a Latin word for knowledge.
If we don 't take the next step in the ascent of man,
it will be taken by people elsewhere - in Africa, in China.
Should I feel that to be sad? No.
Humanity has a right to change its colour.
And yet, wedded as I am to the civilisation that nurtured me,
I should feel it to be infinitely sad.
I, whom England made, whom it taught its language,
and its tolerance
and excitement in intellectual pursuits...
...I should feel it a grave sense of loss, as you would,
if, 100 years from now,
Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man,
the way that Homer and Euclid are.
(Wind whistles)
I began this series of programmes in the Valley of the Omo, in east Africa,
and I've come back here
because something that happened then has remained in my mind ever since.
On the morning of the day that we were to take the first sentences of the first programme,
a light plane took off from this airstrip
with the cameraman and the sound recordist on board,
and it crashed within seconds of taking off.
By some miracle, the pilot and the two men crawled out unhurt.
But naturally, the ominous event made a deep impression on me.
Here was I, preparing to unfold the pageant of the past,
and the present quietly put its hand through the printed page of history,
and said, "It's here. It's now."
History is not events, but people.
And it's not people remembering.
It's people acting and living their past in the present.
We sat about in the camp for two days, waiting for another plane.
And I said to the cameraman, kindly though perhaps not tactfully,
that perhaps he might prefer to have someone else
take the shots that had to be filmed from the air.
He said, "I've thought of that.
I'm going to be afraid when I go up tomorrow...
...but I'm going to do the filming. It's what I have to do."
We are all afraid, for our confidence,
for the future,
for the world.
That's the nature of the human imagination.
Yet every man,
every civilisation,
has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
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.