Science And Culture

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30152, 8 June 1963, Page 3

Science And Culture

Doubt and Certainty in Science. By J. Z. Young. Galaxy Book. Oxford University Press. 168 pp. Culture and the Evolution of Man. Edited by M. F. Ashley Montagu. Galaxy Book, Oxford University Press. 376 pp.

Originally delivered in 1950 as the Reith Lectures, the thesis of Professor Young is that study of the brain is one of the most challenging scientific problems. If we knew more about brain processes, among other developments it would follow that education methods could be more efficiently used to produce a type of brain that is pliable and able to be employed to greater advantage in the changing situations of life and environment. The early lectures are in comprehensible technical detail on what is known of brain functions and the allied nervous system, with some light relief in some of the analogies. notably that we can think of the brain as a gigantic government office in multifarious action what a thought! There are intriguing accounts of what is known of the reactions of nervous systems derived from experiments on test animals. For example, the mechanism of the octopus in repelling attackers has pointed the way in modern war for a guided missile that can be set to chase another. In the treatment of technique of study one would have liked to have learned more from this authority, on brain surgery and knowledge derived therefrom. Whereas at one time, exposure of the brain was regarded as fatal, now some of the most remarkable accomplishments of men’s brains are revealed in surgical techniques that even enable a patient to comment on his reactions while his brain is being subjected to electrical and needle treatment.

The later lectures correlate the development of our brains with understanding men's highest activities and of scientific progress. Evidently, the history of social man has been the continual new discovery by trial and error of new tools, technical and verbal, that enable life to be lived in ways not possible before. Man’s brain pursues this alternate process of doubting what were once fundamental laws and then applying the new rules he learns. Thus the rules with which brains had functioned in the middle ages altered to open the era of scientific progress when brains conceived and developed the techniques of counting, printing, the clock, glass, and lenses. Whereas evolution has been discussed largely in relating our traits to influences of physical environment, Ashley Montagu’s volume of massive reading deals with man’s adaptation to environment by the agencies of culture. A former professor of anatomy, but latterly an anthropologist, he has assembled 20 essays, mostly by American authorities and previously published elsewhere, dealing with man in the new environment created by cultural processes tools, marriage regulations, sexual and social selection, economic development. care of children, and so forth.

Allied to Young’s theme, the contribution by F. A. Mettler on evolution of the human brain is noteworthy There seems little support for

the assumption that the size of man’s brain has continued to increase. Intelligence is based on other phenomena than large frontal lobes. The final essay by B. H. Stott on natural checks to population growth will likely attract most interest, being more related than the others to our present day state and the predicted catastrophe of world population. He finds that it will be forestalled either by man choosing to apply population regulatory mechanisms (and to discard some existing conventions) derived from the ways animal populations limit themselves to their subsistence, or by nature herself making the adjustment by the insensitive and amoral evolutionary process of survival of the fittest.

Young’s book has been described as a stimulating popularisation of science; but it requires concentrated study. It is not for the W.E A class but rather for the reader with good scientific background who will find in these wonderful lectures an erudite summarisation of knowledge at present locked in inaccessible textbooks and research journals. Montagu's assembled essays are even more solid literary fare. Some of the essays are scientific writings in their most laboured and tedious form. This book will have value to the specialists in the study of man,, not to the ordinary, suffering, struggling citizen, who will only make contact here and there on a common ground of understanding.