Jacob Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski was a humanist, polymath and all round Renaissance man.

He was born in Poland in 1908 to Jewish parents who moved to Germany during the first World War and then on to England in 1920.

Bronowski won a scholarship to study Mathematics at Cambridge but was also involved with editing a literary periodical called Experiment. This was an early sign that he would be one of the extraordinary few thinkers to straddle the divide between science and humanities – the ‘two cultures’ famously discussed by C.P. Snow in his 1959 lecture and paving the way to the ‘third culture (scientists who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public).

Bronowski’s interests ranged widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism, his commitment to which is evidenced in the following excerpt written in October 1968:

The notion that a man shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, is of course implicit in the outlook of science. But it begins before that as a positive and active constituent of humanism. For evidently the notion implies not only that man is free to judge, but that he is able to judge. This is an assertion of confidence which goes back to a contemporary of Socrates, and claims (as Plato quotes him) that “man is the measure of all things”. In humanism, man is all things: he is both the expression and the master of the creation.

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered for The Ascent of Man, a thirteen part TV series produced by the BBC in 1973, in which he explored the history of science and technology. It is said that it was this seminal TV series which inspired the late great American astronomer Carl Sagan to make his own documentary series, Cosmos, which also inspired a generation of humanists.

Contrary to David Hume, Bronowski championed the idea that the ethical ‘ought’ could be derived from the scientific exploration of what ‘is’ . A particularly poignant and moving part of the series was filmed at the Auschwitz concentration camp and begins with the following:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Bronowski taught mathematics at the University College Hull from 1934 to 1942. The economist Eric Roll who worked with Bronowski in Hull said of him:

He was … a warm and vibrant human being. Every encounter with him was a powerful tonic which left one feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated and enhanced. He did not, however, suffer fools gladly and could be bitingly sardonic about human folly or about the glaring discrepancies so often to be found between public acclaim and true worth. But to his friends he was kind and affectionate, a companion whose gaiety and wit counterbalanced his serious approach to life.

Bronowski died in New York in 1974, a year after the completion of The Ascent of Man. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.

See also…

• Wikipedia biography of Bronowski
• Jacob Bronowski Humanist Heritage Campaign

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest figures in the American Enlightenment and the struggle for American independence.

He was born in Boston and was apprenticed to the printing trade — where he educated himself. He set up his own printing trade after a brief spell in Britain. He bought and ran the Philadelphia Gazette. He founded the Philadelphia library and in 1744 set up the American Philosophical Society.

He was an inventor and philosopher. He proved that lightning was electrical by a famous experiment with a key tied to a kite. He invented bi-focals and the water-harmonica.He was interested in education and civil liberties.

Between 1764 and 1775 he was representative of the American colonies in London. While there he encouraged Thomas Paine to visit America, an action which was to have lasting influence. Frankllin was, like Paine, a participator in the American revolution and played his part in writing the American Constitution.

Franklin was brought up as a Presbyterian, but became a deist. He respected religion but thought it had been corrupted. He wrote:

I believe in one God, the creator of the universe; that he governs it by his Providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.

He later became more sceptical of religion and firmly believed in the separation of church and state. Such views were typical of thoughtful and educated people in the eighteenth century.

Today, Benjamin Franklin House, London where where he lived between 1757 and 1775, is open to the public as a museum.

See Also…

• Wikipedia biography of Franklin

Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was probably the greatest English physicist since Sir Isaac Newton. He was born in Bristol to a Swiss immigrant father and Cornish mother.

Physicist

At the University of Bristol he obtained a degree in electrical engineering in 1921 and a BA in applied mathematics in 1923. A grant then enabled him to enter St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied the new ideas of relativity and quantum theory and gained a PhD in 1926. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. His later years were spent in Florida.

Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930) is still a standard textbook on the subject. He showed that the Heisenberg matrix mechanics and the Schrödinger wave mechanics formulations of quantum theory were mathematically equivalent.

His main achievement was the formulation of the Dirac equation for the electron, combining relativity with the quantum wavefunction. This explained quantum ‘spin’ as a relativistic effect. Symmetry in the equation indicated a second solution, thus predicting the possible existence of ‘antimatter’. The anti-particle of the electron, named the ‘positron’ was observed experimentally by Carl Anderson in 1932. Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger.

“God is a product of the human imagination”

On religion Dirac stated:

If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. [1927, quoted by Heisenberg 1972]

His fundamental belief, according to John Polkinghorne, was that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.

A plaque bearing the Dirac equation was unveiled at Westminster Abbey, London by Stephen Hawking in 1995. Bristol has a Dirac Road, and there is a blue plaque on his childhood home 15 Monk Road.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Dirac
• Nobel Prize biography of Dirac

Margaret Kennedy Knight was a psychologist, broadcaster and humanist.

Born in Hertfordshire, England, Knight went to Girton College, Cambridge University. In her third year there she found the “moral courage”, as she put it, to finally abandon the religious beliefs she had long been uneasy with.

Psychologist

Between 1926 and 1936 Knight worked as a librarian, information officer and editor for journal published by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. She married her husband Arthur Rex Knight in 1936, then in 1938 she started working alongside him as an assistant lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Ten years later in 1948 she was promoted to lecturer in psychology, a post she held till her retirement in 1970.

Morals without Religion

In January 1955 Knight stunned post-war Britain by suggesting in two talks on the BBC’s Home Service (now Radio 4), that moral education should be uncoupled from religious education.

These two talks were published in Morals without Religion and other essays in 1955 by Dennis Dobson, which also contains an entertaining chapter on contemporary reaction to the talks, some of it hostile, much of it appreciative. Margaret Knight quotes from several letters, including one from Germany that she found particularly moving:

…Please accept the gratitude from an unknown man who has seen in your talk the sunrising of a new epoch based on the simple reflection; to do the good because it is good and not because you have to expect to be recompensed after your death. Being myself a victim of Nazi oppression I think that we all have to teach our children the supreme ethics based on facts and not on legends in the deepest interest for the future generations…

See also…

• Morals without Religion – transcript and response
• Wikipedia article on Knight

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis

Pioneer of understanding mental health

The 20th century has seen a revolution in our attitudes to mental problems. A hundred years ago children and adults with mental health problems were often abandoned in institutions where little or no treatment was available.

People had little idea of how the mind worked or why some people suffered from mental problems. Many still believed that madness was the work of evil spirits, or that unconventional behaviour that would barely raise an eyebrow today was a symptom of insanity.

The fact that we have a better understanding today, and that there is a range of treatments and strategies for dealing with these problems, is largely due to the pioneering work of a remarkable man, Sigmund Freud.

Freud showed us that the human mind is like an iceberg – our conscious mind is only visible tip, with the unconscious mind below the surface, exerting a hidden influence on our thoughts and actions.

Freud believed that dreams, slips of the tongue and unconscious actions, such as fidgeting, are all messages from the subconscious. He emphasised the importance of childhood experiences in creating our personalities, and the commonness of much human behaviour hitherto regarded as abnormal. He based his theories on the human mind on observation of his patients.

Controversy

His work created a considerable stir. For one thing his revelations about the hidden emotions, wishes and thoughts that influence human behaviour opened up valuable new insights into human personality.

Secondly, in a prudish era, Freud’s insistence on the powerful influence of sexual feelings throughout human life was both shocking and attractive to the general public.

Freud’s legacy

Although some of Freud’s ideas have been superceded, many have become part of our everyday thinking about personality, and his was the first step towards a better understanding of the human mind and it problems.

Freud was the first to suggest a “talking cure”, encouraging patients to talk about their difficulties and experiences, uncovering memories and feelings that have played a part in causing the mental condition affecting them. Freud called this process “psycho-analysis”, and it has influenced generations of psychiatrists, counsellors and therapists.

“Religious doctrines are illusions”

Freud did not believe in god/s or an afterlife. In his book The Future of an Illusion he wrote:

If after this survey of the nature of illusions and delusions, we turn again to religious doctrines, we may reiterate that they are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them true or to believe in them. They are improbable, incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world … In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable.

Sigmund Freud was one of the many distinguished people forced to flee from Nazi Germany. He found refuge in the United Kingdom in 1938. The house where he lived in Hampstead in NW London is now the Freud Museum.

He became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association which published a magazine and books on Humanism and associated subjects.

Also see…

• BBC Online article on Freud

John Maynard Smith

John Maynard Smith was one of the greatest biologists of the 20th century, remembered for his contributions to genetics and evolutionary biology, and was one of the British Humanist Association‘s distinguished supporter of Humanism.

He was deeply committed to his work and to making scientific ideas accessible, and inspired many younger scientists. He continued writing and research well after normal retirement age, publishing his last book, Animal Signals, the year before he died.

He will also be remembered for his good humour and for the affection he inspired amongst colleagues and students.

In a Humanist News interview published in 2001, he described how exciting he found “the mixture of extreme rational science, blasphemy and imagination” in the essays of J B S Haldane he read as a schoolboy.

He said of religion:

I am tolerant because religious institutions facilitate some very important work that would not get done otherwise, but then I look around and see what an incredible amount of damage religion is doing…It would not matter so much that people believe lies, but when they go out and beat other people up because they believe different lies, that’s another thing.

See more…

• John Maynard Smith talking to Humanist News in Autumn 2001
• Wikipedia article on Maynard Smith
• Origin of Life – Lecture by John Maynard Smith (below)

T.H. Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley was a Victorian scientist and popularizer of Charles Darwin‘s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.  He was colloquially known as Darwin’s Bulldog.

Huxley had an impressive career.  He sailed with the HMS Rattlesnake as the Assistant Surgeon and naturalist – much like Darwin on the HMS Beagle. Huxley also served  on 8 Royal Commissions.  He was inducted into the Royal Society and was President from 1883-1885.  His contribution to science in the 19th century is perhaps incalculable, having served so many institutions, published so many books and help foster many other young scientists.  What is most impressive is that he was an autodidact, having learned everything from German to comparative anatomy through his own study.

He is possibly most known in his role as a major supporter of Darwin, even though he may not have agreed with one Darwin’s core components of evolution – natural selection.  Huxley also took on Bishop Wilberforce in 1860 in a debate on evolution.  The debate would help Darwin’s theory gain wider acceptence, put science in a professional standing and further undermine the literalism of the Old Testament.  Huxley was an avowed agnostic, and indeed, invented the term (though its definition was quite wide ranging in the 19th century).

Huxley formed the X Club, a dining club to advance the cause of science which included many leading thinkers of the time, such as John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer and J. D. Hooker.

In 1895, Huxley died of a heart attack.  He is buried in St. Marylebone in North London. A Blue Plaque marks 38 Marlborough Place, London where Huxley lived and Imperial College London is home to a bust of him.

His grandson Julian was the first President of the British Humanist Association.

Also see…

• Wikipedia biography of Huxley
• University of California biography of Huxley
• Darwin Project
• Huxley papers from the HMS Rattlesnake
• Portraits of Huxley at the National Portrait Gallery

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was a philosopher and sociologist, contemporary with Charles Darwin. Contrary to popular usage, the phrase ‘Surivial of the fittest’ was actually coined by Spencer and not Darwin.

Born in Derby, England, Spencer was the only child of nine to survive infancy.  He was largely educated by his father, William George Spencer, a Methodist Dissenter and was influenced by anti-establishment and anti-clerical views from an early age.

Spencer is most recognized for using the ideas of biology and evolutionary theory to inform his views on society.  His most influencial publication was A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862-93).  Synthetic Philosphy would bring together his ideas of biology, sociology, ethics and politics. However, it should be noted that Spencer’s view of evolution involved Lamarckian inherited traits and not Darwin’s method of natural selection.

Spencer, widely recognized as an agnostic, was enormously popular amongst ethicical and humanist circles, with his works widely promoted by the Rationalist Press Association.  Spencer was an intellectual heavy weight in the Victorian Era, even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. His reputation has suffered somewhat in historiography as he was often inconsistent in his conclusions.

In his later years Spencer was a hypochondriac, suffering from a variety of unrecognisable maladies.  He died in 1903 at the age of 83 and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Herbert Spencer
• Internet Encyclopedia on Philosophy entry on Herbert Spencer
• Portraits of Spencer at the National Portrait Gallery

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin is arguably Britain’s greatest contributor to science and his ‘On the Origin of Species’ changed the way we think about life on earth. The theory of evolution has been repeatedly confirmed by evidence and continues to shape our understanding of biology.

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury into a scientific family, being grandson of Erasmus Darwin, doctor, naturalist and member of the Lunar Society, and of Josiah Wedgwood, potter and industrialist. He studied medicine at Edinburgh 1825-7 with freethinking naturalist Robert Edmond Grant, who imparted he evolutionary theories of Lamarck and St Hilaire.

Voyage of the Beagle

At Cambridge University, where he went to study divinity, his biological studies were encouraged by botanist John Stevens Henslow, who recommended him as travelling companion to the aristocratic captain Robert Fitzroy who was fitting out his ship The Beagle for a two-year scientific survey of the coast of South America.

The voyage extended to a circumnavigation lasting 5 years (1831-36). Darwin took with him the first part of the new Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, and was sent the other parts while travelling. He spent much time ashore and sent back many specimens so that by the time of his return he was well-known in scientific circles in London.

Over the next ten years Darwin published a series of works that established his reputation as a sound scientist in both geology and biology, married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1836, and took up official appointments including to the Royal Society, while living in Gower Street, London. In 1842 retired from all this to the quiet of Down House in the Kent countryside.

On the Origin of Species

Here he concentrated on developing his theory of the mechanism of evolution, which was already in outline. But he was only persuaded to publish when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper that expounded similar ideas. Their papers were read, by colleagues, at the Linnean Society in 1858, but had little immediate effect. Darwin shelved his plan for a multivolume work and condensed his argument into one volume On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection published in November 1859.

This was met with immediate approval in radical circles, stirred controversy among scientists, and consternation among the religious.

Beliefs

Darwin in 1868

When going to Cambridge University to become an Anglican clergyman, Darwin did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible and on board the Beagle, he was quite orthodox in his beliefs.

But by his return he was critical of the Bible as history;  natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design.

He considered it ‘absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist’ and in 1879 wrote that ‘I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally … an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.’

Claims published in 1915 that Darwin had reverted back to Christianity on his sickbed were repudiated by his children and have been dismissed as false by historians.

Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, London.

There are statues of Darwin at the Natural History Museum, London and Christ’s College, Cambridge. He currently appears on the British £10 note.

Also see…

• Darwin Birthplace Society
• Darwin County
• James Moore’s British Humanist Association Darwin Day Lecture 2005
• Complete works online
• Humanist Hero: Charles Darwin by Elaine Morgan
• Portraits of Darwin at the National Portrait Gallery

Statue of Alan Turing - Bletchley Park. Photo by Christopher Hawkins

Alan Mathison Turing was a code breaker and pioneer of computer science who was eventually prosecuted for being gay.

Growing up - shattered faith

Turing was born at 2 Warrington Crescent, London but spent most of his childhood in Hastings, where his parents left him and his brother with a retired Army couple, Colonel and Mrs Ward, in a large house, Baston Lodge, Charles Street, St Leonards, while his father worked as a colonial administrator in Madras, India. Across the road was the house of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the author.

Turing went to boarding school in Sherborne, Dorset, where he fell in love with another boy at the school, who suddenly died of bovine tuberculosis. This loss destroyed Turing’s religious faith and he became an atheist.

Consequently Turing adopted the conviction that all phenomena, including the workings of the human brain, must be materialistic.

Mathematician and logician

In 1931 Turing studied mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, being elected a Fellow at the age of only 22. In the same year he invented the abstract computers now known as Turing machines on which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modelled.

Working independently, Turing and Alonzo Church in the US both showed in 1936 that there are well-defined mathematical problems that cannot be solved by effective methods. This expanded on the work of the Austrian logician Kurt Godel published in 1931, that there can be no consistent, complete formal system of arithmetic.

During 1936-1938 Turing continued his studies, at Princeton University. He completed a PhD in mathematical logic under Church’s direction, analysing the notion of ‘intuition’ in mathematics and introducing the idea of oracular computation in mathematical recursion theory.

Code-breaker

At the outbreak of war in 1939 he joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. Building on earlier work by Polish cryptanalysts, Turing contributed crucially to the design of electro-mechanical machines (‘bombes’) used to decipher the German ‘Enigma’ code and also worked on the ‘Fish’ codes. Turing received the OBE for his wartime work.

Developing an electronic computer

In 1945, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, to design and develop an electronic computer. The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer. The first working computer was however built by the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, where Turing became effectively Director in 1948. Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1951.

Prosecuted for homosexuality

In March 1952 however he was prosecuted for homosexuality, then a crime in Britain, and sentenced to a period of twelve months hormone ‘therapy’.

This and other pressures, such as loss of security clearance, led to his suicide two years later, by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

It was not until 2009 that – following a petition – an apology for his treatment was issued by Gordon Brown – the then Prime Minister.

There are statues of Turing in Sackville Park, Manchester, the University of Surrey campus and Bletchley Park.

Memorial plaques mark Turing’s birthplace and childhood home in Warrington Crescent, London, now the Colonnade hotel his former residence, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

The Alan Turing Building at the University of Manchester houses the School of Mathematics, the Photon Science Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

Also see…

• The Alan Turing Home Page, by Andrew Hodges (biographer)
• Alan Turing on Wikipedia
• Alan Turing in Time Magazine
• Quockling: Turing in Hastings, by Dean Morrison
• Guardian article about Turing commemorations
• Documentary by The Chartered Institute for IT on Turing’s contribution to computing (below)