Termites and Telescopes

Philip Morrison’s Bronowski Memorial Lecture was broadcast on BBC2 Television on Monday, 20 August 1979

Termites and Telescopes

Recall the days of World War II when a loosely-knit but intense community of science and technology spanned the Atlantic, the British on the one and the Americans on the other shore. Thousands of thoughtful persons were earnestly engaged in waging that terrible war, all anxious for the best ideas and the best criticism on how the weapons of war, mostly new weapons, the radar, the aircraft, all those things which arose at that time, could be used in the search for precious victory. Curiously enough this community was nourished by a flow of secret information, papers and periodicals that were whole secret magazines, which circulated marked 'secret, handle with care', to be read only by the specific addressee who was given the magazine. Yet the community was so large, so varied, so concerned for learning that in fact this became a form of periodical literature not dissimilar to that of science in peacetime. Of course, its aims were narrow and grim. But within that human qualities still appeared. We had the usual flow of articles from magazines, we had the occasional striking reports, we had scintillating critiques, which Wired everyone to see that something new had to be done, some change had to be made, some new hope or some new danger was about to appear. And that was the first time I encountered the mind of Jacob Bronowski. From a little English village halfway between Oxford and London, a series of penetrating and iconoclastic papers appeared which caused a helpful buzz of concern and interest throughout that entire community.

The shuttle of war entwined our experiences even more closely. Just at the end of the war I, for my part, was sent by our government to walk the rusty ruin of Hiroshima, to reflect upon what had happened there, to measure and report. Quite independently Bronowski was sent by the UK government on a similar errand. We didn't encounter each other, neither knew of the other visitor until later on, many months later, when we read mutually our reports on that galvanising tragedy.

A few years later, again by chance, we each arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to spend a visiting year. I remember, most fondly, hearing a brilliant course of lectures which he then gave us, celebrating and analysing that city of Florence, the home both of Giotto and of Galileo. From that time on, though our paths were distinct, separated often by continents or by oceans, we were yet together in the sense that we were communicative friends who from time to time enjoyed each other's company. It is with more than an ordinary sense of responsibility then that I try to address something in his memory, by pursuing a theme which was his own in that rich legacy of idea and image which he called 'The Ascent of Man'. The following quotation by Bronowski sums this up:

`It is reported that when the Spaniards arrived overland at the Pacific Ocean, the Californian Indians used to say that at full moon the fish came and danced on these beaches. And it's true that there is a local variety of fish, the grunion, that comes up out of the water and lays its eggs above the high tide mark. The full moon is important, because it gives nine or ten days between these very high tides and the next ones that will wash the hatched fish out to sea again. Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations by which an animal fits into its environment like one cogwheel into another. Millions of years of evolution have shaped the grunion to fit and sit exactly with the tide. But nature, that is, evolution, has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, by comparison with the grunion, he has a rather crude survival kit. And yet, this is the paradox of the human condition, one that fits him to all environments: his imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it. And that series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution, not biological but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks the "ascent of man".'

Let us take up the challenge of that paradox. For we are not in fact the only creatures who change the environment. Most large species do something of the sort. But how we do it, the degree to which we do it, and above all, the rate at which change occurs are the significant features that I think I can tease out to characterise our own condition.

Now the somewhat odd title which I have chosen for these remarks, Termites and Telescopes, is based on the idea just put forward. But it is added to a schooldays' experience of my own, when somehow I encountered in a forgotten book the strange remark that the criterion of true civilisation was the ability to construct the true arch.

Now I don't know what awkward architectural critic, what thoughtless student of cultures made that remark, which I regard as absurd, a way primarily to exclude the Mayans from a discussion by an author who probably recognised Greek and Latin, but was ignorant of the older languages across the world. That remark stuck in my mind, as some chance remarks do. A couple of years ago I was astonished to encounter a clear demonstration, explicit evidence that there are social insects, in fact certain species of termites which construct the true arch. If we are to understand the nature of man, or the nature of termite, we must at least absolve ourselves from a requirement to admit the termites to the class of the true civilisations! Or possibly they belong?

It turns out that when you examine not merely this criterion — of course it's often these simple gates which are dear to examination setters but poor for real science — if you look to see how they make their true arches, as they do, to compare with how we make the true arches, as from time to time we do, the how opens a world of significance in the small distinction. That is what I want to talk about; I think I'll have to say some rather strange things in the course of drawing conclusions from this deep difference.

The Australian landscape may in places be dominated by termites; each termite nest is a city of the creatures. Blind for the most part, one hundred or two hundred thousand living in a single nest. These nests endure for decades; the busy termites build and maintain them and live out their lives in such communities. They are governed, it is fairly plain, by complex rules of social behaviour. The role of the queen mother is crucial. She is literally the queen mother. All the members of the nest are not merely a city but one family. Some hundreds of thousands of the queen's offspring people the nest of the termites. The royal ancestor is tended by specialists, fed, cared for, groomed, guarded in every way.

Their communication is tactile, and of course chemical. Precise chemical signals, a few of which are now known, are transferred between individuals. The white translucent form is the larva. The specialised workers and the even more specialised soldier forms look alike in the first stages. The fierce soldier has great jaws —mandibles fitting him to guard the nest entrance. In the first stages he appears as a little tame white larva like any other worker. Whether it is all from subsequent treatment or whether there is some initial genetic difference to produce the distinct caste is not certain for all species. They derive most of their energy from wood, the source of cellulose, by the use of symbiotic micro-organisms. There are thousands of species of termites, and the differences are not unimportant. I can talk only in the most generalised and approximate way. But I do not think I will mislead when I talk about what seems to be among the most advanced of all termite species, the principal member of a genus of African termites which carries everything to an extreme. These termites are larger, their nests are larger still, than the Australian. The population of a city may well run to two million individuals. The queen is the mother of all; she lives ten or fifteen times the average life of a worker. During her lifetime she gives rise to tens of millions of offspring, a million or two of which may be occupying the nest at a given time.

They are agriculturists and there seems little doubt that the fungus species found inside the nest of these termites, which is known to be indispensable to their welfare, is, in fact, their crop. It is found nowhere else save in contact with these animals. It is tended, sown, cropped, reaped, propagated and resown by the termites, season after season, one particular fungus. In the cross-section of the nest of Macrotermes one sees a deep central region of many warm, damp chambers, where the fungus garden is kept and tended by the devoted horticulturists, blindly in the dark.



Notice the support structure of the nest, how open the structure is. That is indispensable. These organisms must maintain humidity and temperature conditions in a flow of air adequate for their own welfare, for that of the larvae, and for that of the fungus garden upon which they depend. Of course there are many species that build much cruder nests with no such architectural niceties. But these advanced termites could not thrive without some means of making a structure airy as well as strong, which was as large as it has to be and yet could allow the interior passage of air, mainly by natural convection.

What has been learned in the past decade or two by remarkable studies of these animals in the field, is the mechanism by which the termites can build the true arch. Consider what the task is. It begins in a hollow lens-shaped chamber in the ground, first excavated by many termite workers, blindly scurrying around in the dark. Apparently at random, though there may be some less than completely random cause, they start to build. We know only some of their inner drives. We can infer only some of the rules of construction which these animals must bear within themselves. But some we can see. They begin, hundreds of them working in the dark, to assemble the material from which the architecture will be built. This is called carton; it is the excreted chewed-up wood fibre mixed with a cement they secrete, to form little pellets which then can be glued together to build up a structure as you see it, metres high, and decades of endurance in the weather.

To begin with there are simply the scurrying insects in the dark, each one individually making a little pile of pellets. At some moment apparently each comes to obey an internal programmatic rule, which in effect says: you have built a pile for a certain amount of time, up to a certain degree of success, abandon your pile if and only if there is within your purview, within your sensory reach (we don't know at all how the sensing is done — by odour? by moisture?) — a larger pile. If there is, drop your work and go to work on the larger pile. Now among a thousand small piles, of course by chance some are a little larger than the others. Suppose now there are perhaps a hundred piles, each two or three times larger than their neighbours, scattered over the floor of the cell. The small ones are abandoned, and now the large ones start to grow, many insects working on each one.

A third important signal arises in the system. If you had a column at a certain height, and there is no column nearby of an adequate height, abandon the column you're working on, and join one which by chance belongs to a pair. There you see in the sketch insects who have found a pair of columns and then obey the fourth instruction. It says, whenever the pair stand close enough, a few among many columns as chosen by random events, close enough so they might practically be bridged together, work at the tops until you bridge them across with cemented wood fibres to make the true arch. There you have true termite civilisation and its architecture.

Here is an extraordinary if not an awesome outcome. Notice that the affair is without symmetry, without plan or blueprint, without fixed outcome. The only likely outcome is purely functional. There will be, on average, enough arches, enough of them sufficiently spaced to support the airy structure. No two nests will have the same plan, the same numbers, save by chance. There will be no Palladian school. The situation has about it a disturbingly effective and yet to human eyes and minds a curiously random pattern. A blueprint exists nowhere. The complexity arises out of the interaction of the insects, using cues which admittedly we don't know, and some inbuilt instructions that we also don't know, but with several important cues that come from the structure itself upon which they're working. That is enough to put together a vaulted crypt which will, on the average, function well. Truly an extraordinary outcome, the outcome we are constrained to believe, of the processes of natural selection on the complex genetic structure these insects bear.

Insects like this, termites, can learn little individually. Most of what they know is already coded deep within. They have, individually, very few tricks; it is hard to distinguish the actions of one worker from another's. You can measure the probabilities of each action: it looks quite random what, for example, that one does who has succeeded in the work. There are no outstanding craftsmen, no talented pellet pilers among the termites.

I would like to extend our topic so as not to leave you with an unexamined empathy toward termite civilisation. It is certainly not any civilisation, though it is an organic whole we are looking at. Termites have rather soft skin which is damaged without much difficulty. Occasionally a slightly injured termite with a scratch or little nick in the skin will be walking down the access tubes, where they enter. There the tactile interaction is very strong. Almost every nest mate that termite encounters will feel and groom it a little bit. If that tiny tear should appear to be at all tangible it is likely to bear very solicitous examinations indeed, until after a while the insect may be surrounded by a dozen active kin, all anxious to stroke and to feel and to assess the state of health of their fellow citizen. During this worrisome press very often one of the grooming insects will chance to tear the skin a little bit more, enough to cause the exudation of a tiny drop of fluid. Once this happens the outcome is swift. That imperfect termite is rapidly consumed by his neighbours. Among termites protein is always short. There is no chance to waste it. Individuality is minimal; one termite is after all like another. This moral justification may be seen to support a fearful helot democracy within the termite workers' world.

Now, how different is human architecture? It rests plainly on human societies. We are social as they are; we are little without our collectivities, from the earliest bands that wandered the African Rift to the great nation-states and the world community we look forward to. Still, there are distinct individual human minds communicating, and a rich store of experience in every individual. The internal model each individual can make of what is going to happen in the future is the raw material for that steady selection of ideas, of activities, of content, which comprises the growth of human society, let us say of human architecture. We offer in evidence an architectural drawing of about 1600, by the Turin architect, Domenico Paganelli. There is his drawing; no building of that sort existed when his beautiful rendering was made. That was a project which would come into existence, it may be, if the patrons were pleased, the circumstances were correct, and the artist was satisfied himself with that version. To eliminate that papery building — we may be sure that there were many pieces of paper before that one — to discard those earlier pieces of paper did not always require the expiration of the lifetime of Paganelli or the failure of his building by structural collapse, and the starting out of another ten or a hundred variant Paganelli to see how their buildings would turn out. Purely on that basis, human architecture would proceed with an extraordinary slowness. We have instead a culture which evolves in a wholly different domain, by interchanges of language and selection of artefact, far more rapidly than could ever be imagined for the long exchange of genetic material which lies behind the selection, in their myriads, of whole epochs of termite nests.

The Sanctuary of La Madonna di Mondovi by Domenico Paganelli.

I offer therefore a conjecture which may be a little startling. It is more than I could prove, yet I find it very attractive to consider. Is there in fact any limit in kind to the operations of evolution in natural selection of the genetic material? Have the termites reached some clear limit? Is our obvious extraordinary complexity, our wealth of culture, our dominance of much of the world, different in kind from that which the termites could obtain by blind selection? In my opinion the answer is No. I conceive that if they can make the true arch, as they do, I have no reason to doubt that sooner or later — I shall point out a strong difference in a moment — sooner or later the termites could evolve any structure, for example, if it were valuable to their survival, even manage the manufacture of telescopes. Yes, and radio telescopes as well. I think you can see how it would work. It would begin with termites who had collected rocks a little heavier than the sand around. Their samples would have a lot of ores. Then some nests would have found how to collect the heaviest ones, which would be copper, and not merely the iron that was lying around — and so it goes. Finally fire they would take from
nature. Now it's plain that if I were to list the rules that make an arch, even in our half-understanding way, you would agree some tens of programmatic rules, like listing for a programming computer, could do the job. But to list the rules in that same way, without blueprint, without final goal, without an internal model, just letting events feed upon events in response to a few simple programmatic demands. Like, 'Now is the time to turn off the fire'. It's plain to me that it would take a million listings! Would you doubt that? I don't think so. It might be ten million; I've not tried to calculate it. A crude estimate of this sort suggests that's what you would need. That's the content of the books I'd expect to have to read, knowing a great deal already, to be able to build a telescope starting from scratch. Is it not plainly at least in the order of millions of listings? But the listings have accumulated for the termites over tens of millions of years. Our ancestors, a different species but of the hominid strain, were still arboreal in the African rift, while Macrotermes were already building, we are pretty sure, excellent arches. Their progress is painfully slow. For me that is the chief difference. That is what we represent, against the blindness of the disindividuated termites, almost unable to learn. They can probably achieve anything that is in the interest of their survival; they have at least a chance to do that, though they're not certain, just as indeed we are not certain, to fulfil their destinies. But whatever grandiose goals you set they can attain, provided you allow the depths of time, the caverns of time that they require. But the universe is not built to allow that time. Powerful termites evolving to build telescopes would long outlive the sun's heat. In the demise of the sun even their cleverest fire-making would not long permit them to exist. No, the reason we are distinct is not simply the kind of thing that we do; of course we do things greatly different in kind from the work of any other species. We can do so because we have inbuilt a new means of change, so swift that it enables evolution on an entirely different time scale. That time scale, not the limits set by the intricacy of the outcome, but the limit set by the time alone, is the distinction between what I have called the blind paths of genetic selection and the half-knowing paths of the selection of internal models by which we change.

We are swift changers over the land; only by swiftness in this inconstant universe is it possible to attain large change. That's all. What is given to us is the time set by the inexorable rules of the galaxy and the stars. That time is all the time that the play of evolution can have on the field. To evolve such remarkable things as the cultural structures of which we are a part requires a time scale quite unreached by the processes of natural selection and mutation and meiosis and chromosome exchange and whatever shufflings you imagine in the genetic material. That is the principal conclusion that I would like to draw.

Let me try to tease out more of the differences between ourselves and these social animals, our predecessors. Indeed they may be our first models, but models from which we have much diverged. I want now to make a very simple arithmetical discussion, which is a naive effort to show you one point you might well believe, but to show it in numerical terms, so powerfully that it astonished me when I first made the same simple calculation. The idea is this: we manipulate internal symbols; such is our nature. That makes us fast to change. You can utter words, draw papers, exchange ideas, or dance in a much shorter time than it takes to live a life, undergo selection, and breed true. You thus bear an internal structure of your own; you do not, like the termites, have one structure built in, to last all of life without much change. They learn little, we much. We continually manipulate symbols. I shall use letters, but that is only the most naive example. Think of this in a general way standing for any kind of manipulation of symbols, images, forms, acts, gestures. I want to ask a simple arithmetical question. Therefore this is not meant to be a model in any detail of the real world, but is meant only to suggest how the real world might work.

Suppose you had but three symbols, which a chimpanzee could master, or even a mammal less related to our intelligent stem. If I seek three symbols, there are three that come at once to mind: MIT. I will simply use these symbols, I'll try to exhaust for you simply all the possible permutations of the three symbols. If you are able to arrange only three items you can, of course, form quite a number of combinations. Let us do it in a systematic way. Take the symbols MIT. First choose M. After it only I T and T I:
MIT
MTI
Then start with I:
ITM
IMT
Finally, begin with T:
TMI
TIM
Six arrangements, no more.

Now I've exhausted the canon of the orderings of three symbols. It took us maybe half a minute or so. But now what is perhaps one of the most important of all arithmetical facts, is the following conclusion, which I shall only state, though many will be able to check my calculation. (I don't think it's wrong. I was so astonished by it I checked it three or four times!) Suppose I were to try the next word that I could think of, a good long word, TECHNOLOGY. Well, I might bravely set out to play the same arrangement game on TECHNOLOGY. How many ways can I rearrange it? TEC ... TCE ... I'm sure you all agree it would be very tedious to go through the whole operation.

Even allowing for the fact that this is no honest ten-letter word, but has two letters repeated, if I were simply to write down at the same speed all the orderings of ten symbols (with one repeat) taken all ten at a time, as we saw above done for three at a time, the increase from three basic symbols to ten symbols makes an inordinate difference. Instead of under a minute to write all those based on MIT I would succeed in writing all the possibilities generated from TECHNOLOGY only by lecturing eight hours a day, five days a week for three academic years! That is a consequence, of course, of elementary combinatorics. We get too used to it, the people who deal with mathematics get used to such remarkable functional growth, as in this case of a change from three to ten (determining an increase from six to more than 1.5 million). But in fact it remains remarkable; for me it stands as a sign that it is critical to possess an internal model-making scheme of some strength. I can't say where critical strength comes. I know only that as you develop an internal model which grows stronger and stronger, able to handle more and more complex orderings and reorderings of its internal content, then at some point the organism — the society acquires inordinate power, even though shortly before that point its power would be quite ordinary. That is the formal root of the distinction we see between ourselves and our cousins, the friendly chimpanzees and the quiet gorillas. Of course it is the same sort of change, of exponentiation, which we see so markedly in the rise of human culture itself through history.

It is important for us to examine the proposition that our essence lies in the internal model-building property. It is up to us to try to understand what kind of models we form and how we build them. That system will influence our every thought; indeed it is our every thought.

Now I see, and I think it is apparent to all, that there are two polar opposites in the world of model building, two descriptions of models, both of which we know and use well which are quite different in their nature. They can be described in several different ways and I shall do that. The simplest one is the foundation stone of our culture, at least it has been let us say for half a million or a million years, language itself. Language, you see, has a curious property. I recall to the computer enthusiasts that language is familiar —indeed they speak of 'machine language' — a combination of a few symbols, repeated over and over and over again, interchanged and arranged, lacking all representative quality, with no necessary iconic connection between the word and the world. Brass is not a yellow metal, nor grass a green plant. The two words sound similar, but their meanings are entirely different. This arbitrary mapping is the essence of the digital, the essence of language, the essence of algebra. The X can stand for anything. So language, algebra, and digital calculation I can regard as three prototypes of the one kind of model.

The other kind of model includes vision, geometry, and physical analogues. Those are very different in nature. They tend to have continuity, with much closer connection to the three-dimensional nature of the spatial world and to evolution in time. They tend to be more immediate than the powerful but strangely abstract models we call language or algebra or digital calculation. Now, it is a popular thought these days (I've read it in numerous books) that indeed there is a logical difference between these two branches of mind-model. The stern, the calculating, the objective mind deals in the digital, the symbolic, the algebraic; while the light-hearted, emotional, unreflective, spontaneous mind deals in vision, geometry, motion. I'm sure you have heard the generalisation. I believe it is far from true, probably wholly wrong. All that I know from what the logicians say is that for every geometrical proposition in Euclid, or even in much more complex kinds of geometry, an equivalent algebraic expression can be formed. Conversely, for any of a very large class of algebraic expressions, some geometrical analogue or logical diagram can be produced. For every digital calculation, I can to some degree substitute an analogue model, and the reverse. In my opinion there is no strong logical difference between these two model poles. I agree they represent two attributes of the human mind or human minds; they are both widely used, they are both indispensable. They both allow fully logical and indeed fully artistic or emotional consequences, either way. The medium in this case does not fix the quality of the message. What happens is that people who write books and articles know a lot about putting strings of symbols together, but very little about drawing and painting. They think the art of the painter is spontaneous and carefree. Perhaps the painter feels on his part, well, putting all those symbols together is much what you did in childhood, spelling and story-telling, but that struggle to get exactly the right visual form on the canvas, that's a different matter, adult and serious. I suspect they're both right: I mean that the true situation is really more complex.

I 'want now to say a little about how people make their models and why. In the West of England, right across the country from the famous cathedral of Canterbury, there is another cathedral, the Cathedral of Wells, set in verdant countryside. What do we find at Wells Cathedral?

This beautiful structure was begun about eight hundred years ago or a little more. Its facade is magnificently sculptured. If we enter the cathedral we find the cathedral clock. The knightly automata joust up above the dial as the hour is struck. This clock was built in Chaucer's day. As you go towards it you will see the great sunburst which is its principal hand. That hand travels daily once around the dial. Another dial is set within, marking the phases of the moon, and bearing a beautiful inscription which I shall cite later. As the day wears on from noon the sun-burst is at the top. The sun will go right to the bottom of the dial and back up again to the top, turning one full turn in twenty-four hours, a model of our turning earth. It is not like our unfortunately degenerate modern watches which, when they have turning hands at all, go round the dial twice in a day, so willing were we to attenuate the great world model on which the clock was based.

Do not think that this clock was primarily a practical matter. It was not open to the public at all for the first couple of hundred years after its installation. It was undoubtedly of use to the clerics of the cathedral, who had free access to it and could watch it; perhaps they could time their comings and goings, and their prayers as they chose. But it would be a mistake to think that that magnificent clock was built mainly to assist the scheduling of a devoted and expert society that knew perfectly well what to do each hour of the year. No, the inscription tells us otherwise. It says (and I construe the Latin very freely) 'this circular dial presents the universe in microcosm.' That's what it was for. The men who caused this clock to be built and the brilliant artisans, probably Flemish and Belgian, who helped build it were celebrating that universal order which they saw as their Creator's, exactly as those artisans were who made the sculptures on the facade. They were not doing any lesser, any more secular task. It was not a practical timekeeper alone they were building in that cathedral. Every human inference leads to that conclusion; and they told us so on the face of the clock.

In this case we see an explicit analogue, a model which contains some measure of the truth of the day: namely the earth turning on its axis, or, as they saw it, the heavens turning about the earth once every twenty-four hours. The hand which bore the moon was ingeniously contrived to fall behind the sun by about that one hour per day, so that in the course of a month the disc which exposed the crescent moon would gradually slide as well, to picture the moon's phase as you watched. (It turns out they had to intervene a little bit; the moon had to be adjusted by hand at the end. Gears were new in the fourteenth century in Europe; you couldn't burden the pioneer clockwork too heavily.)

Now of course most clocks have acquired a rather different quality. A contemporary digital clock has quite a handsome face, there displaying that time for us all; while it may have a hidden rotator which still remembers, very faintly, that great rotation which it follows, all rotation is well concealed. What we see are only numerals that come one after another to the face of the clock. I venture to say that quite a few of you wear on the wrist a little clock which has given up all semblance of rotation (except in the abstract space of complex variables, where there is a rotating vector whose electrical projection follows a quartz crystal). How far we abstract from the earth-spin! That is the story of the rise of scientific precision, scientific strength, scientific growth, a chronicle of power.

But that steady abstraction ought not to be maintained as the only element of an appropriate structure of models, a scheme of all models for the human mind. It is too attenuated, too narrow, too thin. We cannot be fully nourished on such a diet, however precise, however numerous the bits which it can handle. There is a wonderful book — The Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac — an Anglo-American production by the way, jointly computed by the authoritative staffs of the US Naval Observatory and the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which, when I open it, taps more than two hundred years of tradition. If I turn to today's date and seek the table in which the moon is entered, I will find a precise and beautiful table of figures. I could report to you nine figures and some interpolation numbers too many to count. They tell you hour by hour the position of the moon, just as the dial in Wells Cathedral has been doing for these six hundred years, but not so beautifully, not so richly. Each to its own purpose. I do not undervalue that table for a moment. I would defend intensely the energy, the strength of human spirit, the long co-operation which has given rise to the digital tables of the Nautical Almanac. That work has freed us, for example, from the fear of the eclipse; every eclipse is catalogued. Such an event remains marvellous, but something we recognise as part of that order of nature that we still only partially perceive.

At the same time, admittedly the tables require some little connection with the outside world. You can't use these tables alone to find the moon. Somebody must tell you at least which direction is south, and where the meridian is, or something equivalent. But once you're given one or two geometrical items of data, then the number-crunchers, the table-makers can do everything, in enough time. Indeed, Alan Turing once proved that for us, as far as we're likely to be interested for a very long time to come. But the digital method, symbolic abstraction, absolutely indispensable to science, never to be done away, impossible to overpraise, is nevertheless not enough. It is not the whole story, it has never been the entire story, it cannot become the whole story. At our peril do we celebrate the tables of the digits, to forget the simpler, the analogical, the visual, the sensory, which lies at the other pole of the internal representations of the world that we human beings must live by. Richness must complement that powerful austerity.

Now I have come to the place where I must speak of that other domain of our internal modelling, of our representations, which is not science nor exposition at all. That place is art. You will at once admit that the complex sensory order, if not absolutely indispensable, at least conveys the greatest part of all the arts in our history. We must appeal not to a string of digits, however elegantly assembled, however meaningful, but to a real, material system, whether it be of metal or canvas, or even beams of light or sound, whatever it might be, which we can perceive by the senses, celebrate in the mind, sometimes subjective and expressive, sometimes quite objective and representational. Often it is rich with metaphor. It can itself be logically austere, or as spontaneously free from logical constraint as it chooses, provided only it embodies itself in a material base of some kind that we can apprehend through the senses. Their logic it must obey.

A splendid example of such a piece of matter is a beautiful ritual cooking vessel of the Shang culture of China, in the valley of the Yellow River; it was made by its artisans, designed by its artists, celebrated by its priests some three thousand years ago. It is fair to examine this masterpiece of art and craftsmanship, and to ask ourselves this question: could its eloquent symmetry, its fitness to the material, a subtly-cast bronze, be in any way exhausted by describing it carefully, a geometrical position for every point, and a code number for the material at each point, air, alloy, or patina? That long, long string of numbers is logically equivalent. Indeed the digits can generate and do generate to a television audience just the picture that we see. But nevertheless that is not the same as the object itself. Its effect must be transmitted to us through a sensory channel, or the beauty has gone. That is the lesson I think art brings to us, richly brought out in this particular example.

I am moved to comment on the form itself. The strange animal mask, the symmetrical face, much distorted, much abstracted, which nevertheless resides in the careful design. Even more striking is the artful use of these cast flanges as a piece of the design, where it is pretty clear that they are indispensable as well to the manufacture, to the piece-moulding technique which enabled the artisans three thousand years ago to put it together. So much were they imbued with the understanding that the object was material, a real material, not simply an abstract model in the mind, that they fused ideas together, to make material and form co-operate in presenting to us a work of art which even across a gulf of time and of society we can hardly cross, still speaks to us with extraordinary eloquence of what we call beauty. Any masterpiece of any period could have carried much the same message.

If I have to draw conclusions from what I have said, I must hold it true that we operate primarily on a different time scale from all other species. Since we have a different time scale, we have a different scale of complexity of performance and of error as well from those strange, powerful beings, the creatures in the termite nest who modify their environment across the savannah. We are indeed different. But our difference does not lie in the fact of evolution. It does not lie even in the limits which life might attain. It lies in the remarkable speed we have acquired from an inborn evolutionary choice, in our swift model-building possibilities. They arose a million years ago, perhaps reaching the present biological state some forty or fifty thousand years ago. There seems to be no important biological change in our species since then. The compelling argument for that is the artefacts of the Upper and Middle Paleolithic, the paintings in the caves, the mobiliary art, the possible symbols inscribed on the walls. Those who made them were persons like ourselves. The absence of a longer cultural legacy, the smallness of their bands against the forces of nature around them, made their accomplishments modest in aggregate, but intense in themselves and magnificent in potential. We are trying to realise that potential in our time, now that we are four billion people, not four hundred thousand, on the face of the earth.

This release from the pace of natural selection is the key point that I have tried to stress. But it is a release which is possible, only if we remember that we have such rich model-building propensities, that every human life builds models, the unlettered no less than the professional are constantly foreseeing the future, modelling the consequences of every event, looking at the fall of the easel or the rain outside, to seek some understanding of what will happen. By experience, by feedback mechanisms, we learn from our own and from social experience. We construct an internal model which is the only way any of us can manage our individual lives and our social and cultural exchanges. Dominant there is language, in which we are embedded from earliest youth.

Our model building cannot and should not be restricted to any single form of model. We need to cherish, to stimulate, as well the visual as the digital, as well the algebraic as the geometrical. Otherwise we will abandon a long tradition in which what was prized was not a long austere string of bits, but a carefully-made object from a flint knife to a Shang bronze, to a Wells clock, to the great cathedral itself, to the plainsong within. This is, I think, our nature; I do not believe we are in any serious danger of losing it. I speak only to emphasise the importance of a catholicity of model building, the importance of the refreshing multiple possibilities, the importance, above all, of fusing even the most logical, the most rigorous of our procedures, which go by careful symbolic steps through some algebraic argument, with those objects of three or four dimensions in the real world, to which the logic bears some relation. That fusion cannot remain only in the final step. Precision can be attained far beyond what the senses grasp by pursuing chains of thought very far. But we must seek unity in the beginnings because dividing the model-making of our world, dividing those persons who make models into classes depending on which mode of model they choose belies our evolutionary history, the structures of eye and hand, mind and heart.

I admit to a deficiency in the beautiful set of objects we have admired. What I have talked about is only the sunniest of the landscapes which the human mind has illuminated, and human society constructed in its long span of overturn and continuity. I would be dishonest were I not to admit that, besides the sunny landscapes, I could have shown, and I will mention, most dark and ugly ones. You can add to the tragic roll for yourself; I will list only a few. There are the bomb craters still marring the rice paddies of the Indo-China peninsula. There is the wreckage of the houses in New York, say in the South Bronx, and the oppressed travesty of a city, say in Soweto far away in the tip of Africa. Add your own; you will not be surprised. Those, too, arise from the power of human society to envision within limits, the consequences of its acts. Our society built them too, even in the realm of idea alone, for they certainly extend beyond the material into the domain of ideas. Our power to shape is a power for good and for evil, and so always has it been. There is no more obvious comment I could add. When I have said that I will not close despairingly, for I think we have very good reasons not to despair. What our power for shaping means is dual. But it enforces responsibility on us for the forms we make. And since we can shape the world, and we can sometimes shape it well, I most firmly hope we will yet make wiser and lovelier forms in the landscape.

And now I would like my old friend, Jacob Bronowski, to have the last word.

`Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them he is not a figure in the landscape; he is the shaper of the landscape.'

The text printed here is a slightly expanded version of Professor Morrison's lecture, a version of which appeared in the issue of The Listener for 23 August 1979.

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Here's the rest of the publication information I have:
Philip Morrison
The Bronowski Memorial Lecture: August 1979
Termites and Telescopes
Published by the British Broadcasting Corporation
35 Marylebone High Street
London W1M 4AA
ISBN 0 563 17775 6
Copyright by Philip Morrison 1979
Illustrtions are from A Natural History of Termites By Frances L Behnke, Scribners's Sons, NY Illustrated by Turid Holldobler. The drawing by Domenico Paganelli is from the collection of Alessandro Tesauro in Biblioteca Natzionale, Turin, Italy

First printed in England by Yale Press Limited, London SE25

It's just about disappeared from our knowledge, I can't find any text of it anywhere on the internet, and only a couple of references to it. Print copies are rare collector's items. I figure it's profound enough it should be kept in circulation, don't you? There seems to be no one to contact regarding the copyright -- all inquiries go unanswered - so I'm putting it up here for awhile. (Of course if someone comes along who objects, I'll pull it down.) If you catch any typos or suchlike they are due to my scanning, and I'd appreciate you pointing them out. I guess the comments section would be good for that.