When I think about my "Journey to Humanism" there are, of course, many things that have influenced my thinking and led me to where I am today. In the months ahead I hope to share some of these things with you (personal experiences, favorite quotes, even some song lyrics).

As someone who approaches humanism from a scientific point of view, I'd like to start with a passage from one of my favorite books, Jacob Bronowski's, The Ascent of Man.

For a long time I had accepted evolution in the Darwinian sense, that is to say as strictly biological. But two phrases in the passage below helped lead me to a greater understanding of the scope of evolution: "the evolution of nature" and "matter itself evolves."

Transmutation was, of course, an age-old dream. But to men like me, with a theoretical bent of mind, what was most exciting about the 1930s was that there began to open up the evolution of nature. I must explain that phrase. I begin here by talking about the day of creation, and I will do that again... Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, a long time ago, about 1650, said that the universe was created in 4004 BC. Armed as he was with dogma and ignorance, he brooked no rebuttal. He or another cleric knew the year, the date the day of the week, the hour... But the puzzle of the age of the world remained, and remained a paradox, well into the 1900s: because, while it was then clear that the earth was many, many million years old, we could not conceive where the energy came from in the sun and the stars to keep them going so long. By then we had Einstein's equations, of course, which showed that the loss of matter would produce energy. But how was the matter rearranged?

Very well. That is really the crux of energy and the door of understanding that Chadwick's discovery opened. In 1939 Hans Bethe, working at Cornell University, for the first time explained in very precise terms the transformation of hydrogen to helium in the sun, by which a loss of mass streams out to us as this proud gift of energy... Hans Bethe's explanation is as vivid to me as my own wedding day... Because what was revealed in the years that followed (and finally sealed in what I suppose to be the definitive analysis in 1957) is that in all the stars there are going on processes which build up the atoms one by one into more and more complex structures. Matter itself evolves. The word comes from Darwin and biology, but it is the word that changed physics in my lifetime.

The first step in the evolution of the elements takes place in young stars, such as the sun. It is the step from hydrogen to helium, and it needs the great heat of the interior; what we see on the surface of the sun are only storms produced by that action... What happens in effect is that from time to time a pair of nuclei of heavy hydrogen collide and fuse to make a nucleus of helium."

In time the sun will become mostly helium. And then it will become a hotter star in which helium nuclei collide to make heavier atoms in turn. Carbon, for instance, is formed whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a millionth of a millionth of a second. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision. Beyond carbon, oxygen is formed, silicon, sulphur and heavier elements.

I think it is a mistake to view evolution as only a biological phenomenon. For me, it helps to clarify and enhance my understanding of the cosmos to understand that biological evolution is only possible when the matter we are made of first comes into existence. It comes into existence (as Bronowski puts it) by those "wildly improbable" collisions, known as nuclear fusion.

As you can see from this passage, Bronowski is a learned and passionate author whose writings have long inspired and intrigued me. The Ascent of Man has a prominent place in my library and I definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the evolution of man. However, The Ascent of Man is not only an eloquent treatise of science, but also a fascinating journey into history, anthropology, architecture and mathematics. I hope you will find it as inspirational and thought-provoking as I have.