The Future of Man

by Peter Medawar

Excerpt from The Future of The Bbc Reith Lectures, 1959No one need be ashamed of his Shortcomings as a 'hu man biologist'. A human biologist must be demographer, geneticist, anthropologist, historian, psychologist and sociologist all in one, and much else besides; he must also be a fairly reasonable sort of human being; and no one can be all of these things. What is written here is therefore the product of a certain Combination of knowledge and ignorance; it is also the product of much careful and anxious thought. I Can now see a good deal wrong with the Style/of these lectures they were too closely reasoned, and often made unfair demands on the listener's attention but I Still feel I was quite right in attempting to expound the processes of reasoning rather than the finished pro ducts of thought. Nearly all that follows is unfinished thinking.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 28, 1961

Reviews

[Pranjal Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the final lecture bearing name of the book, Professor Medawar impressed upon me the idea that a human being evolves through a synergy of Darwinian heredity, Lamarckian heredity and Jungian individuality.

He breaks down heredity (of which evolution is a special case) into endosomatic (for example acquiring of genes from parents) and exosomatic (for example acquiring of knowledge from society).

A hereditary system is a special kind of system of communication—one in which the instructions provide for the issue of further instructions—so there is a specially important kind of hereditary system: one in which the instructions passed on from one individual to another change in some systematic way in the course of time. A hereditary system with this property may be said to be conducting or undergoing an evolution.

While a gramophone receives musical information from its environment in order to generate music, a juke box inherently has musical information and only receives a cue from the environment in order to generate music. In a sense, the gramophone can be instructed to play a music through a disc that comes to it externally, while the juke box is elected to play a music it already knows.

With brilliant examples Professor Medawar convinced me that Man, is an intelligent social animal having a brain with the capacity to think and reason, a Lamarckian social system that allows for passing along of instructions marking the exosomatic heredity, and fundametally a Darwinian reproductive system that allows for the animal to be born in the first place marked by endosomatic heredity.