Late Afternoon Thoughts On the Twentieth Century

A distinguished biomedical scientist and authorkeynotes the new Sophomore Summer Programwith an overview of major developments andproblems that have shaped the modern world

An entire century is obviously too much to cover in a talk that (you will be glad to learn) must be finished in less than an hour, so I feel free to pick and choose the parts of that stretch of time that I find of personal interest. In a way, I am as well qualified as anyone to deal with the 20th century, standing as I uniquely do in a sort of geometrically central position: I was born 13 years after it began, and at the end of this year I will be exactly 13 years from its end. I have covered enough of it, by the sheer act of living, to rank as an authority on the course of its events.

Not, I hasten to add, as a historian. I could not possibly remember all the events, not even the ones since 1913, much less lay them out seriatim in order to show how one thing led to another. Professional historians must do that and more, or at least it is their professional obligation to try they are occupationally compelled to remember everything that happened and then to connect all the bits and pieces of history and show why one thing led to another. I admire them for this knack of their trade, providing the rest of us with a coherent narrative, convincing us that everything that went on, throughout the whole 20th century, for better or worse, will make a certain logical kind of sense. Looking back at it, that is.

But if I were a historian, it would trouble me deeply that this professional aptitude works in only that one direction, looking back.

Every now and then someone, usually from the academic world often from the field of general biology takes on the problem of the special nature of the human brain and its product, the human mind. We are different, we say, fundamentally different, from every other creature on the planet because of that mind, and we do a lot of thoughtful bragging about it. We boast endlessly about our consciousness and awareness, and the added gift of language allows us to discuss it within ourselves and with any other people wil ing to listen. Animals, the others, dogs, cats, lions, tigers, fish, fleas, any bird in any tree, cannot lay claim to our kin of consciousness, maybe not any kind. Well, whales and dolphis maybe, but who knows, and, considering the numbers of whaling ships still at sea, and the ways in which tuna nets are still constructed to entrap dolphins, who cares? Anyway, leave it there: we are the humans, the tippy-top of evolution, the masterstroke of the biosphere, the most special of all intellects, maybe the only intellects, by virtue of this magical gift not possessed by other animals. It is this: with our kind of awareness, we can think ahead, and other animals cannot do this. Everyone seems to agree on this point. We can even be aware of dying in the future, never mind when, and no dog or cat, no matter how intelligent in other ways, can do that.

Of course, there are occasional arguments about all this. You can read about experiments demonstrating that chimpanzees, even monkeys, can do a certain kind of anticipating the immediate future, even making little plans, usually involving bananas and sticks, based on the memory of how things went in the past. But always the conclusions about animal intelligence are hedged about by cautions against anthropomorphizing. They are different; they cannot really think in the way we think; they cannot really picture, in whatever passes in their heads for minds, the whole sweep of events that lie in the future. We can do that, because we are human and special.

Moreover, they cannot amplify their vision of the future, as we can, by thinking together, for they do not have language to employ for the building of collective thoughts.

I should think the historians must be puzzled when they read this sort of thing about the human mind, and the historians of this particular century the most puzzled of all. As they look back, it must be the case that they can agree on a short list of dominant events that determined the flow of history the two World Wars, for instance, the Russian revolution, the rise of the oil states, the abandonment of Western empire stakes in Africa and Asia, the smaller running wars now in progress, the population explosion worldwide, the changes in health and longevity in industrialized nations, the impact of science and technology on human life, the bomb, the devaluation of faith, the spread of anomie in some populations and, at the same time, the rise of zeal in others.

Looking back, it must strike the historians, as it strikes me as an outsider, that virtually everything of real significance that has happened thus far in the 20th century occurred as an overwhelming surprise to everyone, absolutely unpredicted both for onset and outcome, one astonishment after another, and most recently one dismay after another. If this record is to be taken as evidence for the special human endowment for looking ahead and thinking together, and planning rationally distinguishing us from all lesser beasts I would rather rely on the brain of my cat Jeoffry for looking into the years remaining in this century.

I think we should put it differently. We humans are not really good at prdicting future events. To the contrary, we are conspicuously bad at it. But we keep trying, and the very act of trying to plan our long-term futures is what distinguishes us from other animals; we cannot sit still and let life flow; we insist on having a future and manipulating it; we cannot bear being bewildered by unpredictability; and we keep getting things wrong. So far, anyway.

Did anyone, before the outset of World War I, foretell the sheer fecklessness of it, the total futility, the inconclusiveness, the enormous cost in lives (probably the best and most promising young lives of that generation on all sides), and did anyone know that the terms of its final settlement would make World War II inevitable? At the beginning of World War 11, who could have predicted that Germany and Japan would lose totally, by unconditional surrender and by the near-total destruction of both societies. And then, did anyone even make the guess that within less than 40 years both of these countries would be the stunning economic successes among the world's nations, while the leading victor, Great Britain, would have become a second-class power, and the leading pair of allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, would have turned into mortal enemies, now prepared technologically to bring the whole world down in nuclear fire? And now, given that record, in the face of all that wrongness, who would have the effrontery to predict what will happen next, next week or next century? Well, the answer to that last question is easy: everyone is prepared to predict, endlessly and in full confidence, scholars, statesmen, scientists, clergymen, writers, everyone but my cat Jeoffry.

Me too. Being human, it is my nature to predict, and I am happy for this opportunity to tell you how things are going to turn out if we go this way or that way in the future. So, I shall do just that, in a moment.

But first, before going wrong, I shall do some digressing and a bit of waffling, in order to set the stage in my own mind. I have an idea about why we have all been so wrong in the past about our future, an excuse of sorts. It is not that we are a dumb species, unable to use our wits. Not at all. We are, in my view, a really splendid sort of animal, the brightest in town, brainier by far than anything around, but still very young. Our real difficulty, the problem that makes us seem to ourselves so error-prone, and the thing that makes our near future so terribly dangerous, is that we don't know enough and we haven't yet learned enough.

Unlike most other creatures, we do not live by the rules laid out by our genes. We live instead by changing our minds, and our minds keep changing because of new information. This is the way we are made. We do not come along with all the instructions for living already built in, as ants do in the construction of their hills, or termites for the outfitting of their nests, or bees for their hives. We are, of course, as biologically and compulsively a social species as they are, more so I think. It is harder to imagine a single, solitary human being off on his own, detached completely throughout his life from all other human beings, than it is to imagine the survival of a solitary ant with no hill, or a single termite with no nest, or a honeybee forever alone. But these animals, unlike us, do come with detailed genetic instructions, and they know instinctively, from one moment to the next, precisely how to get along. By and large, they succeed nicely in their social living, as far as it goes.

We, in contrast, have to make up our lives as we go along. Language is built into us, no doubt, probably grammar and syntax as well, all lodged in deep centers in each of our brains, but the things we think and say to each other, making use of that genetically determined grammar, are metaphors we must make up for ourselves as we go along. Metaphors do not come coded by genes, they pop into our heads, and we are obliged to live by them, once made, mostly by our poets. This has never been easy, and never will, but perhaps it is harder for us right now, as the 20th century begins to go slipping through our fingers, because we are still so young as a species, still learning, and entering a particularly difficult and trying stage of immaturity. As individuals, we grow up, learn all we can, mature, make all the sense we can of nature, grow old and die. But as a species we are probably still in our infancy, still getting ready for something like childhood.

This does not put us down, in my view. I have as high a regard, amounting to awe, for children as I do for human beings in general. I am just facing what I think are the facts of our life. In evolutionary time, we arrived on the planet fully human, ready for language, down from the trees, free of our hominid and pre-hominid traces, totally vulnerable except for our braincases and their fabulous contents, only a few moments ago, a million or so years at the utmost, and perhaps only a few-score thousand as language-using communities. We are the newest of all the experiments of evolution, and in almost no time at all we have swarmed everywhere on the planet and then out into space. But we have, of this I am certain, a great deal to learn about nature, and about living together.

So far, I think we've gotten it mostly wrong, and wrongest of all in this century. But not irreversibly wrong, not yet anyway.

The two worst things we've done will have their effects in the relatively near future, but both can still be turned around if we act, as a species, quickly enough. The first is the change we are about to produce in the climate of the planet, by inserting an unnatural excess of C02 and other gases into the atmosphere. The second is the thermonuclear bomb, ready to go off right now over any city we choose, or the Russians choose, or any number of other nation-states with even moderately up-to-date technology may choose.

The first, the warming up of the earth by the "greenhouse" effect, is a plainly unacceptable risk to run and one that can be averted by science and technology, if we wish. An easy one to solve, but only if all the nations agree. The second, the instant creation of small-scale radioactive suns, sent off across the pole with pinpoint accuracy by lovely soaring missiles, or hand-carried ashore in plain suitcases, is already a finished triumph of science and technology, fully mature, ready to use, and not yet preventable by any other scientific innovation, not yet or ever in the view of many knowledgeable scientists. To avert this disaster, science will not do; it needs a change in human mood, a different way of looking at each other; perhaps, as I hope to show, a long hard look at the way the rest of nature gets along and survives.

As to the first, the simpler problem: As things now stand, we have already increased the levels of C02, methane and trace fluorocarbons in the upper atmosphere to impede the radiation of solar heat away from the earth. A rise in the planet's average temperature of one to two degrees Centigrade within the next 50 years, perhaps the next 20, is already predictable. What this will do to the climate at large, the Antarctic ice-shelf, the water resources in inland farm countries, and to coast-line cities, is anyone's guess; the professional geographers are already guessing at deep trouble for the human species all around. But it is not yet out of hand. Most of the trouble is the burning of fossil fuels and wood by humans, for energy and heat. We once thought, 25 years ago, that conventional nuclear power would solve the problem once and for all; perhaps it still might, if the engineers could do it differently enough to guarantee against any new Chernobyl and if they could figure out a way of disposing waste, by firing it off, say, into the sun, but the odds are against this technology at the moment. Nevertheless, we simply have to cur- tail the burning of fossil fuels for en- ergy, and we cannot go back to simple living, family farms and small campfires, not with a human population of 4.5 billion and still rising, not with cities like those of this century.

So we need something new, and there seem to be three possible ways to go, all speculative but all possible. Solar power is clearly one way, but limited still to the regions of the planet with abundant access to the sun. Tidal and wave power from the oceans is another, but still nowhere near what engineers call feasibility. The third, and likeliest, is fusion power, technically feasible, theoretically a certainty, but a long way off. Fifty years away, is the accepted view; fifty years needed, mostly for materials research to find the right containers to hold in the vast heat of nuclear fusion. Except for these blocks, we would have it now, or very soon. Inexhaustible sources of fuel in the sea, minor problems of radioactive waste, low costs of operating, electricity for everyone everywhere, and back to a normal atmosphere for the planet. Time is the real problem, time and the cost of research to get fusion working. Here, it seems to me, is the best of all possible problems for collaborative, international science, ready to engage the best minds in this country, in Europe, in the Soviet Union, in China and Japan, in India, anywhere else where brains and engineering skills can be developed.

That 50-year forecast has to be an illusion, based on an assessment of future progress at today's pace and effort. It would be a different forecast down to 10 years perhaps if the problem were viewed as we once viewed the Manhattan project or the moon-shot in this country, or as the world at large now views the need for nuclear arms.

We could try it first as a joint project between this country and the Soviet Union, for starters, if we could only agree that we have a common stake in fusion power for preserving the world's climate. And think of the spinoff benefit to mankind in general, if the scientists and engineers of both nations were to take their minds off military hardware and go to work on energy. Once begun, they might even find themselves working together on space exploration, all of science, free and clear and out of mischief, at least for the time being, and all of the earth heaving a vast and easy sigh.

Here is something else to worry about, another gift from science, this time biomedical science, coming in looking like a blessing all around/but maybe, on very close inspection, a slightly mixed one. It is one of the more conspicuous achievements of science in this century, setting it distinctly apart from all preceding millennia. It is longevity. We all used to live, on average, shorter lives, some of them pleasant and affluent, more of them "nasty and brutish," but all short. At the turn of the century, the average life span for an American was something around 46 years; now it is 75 or there- abouts for men, in the 80s for women. So, we are all living longer lives. The statistics are a little bit skewed because of the sharper reduction in infant mortality, but the figures still tell us that more and more of us are living into what we used to regard as very advanced age. Now there is talk of the likelihood of doing still better, pushing us on and on, making it possible for most of us (bar cancer, which is quite conceivable considering how amazingly well that science is progressing; bar heart disease, ditto; bar stroke, maybe ditto) to go on into our 90s, even early 100s. This has a nice sound, but not so nice a look. I am not at all sure that the process of senescence, even unaccompanied by the multiple disease processes which now intervene and terminate it before it has run its course, is all that much fun. Living to the age of 100 is celebrated these days by public ceremonies, congratulatory messages from the President, lots of shaking of limp hands by other limp hands, but condolences are also there between the lines. Who wants a long, long life in times like these, when our society is having trouble enough coping with the reitrement needs of people who have just turned 62? And, are we ready yet, in any kind of society, to cope with this new generation of aging people, most of them without much to do beyond sitting on the porches of retirement villages, consulting their watches? I must confess, as a prospective candidate for entry into this section of our community, that I am not so sure about the costbenefit arrangements. If I were agile as a flea, and wise as Wallace Stevens, I would still be hesitant at crossing that threshold. Another kind of society, at some future time, may figure out ways to make longevity a prize to aim at, for its own sake, but not any society that has emerged in this century.

And, anyway, we have more important things to worry about. Survival itself, not into old age but into any age, just plain survival itself, is the central issue now. And not just physical survival of ourselves as individuals, the survival of human culture. How do we go about making sure of that, for our children, and theirs, and theirs?

I suggest that we look more carefully at the more experienced arid skilled survivors among our close relatives, the old-timers, the oldest residents, our forebears, our Ur-great-grandparents, the beginning of our line and all other lines of life on earth, the bacteria. The first one we know for sure about, the ranking candidate for our ultimate source until something older turns up, is a microorganism interred in rocks that are indisputably 3.5 billion years old, only a billion or so years younger than the age of the planet itself. This one, the oldest known prokaryote, is, at least until something older turns up in other rocks, our single ancestor. After this creature appeared, pieced together somehow by RNA and peptides and clay surfaces and then DNA and then proteins and then, behold, life itself: all done, as we are instructed, by chance, but by extremely lucky chance at that, so lucky as to qualify for some other nicer term than chance, maybe magic which after all derives from the old Indo-european root magh meaning, simply, to have the power to make, meaning magic itself, like all of nature. Anyway, that is how we came into being, as best we can tell. First that simple prokaryotic cell, a bacterium, parent of us all. Then at least 2.5 full thousand million years of experimentation by the progeny of that cell, clone after clone, colony after colony. Viruses turned up, bits of nucleic acid carrying the news of novelty from one cell to another, switching genes on and off, changing genes, getting things ready for what lay ahead. Accommo- dation turned up, compromise, edging to one side to let others in, signals evolved for announcing identity and property rights, organization turned up, society began to evolve. All this, aeons before the invention of nu- cleated cells pieced together by the col- laboration of microbial cells, a near- infinity of time before multicellular col- onies like sponges, time and away be- fore proper animals, an eternity before things like us. But during all that long time, on which we must now depend for whatever knowledge we can gain for getting along in the future, the con- cept of social grace took its place as the dominant influence in the evolution of life on this planet.

We have it with us still, running through all our genes, our longestlived heritage, the idea of getting along. Our brains, late on the scene, especially our frontal lobes, hell-bent on individuality and self-assertion, deny the idea, but it persists there, ancient and enduring: get along, it says, just get along. Look around, it says, take pleasure in the extraordinariness of being alive, find your joy in astonishment, be pleased by bewilderment, look around and find out whatever you can. But don't swipe, don't be grabby, don't betray. Get along, pry around, draw breath in surprise, but be good; and remember that you made that word "good," the word most frequently encountered in all the works of Shakespeare, out of another much older word ghedh meaning "together."

The biologists of this century have been bewildered by a great many new things, but most of all by the idea of altruism. It came to view first in the close study of insect societies, and it was a puzzle because it seemed at first to violate the tenets of evolutionary doctrine. How could it be that an ant, or a bee, or a termite, could go out against the world and deliberately, intentionally, give up its life in defense of the colony? Evolutionary theory, at first glance, did not allow for behavior of that kind, the fittest of all creatures of a species giving up all hope of survival in aid of the rest of the species. But then it was explained, by the insights of Hamilton and Trivvrs, based on the original genetic arithmetic of Haldane. It is genes, not individual organisms, that need survival; the ants and bees and termites are siblings sharing genes, and if one of them gives up its life, this act preserves its own genes, in the others. As Haldane put it, "I would give up my life for two brothers, or eight cousins."

So, this is no longer altruism in any of its original senses, the giving up of things for the benefit of others. It is, instead, a hard, close calculation of self-interest, nothing to do with good- will, or kindness, or charity, or compassion, or the plain friendliness that underlies the successes, when we do indeed succeed, of our species. Our affection for each other, our respect, indeed, to put it most baldly, our love for each other, is not based on any arithmetic of genetic survival.

Well, what else? Robert Axelrod wrote a lovely book last year, titled The Evolution of Cooperation, in which he demonstrated that a computer game provides an explanation for "good" behavior, in evolutionary terms. When you make up a game in which competitors must meet each other over and over again, looking for survival, you find that the strategy called "tit-for-tat" is the only sure guarantee of survival. This strategy is gentle, forgiving, but firm you let your competitor make the first move, and then, forever after, you do whatever he does. Oddly enough, but sure enough when played enough times against enough competing strategies, this one cannot lose. It is called, in computer jargon, "nice" behavior, and it will always, in a long enough run, win. I don't like that word "win," for what is at stake is really survival for the enjoyment of life.

Enjoyment is, to be sure, a very loose word when we are talking about such high stakes as the survival of a species, especially when it is our own species at stake. But there are not so many other better words, come to think about it. "Enjoyment," an easysounding word, comes from the root gau, meaning originally a complex mixture of rejoicing and awe, later turning into "gaudeamus." "Pleasure" comes from the flat root plak, perhaps from the calmness of a flat sea, placidity, flatness, not a good enough word to tell what we are up to. If you want an Indo-european root that lays out all our aspirations, describes in candor what we wish from life, tells the deep truth about us, take a look at gen or gene. A word that has hung around in all our western languages for 30,000 years or more, with equivalents in Chinese and probably also in every human language ever installed. Gen, or gene, at its origin, signified being, becoming, begetting, giving birth to, existing in families, surviving in groups and tribes. A very old word, but never worn out; look what we have done with it. Brought into Latin as gnasci, to be born, it became Nature; extended, it became gentle and generous; in Germanic it became kind and kindred; from the Latin benignus it became benign; the most natural of words, used, when we wish to pay respects to our- selves, in human nature. Human is another telling word, rooted in the first word for the earth itself, dhghem, asserting our origin in humus, then turning into lovely words like human, humane, humanity, humble, humility, and homage. Nice going, for a species so new, so recently equipped for language.

If you ask around, you are likely to be told that the scientific triumph of this century has been the discovery of information theory, and the accom- panying technological triumph is the computer, and the ultimate objective, now within distant sight, is Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps so, and I shall leave the predicting of this for others more skilled and informed, and more accustomed to assessing probability. For the moment, and for concluding, I bring up just one spinoff from the efforts made to date. Professor Marvin Minsky, of MIT, has taken the notion that computer intelligence derives from the aggregated sum of numberless tiny bits of intelligence, and used it to propose that the human mind derives from the aggregation of a nearinfinity of mini-minds, each contained within, and modulated by, items as small as the columnar modules of interconnected neurones in the cortex of the brain. Put enough entities together, connected up, generating information and passing it around, and there you have a mind, or something like a mind. This is a nice idea to play with, if you want to explain how 50,000 bees in a hive can do geometry, solar navigation, sugar-detection, earthmapping, even vengeance on occasion, when none of the individuals in the hive possesses anything we would call, even derisively, a brain. A single termite, alone and blind, cannot conceivably contrive a thought, but a whole termite nest, 10-feet high, has all the appearance of a meditative beast. And then, there is us, all 4.5 billion of us, linked together now by television and radio, at each other all day, all night, all round the globe: are we generating a collective thought of which we are still unaware?

Take it the full distance, then, for the final most outlandish, unacceptable, indefensible but still, I think, logical notion. Why not? The life on this planet, what we call the biosphere because that word has a nice, technical, reductionist sound, is all interconnected. Events in rocks deep under the ice in the polar shelves are somehow conveyed to shoals of sea life further north or south, thence to the life on land masses, up to the lichens at the peaks of mountains, down to midges hanging in the sunlight, down again to forms of life beyond our comprehension around the black smokers at the bottom of deep sea trenches, up again, out again, back and forth again.

If Minsky is right, if the AI people are correct in their forecasts, if all you need for thought is enough interacting sources of information, connected up, at each other all day all night, then the earth itself is thinking. What that thought is, how it turns itself over, what it meditates upon, whether it is aware of us, I leave to the centuries yet to come, or maybe, better still, in the words of Christopher Smart I shall consider my cat Jeoffry.

THE AUTHOR: Lewis Thomas, M.D., is President-Emeritus of the Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center and Professor of Medicine at the Cornell Medical School, New York City. A graduate of Princeton (1933) and of Harvard Medical School, he has a worldwide reputation in the field of biomedical research and teaching. Former Dean of the New York University and Yale medical schools, he earlier taught at Johns Hopkins, Tulane, and the University of Minnesota, and was on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute. He is the author of TheYoungest Science (1983), a memoir of his life as a physician, and three books of essays, one of which, The Lives of a Cell (1974), won the National Book Award. The other two are The Medusa and the Snail (1979) and LateNight Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's NinthSymphony (1983), which provided a playful variation for the title of his Dartmouth ad- dress. Dr. Thomas came to the College for two days as Class of 1930 Fellow and spoke in the Bema on June 23.

Dr. Thomas met with several classes theday after his address, but one student didn'twait that long.