Bronowski on Man 2

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 a shaper of the landscape. This is the Pacific Ocean. The California 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 females bury themselves tail first in the sand and the males gyrate or dance round them and fertilise the eggs as they are being laid. 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 cog-wheel into another. Millions of years of evolution have shaped the grunion to fit and sit exactly with the tides. 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’.