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    The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young
    The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young
    The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young

    By Albert Szent-Györgyi

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    About this ebook

    A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself with the underlying forces and conditions that have prevented the realization of the higher possibilities of the American Dream, and, by extension, of all mankind. He addresses himself especially to the youth of the world in his attempt to show how man, the more he progresses technologically, seems the more to regress psychologically and socially, until he resembles his primate ancestors in a state of high schizophrenia.
     
    The fundamental question asked by this book is: why is it that most of the scientific research that is done to elevate human life serves in the end to destroy it? That this phenomenon exists is unarguable. How to alter it is the problem the author tackles. He finds the possibility, indeed the instrument of our survival, in our youth. Dr. Szent-Györgyi calls upon the youth the world over to organize and exercise their power to create a new world. He implores them not to waste their energies in petulance and frustration—the world is ripe for the radical changes needed for man’s survival, and for youth to fritter away their opportunity would be to compound the tragedy and seal the fate of mankind.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilosophical Library Open Road
    Release dateNov 4, 2014
    ISBN9781497675902
    The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young
    Author

    Albert Szent-Györgyi

    A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself with the underlying forces and conditions that have prevented the realization of the higher possibilities of the American Dream, and, by extension, of all mankind. He addresses himself especially to the youth of the world in his attempt to show how man, the more he progresses technologically, seems the more to regress psychologically and socially, until he resembles his primate ancestors in a state of high schizophrenia.   The fundamental question asked by this book is: why is it that most of the scientific research that is done to elevate human life serves in the end to destroy it? That this phenomenon exists is unarguable. How to alter it is the problem the author tackles. He finds the possibility, indeed the instrument of our survival, in our youth. Dr. Szent-Györgyi calls upon the youth the world over to organize and exercise their power to create a new world. He implores them not to waste their energies in petulance and frustration—the world is ripe for the radical changes needed for man’s survival, and for youth to fritter away their opportunity would be to compound the tragedy and seal the fate of mankind. Born in the fourth generation of a noted family of scientists in Hungary, Albert Szent-Györgyi decided at an early age to devote his life to biological research. As a medical student he received international recognition for his studies in microscopic anatomy. The First World War, which he spent in the service of the Austro-Hungarian army, caused a break in his career. After the war he left his devastated country to work for ten years in various countries, notably Germany, Holland, England and the United States. He then returned to his native Hungary to help rebuild science there. In 1937 he won the Nobel Prize for his studies on metabolism and for the discovery of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). He soon found himself in conflict with the growing movement of Nazism, was arrested, escaped, and was hunted for years by the secret service of Hitler. After World War II, disappointed by Soviet colonialism and the terrorist methods of Stalin, he left Hungary and found refuge at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 

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    • 2/5
      Gelezen toen ik 16 was; weinig herinneringen aan, tenzij dat het erg ontluisterend was voor de mens
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      Gelezen toen ik 16 was; weinig herinneringen aan, tenzij dat het erg ontluisterend was voor de mens

    Book preview

    The Crazy Ape - Albert Szent-Györgyi

    I. THE PROBLEM IS STATED

    Why does man behave like a perfect idiot? This is the problem I wish to deal with. Today is the first time in man’s history that he is able to truly enjoy life, free of cold, hunger and disease. It is the first time he is able to satisfy all his basic needs. Conversely, it is also the first time in his history that man has the capability of exterminating himself in one blow or making his tragically shrinking, lovely little globe uninhabitable by pollution or overpopulation.

    One would expect that any idiot could make a wise choice between these two alternatives. It is basically a choice between pleasure and pain. Yet man seems to be bent on choosing the latter, on bringing about the Kingdom of Cockroaches. Cockroaches are very insensitive to high energy radiation and will find plenty to feed on in a world made barren of the resources needed to sustain human life. In the most affluent country of the world, five per cent of the people are starving. Fifty per cent are starving in the rest of the world—children do not get enough food to build healthy minds and bodies, and go to bed hungry. While this is going on the United States alone has spent since the Second World War a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) on defense, on instruments of mass killing. The Soviets, of course, are not lagging far behind. These are sums too great to be visualized even by the keenest imaginations. They could long ago have lifted mankind to much higher levels of existence. This is a truly criminal story, yet it is not merely criminal. It is utterly stupid too, for what we have bought with all this paranoiac spending are insecurity, jitters, and a ticket for self-extinction, having placed our fate in hands that we have absolutely no reason to trust.

    If mankind is really this idiotic, then how did it remain alive through its first million years? There are two possible answers to this question. One is that man is not really that senseless; rather, his circumstances have changed in such a way that he no more fits into his environment, which makes his actions senseless. But one could also conclude that man has always been like he is today, that he has always been self-destructive; he merely lacked the technological means to exterminate himself. Throughout his history there has always been an enormous amount of senseless killing and destruction; if man did not exterminate himself it was only because of the primitive nature and inefficiency of his instruments of killing, which ensured that in any violent conflict many would survive. Modern science has changed this situation, and today we all have to go together.

    Whichever of the two theories is correct, if we are to have any hope of surviving it is most urgent that we find out what keeps us in this fateful groove and whether there is a chance and a way of getting out of it.

    II. MAN vs. NATURE

    Nature is big, man is small; the quality and level of human life has always depended on man’s relation to nature, on the measure in which he is able to understand nature and use its forces for his advantage.

    The survival of any species depends on its ability to adapt to its surroundings. Man is like any other species in that he has had to adapt himself to the world in which he was born. This world of, say, a hundred thousand years ago, was exceedingly simple, and so were its problems. The main problem was how to get through the day alive—find food, shelter, a sexual partner, whatever simple requirements were needed. So man developed senses which enabled him to distinguish between a bear or a wolf, rocks and trees, all the basic units of his world. His life improved at the rate with which he learned to shape and use things. The discovery of the needle, the wheel, the arrow, fire, metals, the hardening of clay, etc., marked the single stations on his upward road from primitiveness.

    These discoveries were based on the everyday experience of man. It was not until that singular upsurge of the human intellect, characterized by ancient Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, that here and there men began to try to understand nature. These efforts can be summed up as the science of antiquity. What was characteristic, on the whole, of the science of this period was a faith in the supreme power of the mind, which, it was thought, could solve all problems. This may be illustrated by the story of the two stones. Aristotle, whose ideas were the last word for many centuries to come, claimed that a big stone falls faster than a small one. What was remarkable about this statement is not that it was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to test it. He probably would have taken such a suggestion as an insult. Why resort to crude action when the mind could answer all questions? The freedom of human thought is very limited. We all live in a very narrow cage, the spirit of our times, in which we have very little freedom of motion. If, in different ages, people thought differently, this was not because the cage got wider, but because the cage moved. The spirit of his time made it impossible for Aristotle to pick up two stones to see which one fell faster.

    In the 16th Century a great change must have taken place in the human mind for, one day, a querulous young man went up the Leaning Tower of Pisa carrying two stones, a big and a small one, to drop them simultaneously, having asked his companions to observe which of the two hit the pavement first. This man, Galileo Galilei by name,

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