Book excerpt
Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970
What we call “education” is nothing but the programming of the brain at an early stage when it is still malleable. The future on mankind depends on education, a system of programming which can be changed. Human history reflects, in essence, the gradual change in this programming, and if you compare yourself with a savage cannibal you may find that the only essential difference between the two of you in the educational programming the two of you underwent. It follows from this that education is one of the most important activities of mankind. It opens the door to wonderful possibilities, but it also exposes mankind to terrific dangers, for any dictatorial system can, through education, transform society according to its interests and, if desired, can transform decent people into savage killers, as we have seen happen repeatedly within the present century.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p.23
Theoretically the possibility exists, through education, of changing the course of history with one stroke, replacing today’s narrow nationalism by human solidarity. Practically, however, there are enormous difficulties, for who is capable of teaching the young? It is the older people who have to teach the young, but older people tend to transmit to their students the world in which they have grown up themselves. Who should teach the teachers, then, and what sort of world is it we are aiming at? If we could answer these questions we would be half way on the road to solving the problems of the world.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p.24
Max Planck, one of the greatest scientists of human history, the father of the quantum, wrote in his autobiography that is impossible to convince people of anything new. All that one can do is to give them time to die. The young generation will then embrace the new truths.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p53
Whatever man does he has to do it first in this mind, and the mechanism underlying the mind is the brain. There can be no action without an underlying mechanism and a mechanism can only do what its structure allows it to do. A cow could never lay an egg, however hard she tried; nor could a gramophone type letters, or a typewriter make music. Man, too, can do only what his brain allows him to do. Thus, when discussing human action we must have a look at the brain and see what sort of organ it is and for what purpose it was shaped by nature.
In their struggle for life some animals grew fangs, others claws or tusks, while still others produced poisons. Man grew a brain, and it is a curious fact that this semisolid blob of matter proved to be a more formidable tool than fangs, claws or poison, and insured man’s supremacy. Man’s brain was not developed by nature to search for truth, but to search for food, safety, and the like; to search for advantage, to help man get through the day alive. It is an organ of survival. Human action is motivated by need or desire, and the brain is the instrument of human gratification.
In primitive societies this must have been all there was to it. In more sophisticated societies the brain developed a second function: to find arguments, mostly high-sounding ones, to justify deeds or desires. This our brain does so promptly that we kid ourselves into believing that we are actually motivated in our actions by these arguments.
… Our whole nervous system developed for one sole purpose, to maintain our lives and satisfy our needs. All our reflexes serve this purpose. This makes us utterly egotistic. With rare exceptions people are really interested in one thing only: themselves. Everybody, by necessity, is the center of his own universe.
… These traits of the human mind have remarkable consequences for social structures. Man creates institutions to satisfy his social needs in accordance with his philosophy. Individuals join these institutions and make their personal interests fuse with those of the institutions, on whose wealth and power their own prospects depend. What follows is that very soon these institutions begin to serve their own interests rather than social needs. As time goes by the social needs and philosophy change, but the institutions don’t; they remain fighting for their own interests until they are swept away by revolution, often at the price of much suffering, bloodshed and devastation. Man is like a snake, bursting his skim periodically.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p.19, 20, 21
Konrad Lorenz, the great student of animal behavior, hatched goose eggs at the foot of a chair, and the goslings recognized the chair as their mother for the rest of their lives. When put under the chair a few hours after hatching, there was no such reaction. The point of this experiment was to show that things can be imprinted into the brain at an early age only; the brain freezes up later and is no longer malleable. In dogs this freezing up occurs around the sixth month. If you want a dog of the wolf family to recognize you as his master, you must train him before his is six months old. This freezing up, in man, seems to occur around the fourth decade, after which the brain is increasingly unable to assimilate new ideas.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p53
In sex, the sublime and the vulgar are separated only by a hair’s breadth. Christian religions could never find a consistent attitude towards it, making it a sin before marriage and giving it their sanction after marriage. Overlaying it all was the residual feeling that anything having to do with fornication was evil - this is the legacy that has been passed down to us by religion.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p57
My mother was an enlightened agnostic who just smiled when people talked about religion; but if any of her sons were in trouble, she hastened to church to bribe St. Peter with a dime so that he would lobby for her. The impressions of her early childhood were undeletable; later impressions constituted but a thin layer which peeled off easily.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p53
The world… is not the old world in which mankind was born. It is a new world, and it demands new ideas, leaders and methods. That we have not yet come to this realization - that we have conceived no “new” ideas, have developed no “new” leaders, have devised no “new” methods - is made depressingly obvious by the fact that we are still acting like man of thousands of years ago.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p.18
(My Lai massacre, March 16, 1968) The army will try to polish its tarnished image and will try to show its innocence by shifting blame to a few individuals, especially to Lieutenant Calley. What frightens me about Calley is not that he allegedly killed, but that, according to witnesses, he is a decent fellow who was a good student and a good soldier - he apparently always did his duty and never revealed any traits of criminality. This frightens me because it shows how terribly brutalizing wars and military life are, how they are capable of turning decent fellows into mass murders who can shoot women and children down in cold blood. The culprits are those who turned Lt. Calley into a murder. If I were his judge, I would dismiss the case, exonerate Lt. Calley and his fellows, and pass a severe judgement on the society which created the institutions that made murders out of decent people. After all, the main object of prolonged military training is to teach men to obey orders without questioning. This, it appears, is exactly what Lt. Calley did. He was being a good soldier.
-- Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert (M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine), The Crazy Ape, The Universal Library, 1970, p81