His attitude toward this is curious and contradictory. When people are offered technical means to improve themselves and their children, . . . The drawing, Dyson declares, is an image for our times. The winged child is human life. . . . The old man is our existing human society, shaped by ages of past ignorance. . . .
Caution is justified . . .
Humanity cannot live forever with clipped wings. Dyson is a humane man and a humanist, but his humanism, like that of many scientists, has a weakness. By Alfred W. Crosby. Cambridge University Press. Whether tracing the history of the numeral 6 or untangling the politics of calendar-making, Crosby has produced a fine historical work that attempts to explain the peculiar rise of Western civilization to world importance in the late Middle Ages.