John B. S. Haldane
John B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, FRS was a British-born Indian scientist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and in mathematics, where he made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics. He was the son of the equally famous John Scott Haldane and a professed socialist, Marxist, atheist, and humanist whose political dissent led him to leave England in 1956 and live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 November 1892
It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.
Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.
I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.
My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.
The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.