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
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal.
I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.
Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.
I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.
It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine.
I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
Every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions.
Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.
So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.
The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new.