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
Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch, and being killed with an automatic pistol or shell in place of a dagger or a battle-axe.
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.
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.
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.