<p>The life of an academic, typically, makes dull reading. The undergraduate career, teaching and research, fellowships and chairs, and later, an ungainly grappling with high administration as vice-chancellor or head of a regulatory body. All splendid distinctions, but not of a kind to enthral the reader. Academics do not lead lives that are exciting in a worldly sense. Yet, J B S Haldane’s life is fascinating from start to finish.</p>.<p>John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS, known by many simply as JBS, was a British Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics, and was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. A true polymath, he made important contributions to several sciences and helped forge new scientific disciplines – population genetics, biochemical genetics, and an original theory on the origin of life. Beginning in 1924, JBS published a series of papers on the mathematical theory of evolution which remains his most important contribution to science. JBS moved to India in 1957. He studied Hindu classics and took to the Indian way of life; he even turned vegetarian and preached non-violence as a way of life.</p>.<p>JBS, who died at 72, in December 1964, was a truly original scientist; each of his writings is sui generis. If you had to choose just one of his many books, it has to be Possible Worlds and other Essays (henceforth PW), a collection that is eclectic and perspicacious and helps demystify science while presenting the organic relationship between science, society, and politics. First published in 1927, PW includes some essays on matters of fact, and others that are more speculative, together, demonstrating that in scientific work, imagination must work in harness. JBS writes ‘…it seems to me vitally important that the scientific point of view should be applied, so far as is possible, to politics and religion. …it is urgent that the average person should attempt to realise what is happening today in the laboratories.’</p>.<p>While all the 35 essays in the collection are fascinating, I list four as simply brilliant. Here is a brief glimpse: In the essay ‘On being the Right Size,’ JBS points out that the most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. For every type of animal, there is a most convenient size that has its own effects in the physical world; for instance, the different effects of gravity: ‘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 killed, a horse splashes.’ The metaphor makes it clear and makes you smile.</p>.<p>In ‘Eugenics and Social Reform,’ JBS displays a prescience that is frightening, and the fear is real, of a clear and present danger. He writes, ‘Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our age is the misapplication of science. It is notorious that the principal result of many increases in human power and knowledge has been either an improvement in methods of destroying human life and property, or an accentuation of economic inequality.’ On the growing use of eugenics, JBS points out, ‘Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen,’ but if it perishes from this cause, it will be because its governing class cared more for wealth than for justice.’ A timely reminder on where society in our own time is headed.</p>.<p>In ‘The Duty of Doubt,’ JBS echoes the objective conditions we experience, of the absence of scientific temper: ‘at the present time humankind is suffering from too much, rather than too little faith, and it is doubt rather than faith that must be preached. I am not thinking wholly or even mainly of faith in… religion, but simply of the habit of taking things for granted. Any society in which the suspension of judgement leads to the suspension of action will inevitably perish at the hands of men who are prepared to act, however utterly nonsensical the motives that lead them.’</p>.<p>The best comes at the end. In ‘The Last Judgement,’ JBS reflects on the future of life as we know it: ‘The planet on which we live had a beginning and will doubtless have an end. A great many people have predicted that end, with varying degrees of picturesqueness.’ This piece provides an astounding picture of the human future, revising and updating Wellsian futurism to include the long-term consequences of the ‘new biology’ for human destiny. That vision functioned as a kind of lifelong credo, infusing, and informing, his eclectic approach to science and society providing unity and structure to his astonishing career.</p>
<p>The life of an academic, typically, makes dull reading. The undergraduate career, teaching and research, fellowships and chairs, and later, an ungainly grappling with high administration as vice-chancellor or head of a regulatory body. All splendid distinctions, but not of a kind to enthral the reader. Academics do not lead lives that are exciting in a worldly sense. Yet, J B S Haldane’s life is fascinating from start to finish.</p>.<p>John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS, known by many simply as JBS, was a British Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics, and was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. A true polymath, he made important contributions to several sciences and helped forge new scientific disciplines – population genetics, biochemical genetics, and an original theory on the origin of life. Beginning in 1924, JBS published a series of papers on the mathematical theory of evolution which remains his most important contribution to science. JBS moved to India in 1957. He studied Hindu classics and took to the Indian way of life; he even turned vegetarian and preached non-violence as a way of life.</p>.<p>JBS, who died at 72, in December 1964, was a truly original scientist; each of his writings is sui generis. If you had to choose just one of his many books, it has to be Possible Worlds and other Essays (henceforth PW), a collection that is eclectic and perspicacious and helps demystify science while presenting the organic relationship between science, society, and politics. First published in 1927, PW includes some essays on matters of fact, and others that are more speculative, together, demonstrating that in scientific work, imagination must work in harness. JBS writes ‘…it seems to me vitally important that the scientific point of view should be applied, so far as is possible, to politics and religion. …it is urgent that the average person should attempt to realise what is happening today in the laboratories.’</p>.<p>While all the 35 essays in the collection are fascinating, I list four as simply brilliant. Here is a brief glimpse: In the essay ‘On being the Right Size,’ JBS points out that the most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. For every type of animal, there is a most convenient size that has its own effects in the physical world; for instance, the different effects of gravity: ‘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 killed, a horse splashes.’ The metaphor makes it clear and makes you smile.</p>.<p>In ‘Eugenics and Social Reform,’ JBS displays a prescience that is frightening, and the fear is real, of a clear and present danger. He writes, ‘Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our age is the misapplication of science. It is notorious that the principal result of many increases in human power and knowledge has been either an improvement in methods of destroying human life and property, or an accentuation of economic inequality.’ On the growing use of eugenics, JBS points out, ‘Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen,’ but if it perishes from this cause, it will be because its governing class cared more for wealth than for justice.’ A timely reminder on where society in our own time is headed.</p>.<p>In ‘The Duty of Doubt,’ JBS echoes the objective conditions we experience, of the absence of scientific temper: ‘at the present time humankind is suffering from too much, rather than too little faith, and it is doubt rather than faith that must be preached. I am not thinking wholly or even mainly of faith in… religion, but simply of the habit of taking things for granted. Any society in which the suspension of judgement leads to the suspension of action will inevitably perish at the hands of men who are prepared to act, however utterly nonsensical the motives that lead them.’</p>.<p>The best comes at the end. In ‘The Last Judgement,’ JBS reflects on the future of life as we know it: ‘The planet on which we live had a beginning and will doubtless have an end. A great many people have predicted that end, with varying degrees of picturesqueness.’ This piece provides an astounding picture of the human future, revising and updating Wellsian futurism to include the long-term consequences of the ‘new biology’ for human destiny. That vision functioned as a kind of lifelong credo, infusing, and informing, his eclectic approach to science and society providing unity and structure to his astonishing career.</p>
