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  • The American Scholar

    Mysterious Inheritance

    Jun 01, 2020 4 minutes
    Review by David Brown

    A DOMINANT CHARACTER: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane

    BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN

    Norton, 400 pp., $40

    SAY WHAT YOU WILL about communism, it had a way of fooling a lot of smart people. For a long time, it was as much an opiate of the intellectuals as—to quote its cofounder, Karl Marx—religion was an opiate of the masses. There’s no better example than J. B. S. Haldane.

    A British mathematician and biologist, Haldane is best known for refining the rules of genetic inheritance that Gregor Mendel set forth (and strategically oversimplified). In so doing, he helped explain the mechanics of natural selection, Charles Darwin’s revolutionary idea. He made the

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