Adams 2000 PDF

Journal of the History of Biology 33: 457491, 2000.
2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

457
Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J. B. S. Haldane
MARK B. ADAMS
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6310, U.S.A.
E-mail: madams@sas.upenn.edu
Abstract. This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane by focusing
on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927, The Last Judgment the
sequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924). This astonishing essay expresses a vision
of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years, one that revises and updates Wellsian
futurism with the long range implications of the new biology for human destiny. That vision
served as a kind of lifelong credo, one that infused and informed his diverse scientic work,
political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkable
career.
Keywords: J. B. S. Haldane, biology, politics, genetics, evolution, population genetics,
physiology, Darwinism, experimental biology, eugenics, Britain, Russia, India, Soviet,
Communism, socialism, philosophy, vision, literature, popularization, religion, human
experimentation, bioethics, Venus, Mars, science ction, technocracy, futurology, H. G. Wells,
Julian Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, C. S. Lewis
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.
J. B. S. Haldane
1
Introduction
J. B. S. Haldane (18921964) is one of the most fascinating, perplexing and
troublesome gures in the history of science. That he was a major biologist of
his time goes without saying, but attempts at further scientic classication
are futile: there is hardly a eld of modern biology in whose history he does
not deserve at least some mention. And, beyond biology proper, Haldane had
yet other personae that at times seemed no less central to his career. Any
attempt to come to terms with his life and work must face the dual challenge
of his extraordinary multiformity and his utter singularity.
1
Haldane, 1924, p. 78.
458 MARK B. ADAMS
I rst heard his name as an undergraduate more than thirty-ve years ago
but I have been bumping into JBS ever since. When I began my studies of
the Russian population geneticist Sergei Chetverikov, there was that famous
troika of Haldane, Fisher, and Wright who created mathematical popula-
tion genetics in the 1920s and early 1930s.
2
Later, I became absorbed in the
postwar history of Lysenkoism, and discovered that Haldane was one of the
few Western biologists who rose to Lysenkos defense.
3
While exploring A.
I. Oparins theory of the origin of life, I was surprised to learn that the co-
originator of that theory (in 1929) was none other than JBS.
4
My interests
turned to issues of scientic planning and there was Haldane again, this
time as a central member of the visible college of British activist scientists
in the 1930s.
5
In the early 1970s, when I interviewed Theodosius Dobzhansky
about his life, he suddenly began to recount his own memorable encounters
with JBS, commenting, Haldane was always recognized as a singular case.
6
Later, I began to study the history of eugenics only to nd that Haldane
was one of those so-called Bolshevik, reform eugenicists of the left.
7
Then, on to medical genetics in Russia and there was Haldane the human
geneticist, who apparently thought little of the Russian work, preferring that
of his own student, Lionel Penrose.
8
No matter how distantly I ranged, he
proved impossible to avoid: even while teaching a literature class on that
hoary classic, Brave New World (1932), there was Haldanes Daedalus of
nine years earlier, where the idea of ectogenesis (on which the novel is
based) and the word itself came from.
9
And, as a quick survey of the
literature reveals, he had numerous other personae as well the physiologist,
the biochemist, the biochemical geneticist, the statistician, the popularizer,
the essayist, the polemicist, the editor, the politician, the Communist, the
migr to India.
10
Could all these Haldanes really be the same person? Jack to his friends,
Prof to his students, JBS to the world who was this man? He was,
I learned, the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of the
century
11
(to quote Michael White), a polymath (as Ernst Mayr describes
2
Adams, 1968; on Haldanes contribution, see Provine, 1971, pp. 167177.
3
See, for example: Filner, 1977; Paul, 1983a; Krementsov, 1996.
4
Adams, 1990a, pp. 695700; see also Bernal, 1967; Farley, 1974.
5
Werskey, 1971.
6
One of these encounters has been detailed by his daughter (Coe, 1994, p. 25).
7
Adams, 1990b. On Haldane and eugenics, see especially: Paul, 1983b and 1998; Kevles,
1985; Mazumdar, 1992, pp. 146195.
8
See Kevles, 1985, especially pp. 148164.
9
Thankfully this 1924 work has recently been republished (Dronamraju, 1995, pp. 2350).
10
In addition to already cited sources, see Clark, 1968; Dronamraju, 1968 and 1985.
11
White, 1965, pp. 17; in Filner, 1977, p. 309.
HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 459
him),
12
of whom one student said, He seemed to be the last man who might
know all there was to be known.
13
Here was a person for whom the two
cultures of C. P. Snow apparently had no meaning, who routinely peppered
his writing with Greek, Latin, and French poetry (without translation) not
to mention Sanskrit and Old Norse. He was in the habit of conducting human
experiments many of them dangerous on himself. And his appearance and
personality always seemed to leave an indelible impression: a giant bear of
a man with bushy eyebrows, alternatively charming and irascible, a feisty,
outrageous in-your-face rhetorician who loved a good argument in short
(in the apt phrase of an American reporter) a cuddly cactus.
14
This is not
a man, declared Boris Ephrussi, but a force of nature.
15
Even a cursory survey of his life, however, reveals tantalizing paradoxes,
puzzles, and contradictions. Although himself a member of the British elite,
JBS enjoyed ridiculing it outrageously. He learned his science by apprenticing
with his distinguished physiologist father, John Scott Haldane, of whom he
always spoke highly; but he spent his entire career confounding his fathers
religious, anti-materialist philosophy. From his earliest days, he was set on
a career in science but he never took any degree in the subject, earning
his First at Oxford in the classics (Greats, or Literae Humaniores).
At the time he launched the series of famous papers that would help create
mathematical population genetics, he was actually employed as a reader in
biochemistry.
16
The same JBS who supported a eugenic project in the 1930s
with words, money, and his own semen
17
would repeatedly point out how
premature such efforts were, given the current state of knowledge. The man
who complained in 1933 that University College was as full of bloody
Communists as Cambridge
18
would become a member of that partys British
politburo within the decade. Haldane enjoyed declaring that his favorite
Marx was Groucho (and regaling doubting listeners with the punch lines to
prove it),
19
but, a mere ve years later, he would author one of the most
compelling books ever published in English arguing for Marxist science.
20
He was also an impassioned and consistent defender of the freedom of
12
Mayr, 1995, p. 79.
13
Clark, 1968, p. 86.
14
The Cuddly Cactus, 1956, p. 7.
15
Ephrussis phrasing was: Ce nest pas un homme, cest une force de la Nature. See
White, 1965; from Clark, 1968, p. 99.
16
He worked for ten years at Cambridge as second-in-command to Gowland Hopkins,
biochemist, future president of the Royal Society and Nobel laureate.
17
Paul, 1983b, p. 31.
18
Clark, 1968, p. 97.
19
Clark, 1968, p. 97.
20
Haldane, 1938.
460 MARK B. ADAMS
science but would remain conspicuously silent when his Soviet geneti-
cist colleagues were red from their jobs, even when it became known that
Nikolai Vavilov, his favorite Russian geneticist, had died in prison.
21
In
1957, JBS announced to the world that he was relocating to India in order to
protest British involvement in the Suez War but he had already accepted a
post there and made plans to leave before that war broke out. Finally, although
he made major contributions to at least eight elds of science, it appears that
Haldane achieved no single great or outstanding discovery.
22
Many sources attest to Haldanes striking multiformity and puzzling
contradictions, but few attempt to explain what, if anything, unied his many
facets. The various subplots of his life unfold in the secondary literature
almost dialectically he joins the Party and breaks with it; defends Lysen-
koism, or perhaps not; endorses eugenics, but undermines it; and so forth.
The best scientic biography of Haldane tries to use scientic Marxism as
a unifying theme, but can only do so by conating socialism, Marxism,
Communism, and positive impressions of the Soviet experiment.
23
Even
the admirable and painstaking 300page biography by Ronald Clark which
details JBSs personal intrigues and administrative hassles but largely ignores
his science and ideas does not satisfy, for these and other reasons noted
by its reviewers, leaving the impression that there is something missing.
24
Despite all the myriad references to JBS, he seems to have been, as John
Beatty rightly notes, historically neglected.
25
In this essay, I attempt to identify the underlying vision that united this
apparent chaos of contradictions, these many personae, into a single whole. I
do so by highlighting a remarkable essay he published in 1927 one which,
in many respects, completes and enriches the vision begun in Daedalus, but
which, unlike it, has been almost totally ignored by historians. The essay
is entitled The Last Judgment and it is, I think, the most inuential and
revealing thing he ever wrote. Quite simply, I propose to introduce and
discuss this essay, inquire as to its origins, and suggest how it can help us
to see the coherence in JBSs extraordinary life and work.
21
In Haldanes various essays Vavilovs name appears, with praise, more than that of any
other Soviet scientist; Vavilov had orchestrated his membership in the U.S.S.R. Academy of
Sciences, but, unlike other American and British biologists who were foreign members of that
academy in 1948 and 1949, Haldane never resigned.
22
White, 1965; from Dronamraju, 1985, p. 68.
23
Feldman, 1976. I am grateful for my many discussions with my good friend Feldman
during my year in Moscow (19761977) around the time his book came out. A Haldanesque
character himself, Feldman was a Party member, as well as a lover of Scotland and founder
of a Soviet Bobbie Burns Society.
24
For example, see the essay review by Werskey, 1971, pp. 171183.
25
Beatty, 1992, p. 181.
The Last Judgment
In the mid-1920s Haldane burst onto the scene with his full range of talents,
rapidly becoming a major British gure in both science and letters. It was
his work on genetics, biochemistry, physiology and especially mathematical
population genetics that drew the attention of science; but it was his brilliant
popular essays that attracted the attention of the broader public.
Curiously, he apparently began the decade somewhat skeptical about
whether scientists should write popular articles; at one point, when one of
Julian Huxleys pieces in Nature was picked up by the Daily Mail (which
claimed he had discovered the elixir of life), Jack warned him that he
was in danger of losing his standing as a reputable scientist and would end
by being taken for a quack.
26
It is unclear what led JBS to change his mind.
The closest he came to explaining himself are a few remarks in a preface:
Many scientic workers believe that they should conne their publica-
tions to learned journals, he says (was he referring to his earlier self?),
and then continues: . . . it seems to me vitally important that the scientic
point of view should be applied, so far as is possible, to politics and reli-
gion.
27
Whatever the source of his reticence, he was soon over it: rst came
Daedalus (1924), then his controversial defense of chemical warfare, Call-
inicus (1925), and by 1927 he had published essays in a dizzying assortment
of periodicals, including not only The Daily Mail, but also The Manchester
Guardian, The Rationalist Annual, Bermondsey Book, The Nation, The
World To-Day, Graphic, Weekly Dispatch, and Modern Science in Britain,
Haagsche Maandblad in Belgium, and Harpers Magazine, The Forum,
Century Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic in the United
States.
One reason for Haldanes apparent change of heart may have been the
reaction to his essay Daedalus: Or, Science and the Future. Its publication
resulted from a talk he delivered to a club at Cambridge on February 4,
1923: the audience happened to include a scout for a new series, Today
and Tomorrow, and a rewritten version of JBSs presentation was used to
help launch it. In this essay Haldane suggests that the world can be saved
through eugenic ectogenesis the in vitro fertilization and development
of human eggs. He developed his ideas in a ctional format, concocting
a plausible college essay written by an undergraduate many years hence
about how these biological developments during the period 19501990 had
transformed civilization: The small proportion of men and women who are
selected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to
26
J. Huxley, 1970, p. 126.
27
Haldane, 1927a, p. v.
462 MARK B. ADAMS
the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from the
increased output of rst-class music to the decreased convictions for theft,
is very startling. Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt
that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the
greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all
countries.
28
The publication of Daedalus caused a sensation (it sold some 15,000
copies its rst year and was reprinted a dozen times) and elicited diverse
and energetic responses. One of the most immediate, published the same
year, was a sobering essay by Bertrand Russell (18721970) entitled Icarus,
or the Future of Science,
29
which raised considerable doubts as to whether
governments or medical ofcials could be trusted with administering eugenic
policies. (Eight years later, Russells reservations were given ctional form
by Haldanes long-time acquaintance, Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New
World, which portrayed a future global technocratic utopia built on universal
eugenic ectogenesis.
30
) With the publication of Daedalus in the Today and
Tomorrow series, then, quite suddenly, JBS was as famous as his father
and much in demand. There is no need to dwell further on Daedalus: its
inuence has been discussed in a number of recent publications, and it has
been reprinted with retrospective commentaries by Joshua Lederberg, Ernst
Mayr, and others.
31
What seems to have been overlooked, however, is that Daedalus was
but the rst of two essays laying out Haldanes broader vision. The second,
published three years later, was entitled The Last Judgment. Indeed, the title
of the second essay comes straight from the rst: Daedalus opens with two
scenes from Haldanes memory about the Great War the rst, a battleeld;
the second, a picture of three Europeans in India looking at a great new star
in the milky way. In contemplating the origins of that cosmoclastic explo-
sion, Haldane writes: Perhaps it was the last judgment of some inhabited
world. . . .
32
The Last Judgment appeared as the nal piece in Possible Worlds
and Other Essays, issued in London by Chatto and Windus in 1927 and
reprinted the following year.
33
This remarkable collection of Haldanes
essays the rst of many fully embodied the wide range of interests at
28
Haldane, 1924, pp. 6667.
29
Russell, 1924.
30
A. Huxley, 1932.
31
Dronamraju, 1995. See also Kevles, 1985, pp. 176192.
32
Haldane, 1924, p. 3.
33
Haldane, 1927a. The exact edition is important: this particular essay was omitted from
the books American edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), as it had been published
separately in Harpers Magazine.
which later biographers would marvel. Among its thirty-ve essays are his
renowned obituary of William Bateson; his prolegomenon to the coming
evolutionary synthesis (Darwinism To-Day); discussions of science and
politics, eugenics, social reform and the funding of science; and memor-
able popular science essays on a wide range of subjects, as well as several
declarations of his own fundamental beliefs, including When I am Dead,
The Duty of Doubt, and The Future of Biology. The penultimate essay is
the volumes signature piece, Possible Worlds, which explores the animal
mind and concludes with the likely ontology, aesthetics, and ethics of a
philosophical barnacle.
34
In short, the volume itself embraces between two
covers the full range of Haldanes diverse facets, and, I would suggest, it is
The Last Judgment the volumes culmination and nale that presents
the underlying vision that united them.
The Last Judgment is about the end of the world. The star on which we
live had a beginning, the essay opens, and will doubtless have an end.
After surveying accounts of the nal days given in various religions and
myths (he is especially hard on Revelations), he settles, for the purposes of
his tale, on the moon as the source of destruction, citing Islamic, Nordic and
other myths which also give our satellite special prominence in the nal days.
With these preliminaries nished, Haldane sets upon his principle task to
describe the most probable end of our planet as it might appear to spectators
on another. I have been compelled to place the catastrophe within a period
of the future accessible to my imagination, he explains, for I can imagine
what the human race will be like in forty million years, since forty million
years ago our ancestors were certainly mammals, and probably quite de-
nitely recognizable as monkeys. But I cannot throw my imagination forward
for ten times that period. Four hundred million years ago our ancestors were
sh of a very primitive type. I cannot imagine a corresponding change in
our descendants.
35
Haldanes literary approach is to speed up the end by
hypothesizing a series of circumstances that lead our moon to approach the
earth and destroy all life.
The core of the essay is a ctional message from the future which
embodies his visionary ideas a seventeen-page broadcast to infants on
the planet Venus some forty million years hence. The message begins: It
is now certain that human life on the earths surface is extinct, and quite
probable that no living thing whatever remains there. The following is a brief
record of the events which led up to the destruction of the ancient home of
our species. From the outset, then, Haldane signals two arresting ideas: the
34
The passages concerning an intelligent barnacle left an indelible impression on the
young John Maynard Smith; see his Introduction, in Haldane, 1985, p. ix.
35
Haldane, 1927d, p. 292.
464 MARK B. ADAMS
complete destruction of life on the earth is not the end; and the spectators on
another planet who view the earths destruction are, in fact, our descendants.
Haldanes message to Venusian infants devotes only a few paragraphs
to the physical causes of the destruction of life on earth as they unfold over
40,000,000 years. With the exhaustion of all fossil fuels, other sources are
tried, including water, wind and sun, but they prove insufcient and unreli-
able. Ultimately, the force of the tides is harnessed but over millions
of years, the use of tidal energy gradually slows the earths rotation. By
8,000,000 the length of the day has doubled; the moon gradually moves
farther away, then begins its nal approach, and it soon becomes clear that
the end is coming. These events lead to massive climate changes, the diminu-
tion of the human population, and the extinction of all non-domesticated
mammals, birds, and reptiles and many plant species. The coming destruc-
tion, then, is a direct result of human action the continuing use of tidal
forces to satisfy the great demand for energy but, even when the future
consequences of this are clear, for many millions of years humanity does
nothing to alter the unfolding course of events.
Why this curious inaction? The fundamental cause, according to the
Venusian message, was the quest for and achievement of individual human
happiness. Initially, science is harnessed to gratify all human desires. The
development of synthetic food allows the population to grow. The continents
and climate are remodeled to suit human tastes. By the year ve million, the
message tells us, the human race had reached equilibrium; it was perfectly
adjusted to its environment . . . ; and the individuals were happy, that is to
say, they lived in accordance with instincts which were gratied. . . . Human
effort was chiey devoted to the development of personal relationships and
to art and music, that is to say, the production of objects, sounds, and patterns
of events gratifying to the individual.
Of special moment is the triumph over natural selection. With the devel-
opment of the biological sciences, humans achieve almost complete control
of life. Although they apply this knowledge to the sculpting of other life
forms, the alteration of the human form is only minor, and largely directed
at achieving happiness. Teeth are eliminated, along with all disease; the
healthy human lifespan is extended to three thousand years; and, since it
is no longer needed, the human pain sense is almost completely abolished
the most striking piece of articial evolution accomplished, according
to the message. Aside from these adjustments, however, the instinctive and
traditional preferences of the individual, which were still allowed to inuence
mating, caused a certain standard body form to be preserved, and largely
on aesthetic grounds the human form was not allowed to vary greatly: The
slow changes due to other causes were traced to their sources and prevented
before very great effects had been produced.
As a consequence, by the year 5,000,000, natural selection had been
abolished and human evolution had ceased leading to millions of years
of utopian stasis. Scientic discovery was largely a thing of the past, and the
occasional pursuit of mathematics or biology is undertaken with little or no
regard for practical results. The one exception was the blending of science
and art in the practice of horticulture: the effort expended on the evolution
of beautiful owers would have served to alter the human race profoundly,
the message comments, but evolution is a process more pleasant to direct
than to undergo. As a consequence, by 25,000,000, when the end is only a
few million years off, the vast majority of mankind contemplated the death
of their species with less aversion than their own, and no effective measures
were taken to forestall the approaching doom.
This inactivity is also centrally linked, according to the message, to the
curious human habit of being inuenced by events in the past rather than
by an envisaged future. Humanity continued to squander energy because
it was characteristic of the dwellers on earth that they never looked more
than a million years ahead: human religions all attached great signicance
to past occurrences. This trait, the message suggests, had a biological basis:
If our own minds dwell more readily on the future, Venusian infants are
told, it is due largely to education and daily propaganda, but partly to the
presence in our nuclei of genes such as H 149 and P 783 c, which determine
certain features of cerebral organization that had no analogy on earth.
Because of its inherent danger, and the considerable pleasures of the
earthly utopia, few had been willing or interested to pursue space ight. Here,
at least seen from todays perspective, Haldanes imagination appears to ag:
his account of the difculty of getting projectiles into space, the impossibility
of their landing, and so forth, leads him to anticipate that successful space
travel would take more than a million years to effect beginning some eight
million years into our future. Expeditions nally manage to reach Mars in
the year 9,723,841, but they are annihilated by the species dominant on that
planet, which conducts its irrigation. At long last, after 284 failed attempts,
a successful landing is made on Venus, but the expedition dies because of the
inhospitable environment.
The impending doom, however, leads some to consider the colonization
of other planets. A small group of humans decide to forego earthly pleasures
in order to preserve human kind: they willingly undergo controlled human
evolution in order to create a race capable of inhabiting Venus.
A few hundred thousand of the human race, from some of whom we are
descended, determined that though men died, man should live forever. It
466 MARK B. ADAMS
was only possible for humanity to establish itself on Venus if it were able
to withstand the heat and want of oxygen there prevailing, and this could
only be done by a deliberate evolution in that direction rst accomplished
on earth. Enough was known of the causes responsible for evolution to
render the experiment possible. The human material was selected in each
generation. All who were not willing were able to resign from participa-
tion, and among those whose descendants were destined for the conquest
of Venus a tradition and an inheritable psychological disposition grew
up such as had not been known on earth for twenty-ve million years.
The psychological types which had been common among the saints and
soldiers of early history were revived. Confronted once more with an ideal
as high as that of religion, but more rational, a task as concrete as and
innitely greater than that of the patriot, man became once more capable
of self-transcendence.
36
Unlike their self-centered brethren, those noble few who were once more
evolving, the message reminds us, were not happy: they were out of harmony
with their surroundings and once more subject to disease and crime, which,
as much as heroism and martyrdom, are part of the price which must be
paid for evolution. The price is paid by the individual, Haldane reminds
us, and the gain is to the race. . . . To our ancestors, fresh from the pursuit
of individual happiness, the price must often have seemed too great, and
in every generation many who have now left no descendants refused to pay
it.
After ten thousand years, a human race is articially evolved requiring
only one-tenth the oxygen; raising the normal human body temperature takes
longer. But the planet has to be made to meet them halfway: before humans
can inhabit Venus it is necessary to transform the planet. This is accomplished
by ooding Venus with specially engineered bacteria designed to wipe out all
Venusian life forms and render the planet more habitable. Once on Venus,
the new settlers continue their modications apace: So rapid was our evolu-
tion, notes the message, that the crew of the last projectile to reach Venus
were incapable of fertile unions with our inhabitants, and they were therefore
used for experimental purposes. Well before the earths destruction, then,
there are in effect two human species: the old one on earth, which, having
successfully cultivated human happiness, will be destroyed by re from
heaven; and a new, bioengineered humanity on Venus.
Thereafter, the new Venusian humanity settled down as members of a
super-organism with no limits to its possible progress. Before long, the
evolution of the individual has been brought under complete social control,
36
Haldane, 1927d, p. 302.
and humans have undergone rapid controlled evolution, reacquiring the pain
sense and also a sensitivity to wave-lengths between 100 and 1200 meters,
which places every individual at all moments of life, both asleep and awake,
under the inuence of the voice of the community. Safe on Venus, these
evolved humans escape the catastrophe on earth. But they do not stop there.
Plans are underway to colonize Jupiter: A dwarf form of the human race
about a tenth of our height, and with short stumpy legs but very thick bones,
is therefore being bred. Their internal organs will also be very solidly built.
They are selected by spinning them round in centrifuges which supply an
articial gravitational eld, and destroy the less suitable members of each
generation. If Jupiter is successfully occupied, attempts will be made to
colonize Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, where it is possible that under
the conditions of life in the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a
way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds.
For this new human race, untroubled by such self-regarding sentiments as
pride and a personal preference concerning mating, even the eventual death
of the solar system need not limit its destiny:
About 250 million years hence our solar system will pass into a region
of space in which stars are far denser than in our present neighbourhood.
Although not more than one in ten thousand is likely to possess planets
suitable for colonization, it is considered possible that we may pass near
enough to one so equipped to allow an attempt at landing. If by that
time the entire matter of the planets of our system is under conscious
control, the attempt will stand some chance of success. . . . Only a very
few projectiles per million would arrive safely. But in such a case waste
of life is as inevitable as in the seeding of a plant or the discharge of
spermatozoa or pollen.
The ultimate goal is clearly stated: Our galaxy has a probable life of at least
eighty million million years. Before that time has elapsed it is our ideal that
all the matter in it available for life should be within the power of the heirs
of the species whose original home has just been destroyed. . . . And there are
other galaxies.
In an epilogue, Haldane concludes the essay by reinforcing the future
Venusian message in the present tense: Mans little world will end. The
human mind can already envisage that end. If humanity can enlarge the scope
of its will as it has enlarged the reach of its intellect, it will escape that end. If
not, the judgment will have gone out against it, and man and all his works
will perish eternally. Either the human race will prove that its destiny is
in eternity and innity, and that the value of the individual is negligible in
comparison with that destiny, or the time will come When . . . earth is but a
468 MARK B. ADAMS
star, that once had shone.
37
Thus ends The Last Judgment, and Possible
Worlds.
What are we to make of this extraordinary essay? Three features are espe-
cially worth noting. First, true to the volumes preface, Haldane has indeed
applied the scientic viewpoint to politics and especially religion. In effect,
the opening references to religious myths are used to set the scene for an
alternative, science-based myth of our destiny. The end of the world, he
suggests, need not mean the end of humankind: ultimately, the last judg-
ment is not something that a god or nature renders upon humanity, but
rather something that, for the rst time, humanity may well be able decide
for itself if it is willing to pay the price. A second striking feature of
the essay is the time scale: human destiny, he argues, must be seen in the
context of evolutionary, geological, and astronomical time, rather than in the
paltry, narrow context of our own written history. (The importance of using
the right scale was a point he would make repeatedly in other essays about
other subjects.
38
) Finally, we should note the compressed richness of ideas
the physical mastery of the planet, the control of human evolution, the
destruction of the earth, the migration to Venus, the engineering of humans
to suit it (and of it to suit humans), the emergence of a collective mind, the
pending colonization of Jupiter.
Whatever we may make of it, the power of Haldanes vision found
great resonance among others of his generation. We have already noted that
Haldanes Daedalus led to Brave New World but the impact of his Last
Judgment on futurology and literature was, if anything, greater and more
immediate. That inuence was principally felt through the works of Olaf
Stapledon (18861950). In 1928, the forty-two-year-old philosopher had just
completed A Theory of Modern Ethics and was considering another form for
his ideas, The Future Speaks. Then he read Possible Worlds, and it changed
everything: The Last Judgment became the inspiration and prototype for
one of the most inuential books of its decade, a work infused with Haldanes
vision.
That work was Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future
(1930), a philosophical pseudo-history of humanity from the world of 1930
through to the end of a habitable solar system some two billion years hence.
39
In the course of this future history, civilizations rise and fall, humankind
37
The quotations are from Haldane, 1927d, pp. 292312.
38
See, for example, Haldane, 1985.
39
Stapledons classic was reissued by Pelican Books in 1937 and Penguin Books in 1963
and has also appeared, together with Starmaker, in a joint American edition (New York: Dover,
1971); ve of his principal novels were published in Stapledon, 1953, and all of them were
inuenced, to varying degrees, by Haldane. For information on Stapledons life, see the two
recent biographies, both excellent (Fiedler, 1983; Crossley, 1994).
almost becomes extinct several times, and some eighteen distinct human
species succeed one another, eight of which are bioengineered by their
predecessors. Stapledons Fifth Men undergo the events described in The
Last Judgment with remarkable precision. Indeed, as has been pointed out,
Stapledon used many of Haldanes ideas as the basis for substantial episodes,
including: the depletion of fossil fuels, the destruction of earth by a disinte-
grating moon, the development of new human senses, the abolition of pain,
eugenic manipulation, the transformation of Venus, and the bioengineering of
a dwarf humanity to colonize the outer planets.
40
Understandably, Haldane read Stapledons classic and instantly recog-
nized his own ideas, cast on a much grander and more detailed scale that
he welcomed. He was not so amenable to another book published in 1930,
also based entirely on his own futurological ideas The World in 2030
by Lord Birkenhead and wrote a stinging review pointing out the plagi-
arism.
41
By contrast, JBS initiated a friendly correspondence with Stapledon,
offering free consultations on the authors next myth and an invitation to his
London laboratory; soon Stapledon would become an occasional member of
Haldanes intellectual coterie.
42
In his introduction, Stapledon had charac-
terized his book as not prophecy, but myth, or an essay in myth.
43
In
Stapledon, no doubt, Haldane recognized a true disciple.
Largely through the works of Olaf Stapledon, Haldanes visionary ideas
rapidly spread. This is not the place to explore the enormous inuence of
Haldanes essay, however, as our concern is with understanding its author.
44
Origins of the Vision
Where did the rich vision in Haldanes The Last Judgment come from?
Today, nding the answer may seem a daunting task, given the multiplicity of
his ideas; but every contemporary reader and reviewer knew precisely what
his primary source of inspiration had been: H. G. Wells.
40
See Sam Moskowitz, Olaf Stapledon: the Man Behind the Works, in Stapledon, 1979,
pp. 3537; as cited in Crossley, 1994, pp. 190191.
41
Lord Birkenhead Improves his Mind, originally published in Week-End Reviewin 1930,
reprinted in Haldane, 1946b, pp. 1317.
42
Crossley, 1994, p. 91.
43
Stapledon, 1953, p. 9.
44
This essay is part of a much broader forthcoming study, Visionary Biology, which will
detail the mutual inuences and interactions among a host of thinkers who shared many
elements of Haldanes worldview.
470 MARK B. ADAMS
Herbert George Wells (18661946) was a n de sicle phenomenon.
45
Catapulted to fame by his turn-of-the-century scientic romances (1895
1905), which were translated into many languages, Wells rapidly became an
international superstar as the inventor and head guru of futurology. Equally at
home in scientic, social and humanistic discourse, he exercised an enormous
inuence over an entire intellectual generation. As JBS noted in 1923, The
very mention of the future suggests him;
46
indeed, later in life, he would
credit Wells as the inspiration for his own writing career.
47
So pervasive was
his inuence that most contemporaries assumed there was no need to mention
it; as Olaf Stapledon remarked in 1931, A man does not record his debt to
the air he breathes in common with everyone else.
48
In the case of Haldanes The Last Judgment, however, the inuence was
more than atmospheric: six particular works by Wells seem to have provided
much of the essays essential framework.
The broad outline was clearly inspired by the earliest and most widely
read of Wellss scientic romances, The Time Machine (1895). Its unnamed
narrator travels to 802,701 A.D. in order to observe the scientic marvels and
social advancement he expects to nd. Instead, he discovers that the human
race has evolved into two degenerate species the Eloi and the Morlocks. At
the end of the story, the time traveler voyages to an even more distant future,
only to discover a dying planet with no trace of humanity or intelligence, a
cold earth sitting motionless beneath a pale, red, dying sun. The distant future,
further human evolution, the bifurcation of the species, the danger of human
degeneration, the prospects of extinction, the dying sun all would reappear
in Haldanes essay.
49
The mechanism of the earths destruction was almost certainly inspired by
one of Wellss most popular and beautifully crafted short stories, The Star
(1897), in which a giant cosmic body passes near the earth, causing cata-
clysmic tidal waves and earthquakes that almost wipe out human civilization.
45
The literature on Wells is vast. Of special pertinence to the present discussion are his
experimental autobiography, Wells, 1934; Bergonzi, 1961; Williamson, 1973; McConnell,
1981. Most of his early romances are collected in Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells
(New York: Dover, n.d.); for a replica of the rst magazine editions of some of these works,
together with original illustrations, see Wells, 1978.
46
Haldane, 1924, p. 9.
47
Dronamraju, 1995, p. 10.
48
Olaf Stapledon to H. G. Wells, 16 October 1931; reprinted in full in Crossley, 1994,
pp. 197198.
49
In The Causes of Evolution (Haldane, 1932a, p. 166), Haldane establishes the connection
himself. Referring to The Time Machine and The Last Judgment, he writes: Wells (1895)
and I (1927d) have given less alluring accounts, both involving a bifurcation of the human
species into two, each of which loses certain qualities which we admire in contemporary man.
The story ends with the perspective of a Martian astronomer observing the
Earths trauma from a distance; to him, there appears to be no effect whatever,
aside from a small diminution in the polar icecaps which only shows,
concludes the tale, how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem,
at a distance of a few million miles.
50
From this story, then, came not only
the means of the earths destruction, but also the narrative device of having
that destruction viewed from another planet.
Another source for Haldanes ideas was Wellss widely read classic, The
War of the Worlds (1898), which details the invasion of the earth by scien-
tically advanced and utterly alien Martians, who must abandon their dying
planet. After driving the inferior humans close to extinction, the Martians
themselves are wiped out by tiny bacteria to which humans have become
immune. Other Martian ships, however, have apparently tried landings on
Venus. The novel concludes with a vision:
If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the
thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes
this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread
of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister
planet within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life
spreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughout
the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It
may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a
reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.
51
Wellss vision clearly presages Haldanes own; for JBS, however, it is we
who become those Martians, seeking to escape from our own dying world.
The form Venusian humanity takes in Haldanes essay has roots in another
of Wellss romances, First Men in the Moon (1901), which depicts an
advanced, harmonious, stable, utopian Selenite society in the form of an
intelligent, eugenically bred lunar insect hive. (The same motif is contained
in his subsequent short story, The Empire of the Ants.
52
) Haldane suggests
the connection at the end of The Last Judgment, when he admits that he
has depicted a human race on Venus as mere components of a monstrous
50
The Star was rst published in 1897 and subsequently appeared in a volume of
collected stories (Wells, 1899). It was based on La Fin du Monde (1893) by astronomer
Camille Flammarion (18421925).
51
Wells, 1897; see Seven Science Fiction Novels, pp. 45253.
52
Wells, 1905b.
472 MARK B. ADAMS
ant-heap.
53
This is clearly a source for his ideas about humanity becoming a
super-organism in which the individual counts for little or nothing.
54
Even Haldanes political ideas have clear Wellsian roots. Beginning
with his inuential non-ctional book, A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells had
argued for a worldwide, monolingual, cooperative society run by a techno-
cratic elite called the Samurai. Wells continued to pursue this technocratic
vision throughout his career, most notably in Men Like Gods (1923) and in
The Shape of Things To Come (1933),
55
and launched a thirty-year campaign
for global government to be brought about through a peaceful world-wide
revolution. Of course, futurological or not, such Wellsian ideas are indeed
political and socialist, but they are not simply so: in the view of Wells
(and Haldane) such technocratic socialism is seen not as a nal human end
state, but as a necessary, emergent, relatively brief phase in a much longer
evolutionary process.
This is brought home by Wellss most widely read and inuential effort
during the 1920s, The Outline of History (1920), comprising two volumes
subdivided into nine books. This was a history like no other: Its account
of the human past begins with the origin of the universe, the condensation
of the solar system, the geological history of the earth, the evolution of life,
and the rise and extinction of the dinosaurs. Humans rst appear in Book
II; history dawns in Book III; and Book IX deals entirely with the future.
That nal book, The Next Stage in History, consists of only one chapter,
entitled Mans Coming of Age: The Probable Struggle for the Unication
of the World into One Community of Knowledge and Will. It concludes
with a paragraph labeled The Stages Beyond? sketching the coming control
of life, culminating in an almost religious invocation: Gathered together at
last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe, unied,
disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom and with knowledge
as yet beyond dreaming, Life, for ever dying to be born afresh, for ever
young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool,
and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
56
For Wells (as for Haldane), then,
the unication of humanity was not a way of creating social justice or making
people happy: it was a necessary rst step towards our destiny as masters of
the universe.
53
Haldane, 1927d, p. 310.
54
As we shall see, another source may well have been Ernst Haeckels Riddle of the
Universe (1900), which he read as a schoolboy at Eton.
55
On the basis of this latter work, Wells prepared the scenario (published separately in
1935) for the lm classic of the 1930s, Things to Come. The story embodies the emergence of
his technocratic utopia in a ctional form (Wells, 1935).
56
Wells, 1920, p. 595.
The writings of H. G. Wells, then, provided the evolutionary, futurolog-
ical time-scale and context for Haldanes essay but Haldanes vision is
profoundly different from that of H. G. Wells in critical ways. In The Time
Machine, humankind is powerless to stop its own bifurcation, degeneration,
and extinction; not so in The Last Judgment. In The Star, a cosmic body
almost causes the end of a helpless human civilization; for Haldane, the earth
is destroyed, but that is not the end, for humanity is not helpless. In War of the
Worlds, it is not humans but bacteria that defeat the invaders; Wells suggests
that no matter how advanced our own science becomes, we too might be
just as easily exterminated nor would the technocratic world governments
envisioned in A Modern Utopia or The Outline of History be able to do much
to save us from any such threats. For Haldane, by contrast, humans are largely
in control, reshaping planets and themselves in order to survive.
There is a fundamental difference between Wells and Haldane, then, and
it has to do with science. For Wells, the most glorious fruits of the century of
progress its discovery of astronomical, physical, biological and social laws
meant that progress itself was constrained, humans were subject to inexor-
able natural laws beyond their control, and powerless to shape our individual
or collective destiny. Of course, as a onetime student of T. H. Huxley, Wells
knew his biology (indeed, in 1893 he had written two biology texts) but
the biology he knew was the Darwinism of the 1880s. Although Wells used
biological themes often in his scientic romances, then, it was to express
with a clarity that few others could match the classic n de sicle Darwinian
dilemma: if our emergence and progress as a species depended on the survival
of the ttest in the struggle for existence, then the amenities of our modern
civilization (including the survival and reproduction of the less t) could
not be indenitely maintained we would either have to progress through
further struggle, or degenerate. For many, indeed, it seemed less a dilemma
than a cul-de-sac: the very qualities that marked our advanced condition (e.g.,
health, welfare, equality and altruism) would destroy that civilization in short
order; and, since natural laws and natural selection were inexorable, there
was no way to avoid it.
For Haldane, this was the old biology but he and his generation had
grown up with the triumphs and promise of a new, experimental biology
predicated on manipulating organic nature to suit human ends.
57
For its prac-
titioners and devotees, the rst decades of this century were heady times
indeed, promising human betterment along many fronts, including monkey
gland therapy to improve virility, rejuvenation research to extend the human
lifespan, and powerful attacks on the infections that plagued mankind. These
decades saw the emergence of whole new research elds devoted to blood
57
For a readable treatment of the emergence of experimental biology, see Allen, 1975.
474 MARK B. ADAMS
transfusion, tissue cultures and organ transplants. Mendelian genetics was
already leading to the improvement of agricultural breeds and the develop-
ment of hybrid corn and other new crops. Similarly, by studying the effects
of electricity, magnetism, gravity, chemicals, temperature, and other control-
lable parameters on the developing embryo, the new embryology held forth
the promise that the organism might be understood, controlled and even
molded from conception.
58
Just before the Great War, the branch of this new biology that seemed to
offer the most immediate promise for controlling nature and saving humanity
from extinction was, of course, eugenics. Its founder was Charles Darwins
cousin, Francis Galton (18221911), whose multiple contributions to the
new science also included biometrics, statistics, and inuential work in
psychology and criminology. In 1885, he had coined the term eugenics
literally, being well born for the study and practice of improving the
biological quality of future human generations by decreasing the reproduction
of the physically, mentally, or morally defective (negative eugenics), and
increasing the reproduction of the hereditarily gifted (positive eugenics).
59
In a way, eugenics was Galtons own answer to the n de sicle dilemma
his cousins theory had posed; if humans were animals, and animals could
be shaped by the breeder, the same techniques could be applied to human-
kind. Such eugenic ideas were pervasive during Haldanes youth: they were
widely discussed, not only in scientic and popular periodicals, but also in
the famous plays of the Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw.
60
By the end
of the Great War, eugenics movements had blossomed in more than thirty
countries, and in a number of them notably Britain and the United States
eugenics was taught alongside genetics as one of the most exciting and
socially relevant examples of the new biology.
61
The new biology, then, came in many forms and JBS was familiar with
most of them. He learned much science from his father, the noted physiologist
J. S. Haldane, spending his childhood free time and vacations from school
assisting him in the lab. In 1901, at age nine, he was taken by his father to
an Oxford talk reporting on the recent rediscovery of Mendels laws. While
at Eton, JBS was entranced by Ernst Haeckels Riddle of the Universe, which
sought to supplant Christianity with a scientistic philosophy (Monism) based
on evolution. Later he also read lie Metchnikoffs The Nature of Man, which
advocated increased human longevity by the use of yogurt.
62
He also knew
58
See, for example, Pauly, 1987.
59
On Galton, in addition to other cited works, see Cowan 1972a, 1972b, and 1977.
60
Shaw, 1982, for example; see also Kevles, 1985.
61
On international eugenics, see Adams, 1990b.
62
On his boyhood reading, see Clark, 1968, p. 24; Haeckel, 1900; Metchnikoff, 1908.
the classics of genetics, followed the progress of Mendelism, and began
his own genetic experiments on guinea pigs in 1908, at age sixteen, which
eventually established genetic linkage in animals (quite independently of the
Morgan group).
63
By the 1910s Haldane was thoroughly acquainted with
physiology, genetics, biochemistry and the new biology in all its manifold
incarnations. By the mid 1920s, of course, he himself had become one of its
leading gures.
It was this difference between the old science and the new that was at the
very core of Daedalus. Near the beginning, Haldane makes the important
point that [Wells] is a generation behind the time. . . . Now . . . I believe the
center of scientic interest lies in biology.
64
Emerging from the heroic age
of invention, Wells had imagined the world transformed by the engineer and
his machines; now, not the engineer but the biologist is the most romantic
gure on earth at the present day.
65
That, indeed, is what Daedalus is all
about: the way in which the myriad possibilities offered by the new biology
fundamentally transform prospects for the human future. For his part, H. G.
Wells recognized how different Haldanes vision was from his own: appar-
ently stung by Haldanes criticism, in 1925 he resolved to write a book about
modern biology. Well aware of his own ignorance of the subject, however, he
uncharacteristically solicited the aid of two coauthors his zoologist son, G.
P. (Gip), and Julian Huxley (Haldanes former schoolmate at Eton), who
ended up doing most of the writing; as Huxley notes in his memoirs, by then
Wells had forgotten much of his biology and what biology he remembered
was by now old-fashioned pre-Mendelian.
66
The work appeared in 1930 as
The Science of Life, and its nal sections (which were being drafted in 1927
when The Last Judgment appeared) showed that essays inuence.
67
Daedalus, then, began the job of updating Wellsian futurology with the
implications of the new science, a mission Haldane would complete in the
essays twin and sequel, The Last Judgment. The two essays are alike in
many striking ways. Both include references to legend and myth, as well as
quotations in Latin (untranslated) and other languages (French, Greek and
Norse). Both confront religion, setting it in opposition to the world as under-
stood by science, most especially the new biology. The length of the two
essays is roughly the same, as is their structure: each begins with a substantial
63
Clarke, 1968, pp. 2930.
64
Haldane, 1924, p. 10.
65
Haldane, 1924, pp. 77, 80.
66
J. Huxley, 1970, pp. 155156.
67
Wells, Huxley, and Wells, 1930, pp. 14541480. See also Huxleys memoir, which
devotes a whole chapter to the undertaking, and reprints letters between Wells and himself
concerning disagreements over the content of that nal section, entitled The Breeding of
Mankind (Huxley, 1970, pp. 166170).
476 MARK B. ADAMS
discussion, then breaks into a message from the future (in single quotation
marks), and concludes by driving home the lessons of that futurology in
the present tense, ending with a poem.
68
The key distinction between the two essays, however, is telling: The
futurological account in Daedalus is from 150 years into our future, and
details how the decline of humanity was forestalled by the universal applica-
tion of eugenic ectogenesis. The futurological account in The Last Judg-
ment is from 40,000,000 years into our future, and details how we have
survived the end of our planet and risen to a higher form of consciousness
through controlled human evolution. Taken together, then, the two provide a
look at the short- and long-term future of humanity and a complete answer
to the n de sicle Darwinian dilemma Wells had so effectively expressed.
Haldanes answer was essentially this: Traditional religion is untenable.
We live in a material, Darwinian world, governed by the laws of science,
and we must understand our existence and our future in an evolutionary,
cosmic time-scale. Humanity is at a crucial moment in its history as a species,
with only a few centuries remaining for us to seize control of our destiny:
left to natural law, humanity will degenerate and, like all other biological
species, eventually became extinct; our planet (and later our sun) will die.
But the new biology affords us a way out: In the short-term, we can halt our
degeneration through some form of negative eugenics, social experimenta-
tion, world government and technocratic socialism. In the long term, using
positive eugenics and bioengineering, we can create new kinds of humans for
moving into space and colonizing other planets, within and, if possible,
beyond our solar system. In this way, human progress can proceed for
many eons, producing future descendants with even higher (perhaps tele-
pathic or communal) forms of mentality. This is the science-based faith that
will provide what Christianity and other religions cannot: scientic answers
to the profound questions of ethics, human destiny, our place in the universe
and the meaning of life. To realize our true destiny, we must be guided not by
a myth from our past, but by a vision of our future.
69
Haldanes answer, then, took the form of a new myth of human destiny
to replace the old, a vision of a possible human future informed by the new
biology. Although articulated in the 1920s in Daedalus and especially The
Last Judgment, this vision and its elements would resurface and reappear,
with minor variations, in many of his subsequent works. It was a kind of credo
68
The Last Judgment contains roughly 75% of the words in Daedalus, but much of the
difference in length arises from Haldanes more condent, self-assured writing style in 1927;
the futurological message in The Last Judgment, however, is considerably longer than that
in the earlier essay.
69
In Last Judgment, Haldane warns that humanity almost goes extinct because of its habit
of looking to the past rather than being inuenced by an envisaged future (pp. 300301).
and he held to it, I believe, throughout his life. I am not suggesting that this
credo functioned dogmatically or mechanistically that he consulted it,
that it directed him, or that it determined specic scientic research he
undertook or particular political choices he made. Rather, I think it functioned
as a vision, a worldview, almost religiously infusing and informing his
multifarious activities.
Understanding JBS
Haldanes credo provides the key, I believe, to understanding his biography
and career as a coherent whole, helping us to see through his apparent contra-
dictions and vacillations to the underlying unity in his multiple careers as
scientist, popularizer, and political activist.
What kind of a scientist was Haldane? In an autobiographical note
recorded in early 1964, he characterized himself as very much of a dabbler,
adding: But I am not ashamed of being a dabbler. It sometimes comes in
very useful.
70
L. C. Dunn characterized him as a spreader (as opposed
to a concentrator), noting that science needs both.
71
As Ronald Clark has
observed, The uniqueness of Haldanes contribution to science was that
for much of his life he was able to bring to fresh elds the equipment and
concepts he had acquired in other disciplines; for him the cross-fertilisation
of ideas really worked.
72
An especially illuminating comment came from
John Maynard Smith, who worked with Haldane for ten years: He was not
himself a good observer and he was a terrifyingly bad experimenter but
he read avidly and he listened to what people told him, and he had a knack of
drawing conclusions which the observer himself had missed.
73
This helps us to understand the exceptional quality of Haldanes essays. It
is a mistake, I think, to dismiss them simply as popularizations, as is often
done; in Possible Worlds, for instance, which discusses the likely epistem-
ology of intelligent barnacles, what science precisely is he supposed to be
popularizing? Very few of his essays simply acquaint the layman with what
some scientist or other already knows perfectly well; to the contrary, most
make unexpected connections which can startle and inform novice and expert
alike which is why, no doubt, scientists seemed to nd them so suggestive.
Lest objection be made that it is a mistake to attach such importance to
sentiments expressed in mere popularizations, then, we should realize that
Haldanes popular essays constitute a major part of his intellectual legacy,
70
Haldane, 1973, pp. 214215.
71
Dronamraju, 1985, p. 68.
72
Clark, 1972, p. 23.
73
Smith, Introduction, in Haldane, 1968, pp. ix.
478 MARK B. ADAMS
the fullest record of his thinking, and the place where his originality and
special genius is most clearly manifest. We should recall, for example, that his
abiding contribution to the scientic study of the origin of life was not a book
or a stream of work, but simply an essay The Origin of Life published
in the Rationalist Annual in 1929.
74
Alongside that essay, in the same 1932
volume where it was reprinted, are two others that reprise his credo: The
Possibilities of Human Evolution, and Mans Destiny.
75
Haldanes credo, in turn, helps us to understand the multiplicity of his
contributions to science. When we reconsider both their nature and diversity
genetics, biochemistry, biochemical genetics, human physiology, mathe-
matical population genetics, the origin of life, and so forth we come to
realize that they all relate to his vision: these are precisely the scientic elds
whose development is required by the project of controlling future evolution
and human destiny as he has conceived it. Indeed, in the 1920s, as he was
producing his credo, he was also deeply engaged in the scientic task for
which he would be most remembered, one that is central to any attempt at
controlling human evolution: establishing the mathematics of evolution itself.
The importance of his vision allows us to understand why a professional
biochemist would have been inspired to undertake such a task.
Haldane often spoke against excessive specialization, and he abided by his
own warnings; such a fragmentation of science, he believed, would make it
impossible to realize its social implications, to see clearly and build soundly
a way to the future. In one essay highlighting the central importance to our
future of sciences of both psychology and politics, he asks: Why then am I
not a psychologist?, answering his own question, I do not think psychology
is yet a science.
76
Had he regarded it as such, one suspects, we would have
to add psychology to the already daunting list of elds to which he made a
contribution.
Indeed, not infrequently, Haldanes vision actually appears in his purely
scientic work. His zoology textbook, Animal Biology (1927), co-authored
with Julian Huxley, for example, concludes: The one great difference
between man and all other animals is that for them evolution must always
be a blind force, of which they are quite unconscious; whereas man has, in
some measure at least, the possibility of consciously controlling his evolution
according to his wishes. But that is where history, social science, and eugenics
74
The essay was republished three years later (Haldane, 1932e), and also more recently
(Bernal, 1967, pp. 242249; Haldane, 1968, pp. 112).
75
Haldane, 1932c and 1932d.
76
Haldane, 1927b, p. 189.
begin, and where zoology must leave off.
77
Similar references can be found
in his other scientic works.
An especially telling example is Haldanes inuential scientic classic,
The Causes of Evolution (1932), long recognized by evolutionists and histor-
ians of biology alike as one of the rst statements of the emerging evolu-
tionary synthesis. What has been overlooked, however, is the books sixth
and nal chapter, where Haldane explains what he sees as the broader signi-
cance of his own work.
78
There, after reprising the evolutionary history of
man, he turns to the future: Now for the rst time the possibility has arisen
of mind taking charge of the process [of human evolution], things are more
hopeful. We certainly do not know enough at present to guide our own evolu-
tion, but we have only been accumulating the knowledge necessary for such
guidance during a single generation. There is at least a hope that the next
few thousand years the speed of evolution may be vastly increased, and its
methods made less brutal.
79
In succeeding pages he discusses the various
ctional portrayals of the human future by Wells, Shaw and others, which
he largely rejects because of their incompatibility with modern biology. He
praises only one work: If anyone desires a speculative, but not (in the light of
our present knowledge) wildly impossible, account of mans future, I advise
them to read Last and First Men
80
not mentioning that this 1930 work
by Olaf Stapledon was inspired, structured and informed by his own essay,
The Last Judgment, to which he makes but modest allusion. Nor was this
link between his population genetics and his vision a sometime thing: even
at the 1947 meeting that helped to orchestrate and nalize the evolutionary
synthesis, Haldane returned to the themes of his credo in his featured public
address, Human Evolution: Past and Future.
81
77
Haldane and Huxley, 1927, p. 335.
78
The nal chapters of other important contemporary sources, alas, have also been over-
looked: the last third of Paul Kammerers The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (1924),
which argues for a Lamarckian, socialist eugenics; and the last third of R. A. Fishers
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), which argues for a eugenics based on
Mendelian genetics. In all three works, I would suggest, those nal sections are critical for
understanding why these inuential works were written and what they are about.
79
Haldane, 1932a, p. 164.
80
Haldane, 1932a, p. 166.
81
Haldane, 1949. The essay was reprinted as the concluding essay in Haldane, 1951,
pp. 271288. In that volumes preface, Haldane writes: The last essay in the book was
delivered, as an evening discourse, at a Conference on Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolution
held at Princeton University as part of the commemoration of its bicentenary. I should have
preferred to have spoken on a more specialized and less speculative topic. But I am sensible of
the honour done to me in asking me to speak to a wider audience than that of our more strictly
scientic meetings (p. 5).
480 MARK B. ADAMS
Against this background, Haldanes contradictions and shifting posi-
tions with regard to eugenics seem more apparent than real. He was never
much of an advocate of standard eugenics movements, and scorned advocates
of eugenic sterilization (whom he derisively termed the off-with-your-cock
brigade);
82
rather, as Paul, Kevles, and others have rightly emphasized, he
was always a reform eugenicist. Whether current genetic knowledge or
social conditions were sufcient to make a truly successful eugenic program
possible was for him, of course, a question of timing, politics and the state of
knowledge. One senses in some of the secondary literature on Haldane a well-
meaning attempt to somehow exonerate him from his eugenic commitment,
which is treated as a passing infatuation that his own work largely discredited
as if the science he did that led to his skepticism was simply coincidental.
But why did he do eugenics-relevant work in the rst place, if not to accu-
mulate the knowledge necessary to control human evolution in a way that
would work? And, rather than wishful thinking, of course it had to be based
on reliable genetics and good biology what else could it be based on? I think
one can easily make too much of his criticisms of contemporary eugenics by
overlooking the vast time frame in which Haldane thought, mistaking his
withering attacks on ill-founded nostrums and Nazi race biology for oppos-
ition to eugenics as a goal. Concerning the central question that, in the
future, when the necessary sciences were sufciently developed, humankind
must use genetic, eugenic, and other measures to improve human biology and
control human evolution he remained true to his ideal throughout his life.
83
Haldanes vision also helps us to understand his politics. It is well known
that, in the 1930s, Haldane turned from a quasi-Fabian socialist into a card-
carrying member of the British Communist Party. This fact is often treated as
yet another peculiarity of Haldanes personal evolution, without any connec-
tion to his scientic life but, surely, it had very much to do with his scientic
life. As we have already noted, it is easy to mistake a variant of Wellss
futurology for socialism, Marxism or communism. For Haldane, both his
science and his politics owed from his deeper visionary orientation toward
82
Smith, 1987, p. 7.
83
In his introduction, Dronamraju (1995, pp. 1314) takes exception to my published
assertion (Adams, 1990b, p. 220) that The Soviet A. S. Serebrovsky, the American H. J.
Muller, and the Briton J. B. S. Haldane . . . exhibited a lifelong commitment to eugenic ideals.
The word ideals was carefully chosen, however, and is not contradicted by the instances
of Haldanes caution which he correctly cites. He goes on to assert that it is quite easy to
make too much of Haldanes writings on eugenics because he was a prolic writer on a great
number of topics and was given to a great deal of biological speculation and eugenics was
a part of that process, noting that his pronouncements on eugenic improvement were almost
always biology based. Although I think his dismissal of speculation is misleading, much of
what he says, I am happy to note, actually reinforces the argument I am presenting here.
the human future. And revolutionary Russia appeared to many, at least poten-
tially, to be that future in the making: a new society devoted not only to
rational, scientic planning, but also to human experimentation on a grand
scale.
By the mid-1920s, Haldane is already writing about the Soviet Union in
these terms. In Science and Politics he laments that the latter is not yet
the former, commenting: I, for one, shall continue to regard any political
projects as interesting experiments which may or may not promote human
happiness but will certainly furnish important data for future use. . . . Until
politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social
reforms as experiments.
84
He goes on to advocate experimental politics
as the way to speed up human evolutionary progress a thousandfold. In his
other essays of the period, his references to the U.S.S.R. are always framed
by this scientistic, experimentalist, futuristic perspective. For example, in yet
another essay in Possible Worlds, The Duty of Doubt, the nature of his
interest in the Soviet Union is explicitly declared: The government of the
Soviet Union not only admits but boasts that its policy is experimental. . . . No
doubt the Russian people has proved an ideal subject for large-scale experi-
ments. . . . Our present rulers and those who support them will be well advised
explicitly to imitate the extremely capable Bolshevik leaders, and adopt an
experimental method.
85
Things have to be tried to see how they work, he is
saying, and mistakes are inevitable; the important thing is to reject tradition
and outmoded ideas, doubt everything, be experimental and support science.
Note that, some twenty years later, these very same themes would emerge in
Haldanes defense of Lysenko; reading his various comments about Soviet
science and Lysenko over the years, one senses a continuing willingness
to overlook obvious shortcomings in the name of challenging orthodoxy,
experimenting with human society, and attempting to transform nature.
86
Haldanes credo, then, was an informing vision that begins to make sense
of his various political activities a vision that was antecedent to those activ-
ities, and continued after them. In particular, it helps us to understand why,
in the 1920s, he might well have seen the Soviet experiment as interesting;
why, as the 1930s unfolded, he might have regarded scientic communism
in Russia as the best hope; and why he left the Party in 1950, when it became
clear that the Soviet Union had the wrong attitude and the wrong biology!
to lead the way to the future he had envisioned. Did JBS share H. J. Mullers
hope, in the mid-1930s, that Stalin would turn from engineering human
84
Haldane, 1927b, pp. 188189.
85
Haldane, 1927c, pp. 220221.
86
See Paul, 1983a; Krementsov, 1996.
482 MARK B. ADAMS
society to engineering human biology?
87
When Haldane threw himself into
the British Communist Party and its mission a few years later, did he fancy
himself an early prototype of the technocratic Samurai of Wellss Modern
Utopia? In the mid 1950s, when the character of Stalinist biology had become
clear and the radical prospects for Britain were dimmed by the Cold War, did
Haldane relocate to newly independent India because he sensed there another
grand social experiment in the making?
88
The possibilities are suggestive.
Finally, Haldanes credo also helps us understand the religious dimensions
of his life. The term may seem inappropriate for someone of his consistently
atheistic persuasion. As commentators have sometimes noted, however, for a
lifelong non-believer he seemed inordinately preoccupied with religion. We
have already noted the attention devoted to it in both Daedalus and The
Last Judgment, but religion is a major theme in many of his other essays,
written throughout his life. This preoccupation, when noticed, has generally
been accounted for by Haldanes First in the Greats at Oxford, his defense
of Darwinism against creationists, his Marxist agenda, or his showing off.
But I believe that the omnipresent religious motif in his work can be best
understood in relation to his credo.
We have already noted that Haldanes credo constituted a new, future-
oriented myth of human destiny intended to replace the old religions. That
Haldane was advancing a new religion was a fact not lost on the orthodox.
In 1931, Arnold Lunn wrote to Haldane: It has always seemed to me a pity
that the Christians and anti-Christians so seldom engage in battle on the same
ground. You inform the listening world through the medium of the B.B.C. that
the creeds are full of obsolete science and that Christianity is dead. . . . You, I
suppose, believe that your creed if generally adopted would increase the sum
total of human happiness. . . . Are you . . . in the least interested in converting
the world to your point of view? If so, Lunn proposed, Haldane should
collaborate in a book to consist in a series of informal letters in which you
would defend your creed and attack mine and in which I should defend mine
and attack yours. Despite his busy schedule, Haldane accepted the challenge.
The result was a lengthy, lively give-and-take, published in 1935 as a 412-
page book entitled Science and Superstition.
89
The review of the volume in
87
On Mullers eutelegenesis, his time in the Soviet Union, and his letter to Stalin urging
implementation of his ideas, see Adams, 1990c, pp. 152216, and especially pp. 192197.
88
In his writings throughout his life, Haldane made frequent references to Hindu mythology
and practice. In Daedalus, for example (Haldane, 1924, pp. 47, 90), he argues for an ethic
as uid as Hindu mythology. Beginning in the late 1940s, he begins to emphasize that the
eugenic and biological techniques he advocates, although opposed by Christian moralists, are
perfectly compatible with Hinduism, and, indeed, that some of these practices are already
standard among certain Indian peoples.
89
Lunn and Haldane, 1935.
Nature judged that, although a clever controversialist, [Lunn] is not in the
religious sphere the equivalent of Professor Haldane in the science sphere.
90
The same could not be said, however, of C. S. Lewis (18981963)
fantasy writer, Christian moralist and fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Lewis had grown up on Wellss stories and liked the whole interplanetary
idea as a mythology, but Haldanes updating of that tradition in The Last
Judgment was another matter entirely. With its hope of perpetuating and
improving the human race, Lewis understood that his scientic hope of
defeating death is a real rival to Christianity, and resolved to do something
about it. The result was the Perelandra Trilogy (19351945), three novels
(set sequentially on Mars, Venus, and Earth) in which Haldane is carica-
tured in the satanically possessed Weston, a physicist who repeatedly mouths
the selfsame religion expressed in what Lewis later termed the brilliant,
though to my mind depraved, paper called The Last Judgment.
91
When
the trilogy was completed in 1946, Haldane reviewed all three novels in a
stinging essay entitled Auld Hornie, F.R.S., which took Lewis to task for
putative inaccuracies, the complete mischaracterization of science, and his
disparagement of the human race, and extended his critique in yet another
essay, Anti-Lewisite.
92
(Lewis wrote a detailed rebuttal and put it away in a
folder marked Anti-Haldane; it was published posthumously under a more
suitable title.)
93
In one sense, however, Lewis (and Lunn before him) had gotten it exactly
right: although not a Christian, JBS was a deeply religious man. He had a
creed: his faith was reason, his church science. For all his criticism of
Revelations, he had been blessed with one of his own his 1927 vision
and it informed his life. In various writings, he expressed admiration for the
transcendence and self-sacrice of the Christian saints, and his own behavior
consistently reected the same commitment in his indifference to his own
scientic priority, his defense of the meek against the powerful, his devo-
tion to social and political causes, and his evangelical popularizations, not
to mention his lifelong willingness to conduct dangerous experiments on
himself for the greater good. Throughout his career, he sought to advance
the faith, abstaining from criticizing those he regarded, rightly or wrongly, as
members of the congregation (whether Vavilov or Lysenko), and resisting the
temptation, despite considerable pressure from his colleagues, to participate
90
Clark, 1968, p. 111.
91
Green and Hooper, 1974, pp. 163164; Lewis, 1966, p. 66.
92
Haldane, 1946a; reprinted in Haldane, 1951, pp. 249258. (The title means Satan,
Fellow of the Royal Society, that is, Haldane himself as depicted by Lewis.) See also his
More Anti-Lewisite, in Haldane, 1951, pp. 259267.
93
A Reply to Professor Haldane, in Lewis, 1966, pp. 7485.
484 MARK B. ADAMS
in internecine schisms. Rather, he worked with energy, steadfastness, and
dedication whether in science, writing or politics to advance the faith
and spread the gospel. In serving his revelation and his faith, JBS indeed
led a profoundly religious life. As one former student has noted, Life with
Haldane required, among other skills, that one brush up ones mythology,
because he regarded myth as the best form of moral instruction.
94
The Final Years
The developments in postwar science occasioned minor adjustments to
Haldanes vision, but by and large they reinforced it. This fact helps us to
understand the ways in which he began to part company from fellow left-
ists and scientists alike; Haldane welcomed the atomic bomb as a scientic
triumph that afforded new power to shape our destiny, but he realized that
atomic war might complicate the realization of the future he had envisioned.
Nonetheless, as the person who had rst estimated the mutation rate in man
(in 1931), Haldane disagreed with many of his fellow human geneticists, such
as H. J. Muller, over the question of whether testing and nuclear war would
destroy the human gene pool and lead to human extinction; thinking in long
evolutionary terms, he tended to doubt it, and criticized as alarmist the anti-
nuclear activities of the likes of Stapledon and Russell, as well as the spate of
contemporary science ction warnings of atomic monsters and mutants.
Of even more interest to him was mans unexpected leap into space,
signaled in 1957 by the launching of Sputnik. The Last Judgment had envi-
sioned this taking place, with great difculty and much loss of life, only some
9,000,000 years hence but it was occurring in his own lifetime. If the atomic
age was complicating the realization of his vision, then, the space age was
greatly accelerating it and so too were the DNA discoveries and the advent
of molecular biology, developments which he (as a geneticist, biochemist and
biochemical geneticist) found much less surprising. His credo had pictured a
distant human future characterized by the control of life and the move into
space; in the 1950s, both were already beginning to happen.
There was yet another development in the postwar period in which
Haldane took considerable interest: science ction. The modern reader might
be tempted to regard Daedalus and The Last Judgment themselves as
science ction, but when Haldane wrote them the genre have not yet even
been given its name; not until the so-called golden age (19391942) did
it assume its modern form.
95
In a sense, then, as several commentators have
94
Smith, 1987, p. 8. For a suggestive article on the religious context of Haldanes
evolutionary work, see McOuat and Winsor (1995).
95
The term science ction was rst coined (by Hugo Gernsback) in 1929 (Moskowitz,
1963, pp. 313333) two years after Haldanes The Last Judgment was published.
noted, Haldane can be regarded as one of the founding masters of modern
science ction, purely on the basis on his essay, The Last Judgment.
96
Much of the science ction Haldane read in the 1950s must have seemed
remarkably familiar; by then, the ideas he had expressed some thirty years
earlier had become so pervasive in SF as to constitute major motifs of the
genre. His idea of ectogenesis had stimulated Aldous Huxleys Brave New
World (1932), and through it had resurfaced in a host of other works, notably
Robert Heinleins Beyond This Horizon (1942), which explicitly critiqued
many of Haldanes ideas while incorporating others.
97
His vision of a long
future history for humankind throughout the galaxy had become a basic motif
of the genre, thanks to golden-age classics by both Robert Heinlein and Isaac
Asimov. The collective mind of the Venusian humans in Haldanes essay
became the prototype for A. E. van Vogts Slan (1940) and many other SF
stories by Frank Herbert and other authors. His idea of altering planets to
make them habitable by humans was called terraforming by Jack William-
son in a series of stories published in 1942 and 1943 and became the basis
for many other works, by many authors, during the following decades.
98
Finally, in a series of stories beginning in 1952, James Blish coined the term
pantropy for Haldanes idea of biologically engineering humans to t other
planets, and it quickly became a standard SF motif. In his autobiography,
Haldane remarked: The greatest compliment made to me today, I believe,
is when people refer to something which I discovered . . . as a fact the whole
world knows . . . without mentioning me at all. To have got into the tradi-
tion of science in that way is to me more pleasing than to be specially
mentioned.
99
If so, his science ction reading must have utterly delighted
him. From what we can gather, Haldane was critical of much of what he read,
particularly works in which he thought the science was wrong or misleading;
but he must have been surprised and delighted to see how thoroughly his
vision had spread. And it is hardly surprising that Arthur C. Clarke was
his favorite author: as a youth, Clarke had been transformed by his reading
96
In particular, both Olaf Stapledon and C. S. Lewis so listed him, and highlighted the
importance of the essay, in their respective surveys of the genre in 1947 and 1955 (e.g. On
Science Fiction, Lewis, 1966, pp. 5974).
97
It appeared as a magazine serial under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald (Heinlein,
1942), but under the authors real name when it appeared, in revised form, as a book one of
the earliest novels of golden age American science ction to appear in hardcover (Heinlein,
1948).
98
Indeed, the most renowned SF series of recent years Kim Stanley Robinsons Red Mars
(1993), Blue Mars (1994), and Green Mars (1996) is simply a detailed ctional account of
the forthcoming terraforming of Mars. Each of the three novels of the trilogy won either the
Nebula or the Hugo Award as the best novel of the year in which it appeared a clean sweep
unprecedented in the history of the prizes.
99
Haldane, 1973, p. 217.
486 MARK B. ADAMS
of Olaf Stapledons Last and First Men, and many of his subsequent writ-
ings, whether stories, novels, or popular science, are infused with Haldanes
vision.
100
Following his move to India in 1957, Haldane remained an avid science
ction reader and befriended Arthur C. Clarke, who had emigrated to Sri
Lanka in 1956.
101
Many years before, in 1932, Haldane had written a science
ction story, The Gold-Makers, remarking at that time that he was taking
the opportunity of publishing, since it is rather unlikely that I shall ever write
enough ction to ll a volume.
102
Yet that was apparently one of his prin-
cipal preoccupations during his nal years: writing a novel. The unnished
work, published posthumously in 1976 with a foreword by his sister, Naomi
Mitchison, was indeed, as she describes it, rather more than straight science
ction, a work in which he lets his imagination go. Ranging over space
ight, alien civilizations, love, mentality, mathematics, linguistics, philos-
ophy and cats, the work expanded upon his vision, knitting together the
multifarious themes of his earlier essays into a sort of contemplative cosmic
comedy. This is not the place to analyze a 220-page book. Sufce it to say
that, in many ways, the work was vintage JBS: powerful, sometimes clumsy,
sometimes difcult, Mitchison notes, but the product of a man who had
the sort of mind which ranged over everything and usually illuminated and
claried it.
103
And, characteristically, in keeping with his lifelong vision, the
novel was a meditation on the ultimate meaning of the human adventure in
the context of biology, evolutionary time, and cosmic space.
Right up until his death in 1964, Haldanes faith in his vision appar-
ently remained undiminished. The most striking proof is an extraordinary
essay he presented in London in 1963, one of the last major papers he
wrote. Entitled Biological Possibilities for the Human Species In the Next
Ten Thousand Years, this essay reprises his earlier credo, this time in the
context of the atomic age and the space age.
104
Considering the aftermath
100
See Clarke, 1968, pp. 243248. The inuence of Haldanes ideas is evident not only in
much of Clarkes science ction, but also in his non-ctional futurology (e.g., Clarke, 1963,
especially the nal chapter).
101
An Indian student who worked with him in these years recalls that he was a vora-
cious reader of science ction by many authors but especially of Arthur C. Clarke, John
Wyndham and Olaf Stapledon, and relates that on one occasion he mildly protested against
the sensational writings of H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and John Wyndham which he charac-
terised as obstructional to the clear thinking of any serious discussion on the future of man
(Dronamraju, 1985, p. 144).
102
Haldane, 1932b, p. v. The story was rst published as Haldane, 1932f; reprinted in
Conklin, 1962, pp. 125143.
103
Haldane, 1976, pp. 34.
104
Haldane, 1963, pp. 337361.
of a possible nuclear war, he doubts that mankind will be exterminated, and
criticizes imaginative writers with a supercial knowledge of biology, such
as Aldous Huxley and John Wyndham, who have written of mutations of new
types for doing considerable disservice to clear thinking. While regarding
a possible tyrant world state that might emerge from that war as sinister,
he remarks: A few centuries of Stalinism or technocracy might be a cheap
price to pay for the unication of mankind. Assuming that our descend-
ants will be free from atomic war and famine, he then asks key questions
which his paper will seek to address, and all have to do with his vision:
What evolutionary trends may be expected for humanity in the absence of
conscious control?, What evolutionary trends may be expected if evolution
is consciously controlled?, and nally how far must the answers to these
questions be modied for human beings living on other planets, satellites,
asteroids, or articial vehicles?
As his 1963 discussion unfolds, the themes of the early days reappear: he
mentions Metchnikoffs ideas; he remarks that as soon as the genetic basis of
human physiological diversity is understood, large-scale negative eugenics
will become possible; he cites the work of Penrose, and alludes to the ideas
of H. J. Muller pointing out that many of the ideas that are unacceptable in
Christian countries are perfectly compatible with the Hindu faith. Soon, he
is considering what forms of pantropy or human physiology will be neces-
sary for the rst spaceship crews to the stars. He returns to the theme of the
human forms necessary for living on the outer planets, where he proposes
someone shortlegged or quadrupedal: I would back an achondroplasic
against a normal man on Jupiter. He envisions a human-inhabited Mars, then
contemplates dangerous experiments on the brain to explore higher forms of
mentality. By the end of the essay, he worries about the real prospect of
our species dividing into two or more branches, either through specialization
for life on different stars or for the development of different human capa-
cities. It is back to the Elois and the Morlocks all over again, with his own
interplanetary twist.
105
The 1963 essay concludes: I have sketched my own utopia, or as some
readers may think, my own private hell. My excuse must be that the descrip-
tion of utopias has inuenced the course of history.
106
In truth, however, it
was not a utopia he had sketched: it was his credo, updated for the space
age the same vision that had infused all the diverse activities of a life that
105
This discussion echoes the link between Wellss The Time Machine and Haldanes The
Last Judgment that appears in the conclusion to Causes of Evolution.
106
Haldane, 1963, p. 361. Precisely the same sentiment, and many of the same ideas, were
expressed not only in The Last Judgment and other essays in Possible Worlds, but also in a
number of essays in The Inequality of Man and Other Essays, notably Possibilities of Human
Evolution (Haldane, 1932c) and Mans Destiny (Haldane, 1932d).
488 MARK B. ADAMS
was even then rapidly drawing to its close. While in London giving this talk,
Haldane was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and went in for surgery.
From his hospital bed, he recorded his own obituary for the BBC, to be
broadcast When I Am Dead, and, as his own last judgment approached,
he would draft a lighthearted poem about the colon cancer that was killing
him.
107
He returned to India, where he learned the nal prognosis (which had
been withheld from him in London), and died there in 1964. In a sense, the
1963 essay was Haldanes own last judgment on himself and on the vision
his life had served.
There is irony, of course, in the fact that a person so utterly individual
and singular as JBS should embrace a credo in which the individual counted
for so little. Possibly that vision gave him comfort in his own nal days. In
1957, Haldane had written to the wife of an Indian colleague: It is only
fair to warn you that you should probably avoid being on the roof with me
at night . . . because I am liable to start talking about the stars, and many
people nd this very boring. I personally think it most exciting that Vega
is a main sequence star of type A, and only about 10 parsecs distant.
108
The note calls to mind the opening passage of Daedalus, Haldanes youthful
remembrance from the Great War of three Europeans in India contemplating
the last judgment of a distant star.
In his own last days, there was the same old JBS again true to his lifelong
credo, contemplating destiny, and gazing at the stars.
107
The obituary was recorded in London on 20 February 1964 and shown on the BBC the
day of his death, 1 December 1964. Its text, together with the poem he wrote (entitled Cancer
is a Funny Thing, originally published in the New Statesman) can be found in Haldane, 1973,
pp. 213217 and 235236.
108
Clark, 1968, p. 214.
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Journal of the History of Biology 33: 457491, 2000.

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