0 évaluation0% ont trouvé ce document utile (0 vote)
36 vues36 pages
This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane. It focuses on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927. The essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years. It is the sequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924)
This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane. It focuses on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927. The essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years. It is the sequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924)
This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane. It focuses on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927. The essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years. It is the sequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924)
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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 461 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 463 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 HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 465 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 467 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). HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 469 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 471 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 473 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 475 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). HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 477 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 479 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 481 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 483 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 485 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. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 487 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. References Adams, Mark B. 1968. The Founding of Population Genetics: Contributions of the Chetverikov School, 19241934. Journal of the History of Biology 1: 2339. 1990a. A. I. Oparin. In Dictionary of Scientic Biography, Vol. 18, pp. 695700. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. ed. 1990b. The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. 1990c. Eugenics in Russia: 19001940. In Adams (1990b), pp. 152216. ed. 1994. The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky: Essays on His Life and Thought in Russia and America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Allen, Garland E. 1975. Life Science in the Twentieth Century. New York: Wiley. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 489 Beatty, John. 1992. Julian Huxley and the Evolutionary Synthesis. In Julian Huxley: Biolo- gist and Statesman of Science, ed. C. Kenneth Waters and Albert Van Helden, pp. 181189. Houston: Rice University Press. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1961. The Early H. G. Wells. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bernal, J. D. 1967. The Origin of Life. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co. Clark, Ronald. 1968. J. B. S.: The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane. London: Hodder and Stoughton; reprint 1969. New York: Coward-McCann. 1972. Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson. In Dictionary of Scientic Biography, vol. 6, pp. 2123. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. Clarke, Arthur C. 1963. Proles of the Future. New York: Harper and Row. 1968. Haldane and Space. In Dronamraju, pp. 243248. Coe, Sophia Dobzhansky. 1994. Theodosius Dobzhansky: A Family Story. In Adams. Conklin, Groff, ed. 1962. Great Science Fiction By Scientists. New York: Collier-Macmillan. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1972a. Francis Galtons Contributions to Genetics. Journal of the History of Biology 5: 389412. 1972b. Francis Galtons Statistical Ideas: The Inuence of Eugenics. Isis 63: 509528. 1977. Nature and Nurture: The Interplay of Biology and Politics in the Work of Francis Galton. Studies in History of Biology 1: 133208. Crossley, Robert. 1994. Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press. The Cuddly Cactus. 1956. New Statesman and Nation 51: 7. Dronamraju, Krishna R. (ed.). 1968. Haldane and Modern Biology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1985. Haldane: The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane With Special Reference to India. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. (ed.). 1995. Haldanes Daedalus Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Farley, John. 1974. The Spontaneous Generation Controversy: From Descartes to Oparin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feldman, G. F. 1976. Dzhon Berdon Sanderson Kholdein 18921964. Moscow: Nauka. Fiedler, Leslie A. 1983. Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Filner, Robert E. 1977. The Social Relations of Science Movement (SRS) and J. B. S. Haldane. Science and Society 41: 303316. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter. 1974. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Haeckel, Ernst. 1900. The Riddle of the Universe. London: Watts; reprint 1902. Haldane, J. B. S. 1924. Daedalus, or Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge on February 4th, 1923. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. 1927a. Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus. 1927b. Science and Politics. In Haldane (1927a), pp. 188189. 1927c. The Duty of Doubt. In Haldane (1927a), pp. 220221. 1927d. The Last Judgment. In Haldane (1927a), pp. 287312. 1932a. The Causes of Evolution. London: Longmans, Green, & Co.; reprint 1966. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1932b. The Inequality of Man and Other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus. 1932c. Possibilities of Human Evolution. In Haldane (1932b), pp. 7896. 1932d. Mans Destiny. In Haldane (1932b), pp. 142147. 1932e. The Origin of Life. In Haldane (1932b), pp. 148160. 1932f. The Gold-Makers. In Haldane (1932b), pp. 271295. 1938. The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences. London: George Allen & Unwin. 490 MARK B. ADAMS 1946a. Auld Hornie, F. R. S. The Modern Quarterly (N.S.) 1(4): 32. 1946b. A Banned Broadcast and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus. 1949. Human Evolution: Past and Future. In Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolution, ed. Glenn L. Jepsen, Ernst Mayr, and George Gaylord Simpson, pp. 405418. Princeton: Princeton University Press; reprint 1963. New York: Atheneum. 1951. Everything Has a History. London: George Allen and Unwin. 1963. Biological Possibilities for the Human Species In the Next Ten Thousand Years. In Man and His Future: A Ciba Foundation Volume, ed. Gordon Wolstenholme, pp. 337 361. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1968. Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist. The Humanist Library. London: Pemberton. 1973. John B. S. Haldane: Reader of Popular Scientic Essays, comp. G. D. Feldman and O. D. Meshkov. Moscow: Nauka. 1976. The Man With Two Memories. London: Merlin. 1985. On Being the Right Size and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haldane, J. B. S. and Huxley, Julian. 1927. Animal Biology. Oxford: Clarendon. Heinlein, Robert A. [Anson MacDonald]. 1942. Beyond This Horizon. Astounding Science- Fiction (April and May). 1948. Beyond This Horizon. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press. Hillegas, Mark R. (ed.). 1969. Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. New York: Harper and Row. Huxley, Julian. 1970. Memories. New York: Harper and Row. Kevles, Daniel J. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Knopf. Krementsov, Nikolai. 1996. A Second Front in Soviet Genetics: The International Dimen- sion of the Lysenko Controversy, 19441947. Journal of the History of Biology 29: 229250. Lewis, C. S. 1966. Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lunn, Arnold and Haldane, J. B. S. 1935. Science and the Supernatural: A Correspondence Between Arnold Lunn and J. B. S. Haldane. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Mayr, Ernst. 1995. Haldanes Daedalus. In Dronamraju (1995), pp. 7989. Mazumdar, Pauline M. H. 1992. Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: the Eugenics Society, its Sources and its Critics in Britain. London: Routledge. McConnell, Frank. 1981. The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press. McOuat, Gordon and Winsor, Mary P. 1995. J. B. S. Haldanes Darwinism in Its Religious Context. British Journal of History of Science 28: 227231. Metchnikoff, lie. 1908. The Nature of Man. London: Putnam. Moskowitz, Sam. 1963. How Science Fiction Got Its Name. In Explorers of the Innite: Shapers of Science Fiction, ed. Sam Moskowitz, pp. 313333. Westport CN: Hyperion Press. Paul, Diane B. 1983a. A War on Two Fronts: J. B. S. Haldane and the Response to Lysenkoism in Britain. Journal of the History of Biology 16: 137. 1983b. Eugenics and the Left. Journal of the History of Ideas: 567590. 1998. The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate. Albany NY: SUNY Press. HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 491 Pauly, Philip J. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Pirie, N. W. 1966. J. B. S. Haldane. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 12: 219249. Provine, William B. 1971. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1924. Icarus, or The Future of Science. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Shaw, George Bernard. 1982. Man and Superman, A Comedy and a Philosophy: Denitive Text. New York and London: Penguin. Smith, John Maynard. 1985. Introduction. In Haldane (1985), pp. ixxii. 1987. J. B. S. Haldane. In Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Paul H. Harvey and Linda Partridge, vol. 4, p. 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1968. Introduction. In Haldane. Stapledon, Olaf. 1930. Last and First Men. London: Methuen. 1953. To the End of Time: The Best of Olaf Stapledon, ed. Basil Davenport. New York: Funk and Wagnalls; reprinted, Boston: Gregg Press, 1975. 1979. Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon, ed. Sam Moskowitz. Philadelphia: Oswald Train. Wells, H. G. 1893. Text Book of Biology. 2 vols. London: Clive. 1895. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann. 1897. The War of the Worlds. Pearsons Magazine (December). 1898. The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann. 1899. Tales of Space and Time. London: Harpers. 1901. The First Men In the Moon. London: Newnes. 1905a. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall. 1905b. The Empire of the Ants. The Strand Magazine, December. 1920. The Outline of History. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: Macmillan. 1935. Things To Come. London: Cresset Press. 1978. The Collectors Book of Science Fiction by H. G. Wells: From Rare, Original, Illustrated Magazines, comp. by Alan K. Russell. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books. N.d. Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells. New York: Dover. Werskey, Paul Gary. 1971. Haldane and Huxley: The First Appraisals. Journal of the History of Biology 4: 171183. 1978. The Visible College: the Collective Biography of British Scientic Socialists of the 1930s. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. White, M. J. D. 1965. J. B. S. Haldane. Genetics 52: 17. Williamson, Jack. 1973. H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress. Baltimore: Mirage Press.