John B. S. Haldane
John B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, FRS was a British-born Indian scientist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and in mathematics, where he made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics. He was the son of the equally famous John Scott Haldane and a professed socialist, Marxist, atheist, and humanist whose political dissent led him to leave England in 1956 and live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 November 1892
While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
There can be no truce between science and religion.
Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.
This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.
So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.
I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
Every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions.
Money can buy a fine dog but it is kindness that makes him wag his tail.
Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.
There are 400,000 species of beetles on this planet, but only 8,000 species of mammals.
We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.