J. B. S. Haldane Quotes

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There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

J. B. S. Haldane
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J. B. S. Haldane
The permeation of biology by mathematics is only the beginning, but unless the history of science is an inadequate guide, it will continue, and the investigations here summarized represent the beginning of a new branch of applied mathematics.

J. B. S. Haldane
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

J. B. S. Haldane
The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is a spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

J. B. S. Haldane
Four stages of acceptance: (a) this is worthless nonsense; (b) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (c) this is true, but quite unimportant; (d) I always said so.

J. B. S. Haldane
The simplest plants, such as the green algae growing in stagnant water or on the bark of trees, are mere round cells. The higher plants increase their surface by putting out leaves and roots. Comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume.

J. B. S. Haldane
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.

J. B. S. Haldane
An "emergence" of life out of a Newtonian world would be a quite unintelligible miracle.

J. B. S. Haldane
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.

J. B. S. Haldane
Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

J. B. S. Haldane
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.

J. B. S. Haldane
"The results so far obtained are consistent with the view that..." has taken the place of "Thus saith the Lord..." as an introduction to a new theory.

J. B. S. Haldane
Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.

J. B. S. Haldane
When asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of His creation, Haldane is said to have answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles."

J. B. S. Haldane
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.

J. B. S. Haldane
Shelly and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

J. B. S. Haldane
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.

J. B. S. Haldane
The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new.

J. B. S. Haldane
If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.

J. B. S. Haldane
Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies.

J. B. S. Haldane
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plainman, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change.

J. B. S. Haldane
If the only available genes produce rather large changes, disadvantageous one at a time, then it seems to me probable that evolution will not occur in a random mating population. In a self-fertilised or highly inbred species it may do so if several mutations useful in conjunction, but separately harmful, occur simultaneously. Such an event is rare, but must happen reasonably often in wheat...

J. B. S. Haldane
While the geneticists were disproving many of Darwin's ideas, the palaeontologists were determining the actual historical facts of evolution.... they were able to verify the law of succession, first explicitly given by Darwin's colleague Wallace. "Every species has come into existence coincident, both in time and space, with a pre-existing closely allied species."

J. B. S. Haldane
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

J. B. S. Haldane
I do not propose to argue the case for evolution, which I regard as being quite as well proven as most other historical facts, but to discuss its possible causes, which are certainly debatable.

J. B. S. Haldane
Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.

J. B. S. Haldane
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

J. B. S. Haldane
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. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deiciders.

J. B. S. Haldane
If human evolution is to continue along the same lines as in the past, it will probably involve a still greater prolongation of childhood and retardation of maturity. Some of the characters distinguishing adult man will be lost. It was not an embryologist or palaeontologist who said, "Except ye... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

J. B. S. Haldane