JBS Haldane: the man who knew almost everything | Hacker News Reader

JBS Haldane: the man who knew almost everything

newstatesman.com

65 pointspseudolus17 comments

“On Being The Right Size” remains one of the most insightful essays I’ve ever read: http://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRigh...

Yes! He is such a clear writer. That essay is the title entry of the collection On Being the Right Size and Other Essays. The other chapters are:

William Bateson

The Future of Biology

When I Am Dead

Science and Theology As Art-Forms

The Last Judgement

Is History a Fraud?

God-Makers

The Origin of Life

The Biology of Inequality

Beyond Darwin

The Strange Case of Rahman Bey

Blood and Iron

Germ-Killers

Pain-Killers

How to Write a Popular Scientific Article

What Hot Means

Cats

Some Reflections on Non-Violence

Appendix: Adumbrations

Here is a poem Haldane wrote when he found out he had cancer:-

http://nsmn1.uh.edu/dgraur/Texts/Cancerhaldane.htm

Almost all Indians of a certain age know JBS Haldane. And his eccentricities. His life and times would make a great movie!

How come he is so well known in India?

As mentioned in the article, he became a naturalised Indian citizen und was it seems a proud indian nationalist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane#In_India ). As a non-indian though I’d still be curious to know in more detail what his reputation is in India nowadays!

We loved him in India but like many things, he is not familiar to a lot of younger Indians. Others distract them these days. He was very happy in India because of the genetic diversity that aided his research and as a true scientist, it delighted him. He was a little nuts, but he was one of us because he suffered the same ills of bureaucracy and red tape that plagued Indians as well. His wife was a scientist too in her own right. His Marxist/communist ideas found a comfortable place in India where being tolerant and acceptance of diversity of opinions is a survival tactic. Every time India veers away from this survival hack, the country descends into chaos..then learns its lesson and back up again until intolerance raises its ugly head again. It’s a cyclical thing. Unlike England, I think JBS was able to get lost amidst all the millions people without sticking out like a sore thumb but also continue to do the work of a brilliant scientist that he was..a true citizen of science more than anything else.

(thanks for your insider take!)

No mention of the wonderful "My Friend Mr. Leakey"... :-(

>Haldane was very well known because of his journalism, his appearances on the radio

Does anyone have links to his radio appearances? A cursory search of Google didn't turn up much of relevance.

I'm not sure about that but you can see and hear him give the introduction to the bizarre (and almost certainly not true) Soviet film "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" (1940). Haldane was a great scientist, but his judgement may have been blurred here due to his (then) support of the Soviet Union

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/experiments-in-the...

Warning that should have been given : the video link above in the parent has a decapitated dog experimented on ... We don’t know if it’s fake or real, but certainly disturbing footage if you are a dog lover.

He only did the voice over iirc but wasn’t present. Neither did he conduct any of the experiments. I think it was his loyalty towards his Russian comrades that made him lend them his credibility.

I thought it was generally accepted that John Stuart Mill was the last man to know everything there was to know.

By Haldane's time, knowledge had expanded so much that it was no longer possible for any one person to lay claim to that title.

Thomas Young (1773-1829) [1] has also been described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)

The whole concept (of knowing [almost] everything) is obviously an impossibility. As a near ubiquitously accepted term it merely reveals what is considered "true knowledge" and therefore serves to illuminate the bias of an era or society. Or in more fancy terms: the paradigm.

It could also be a marketing ploy, which is no contradiction.

I expected more than just a book review based on the title of the post. There was absolutely no evidence presented for the extraordinary claim made by the title.

The title is saying that politics were a gap in Haldane’s otherwise impressive understanding of the world (in the author’s view.)

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