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A Propos D'haldane The Last Judgment
A Propos D'haldane The Last Judgment
Haldane
Author(s): Mark B. Adams
Source: Journal of the History of Biology , Winter, 2000, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Winter, 2000),
pp. 457-491
Published by: Springer
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History of Biology
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 scientific work,
political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkable
career.
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'
Introduction
science - but would remain conspicuously silent when his Soviet geneti-
cist colleagues were fired from their jobs, even when it became known that
Nikolai Vavilov, his "favorite" Russian geneticist, had died in prison.2' 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 fields of science, it appears that
"Haldane achieved no single great or outstanding discovery."22
Many sources attest to Haldane's striking multiformity and puzzling
contradictions, but few attempt to explain what, if anything, unified 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 scientific biography of Haldane tries to use scientific Marxism as
a unifying theme, but can only do so by conflating socialism, Marxism,
Communism, and positive impressions of the "Soviet experiment."23 Even
the admirable and painstaking 300-page biography by Ronald Clark - which
details JBS's 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 influential 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 JBS's extraordinary life and work.
21 In Haldane's various essays Vavilov's 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 Fel'dman, 1976. I am grateful for my many discussions with my good friend Fel'dman
during my year in Moscow (1976-1977) around the time his book came out. A Haldanesque
character himself, Fel'dman 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. 171-183.
25 Beatty, 1992, p. 181.
In the mid-1920s Haldane burst onto the scene with his full range of talents,
rapidly becoming a major British figure 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 Huxley's 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 scientific workers believe that they should confine 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 scientific
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: first 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 Harper's Magazine, The Forum,
Century Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic in the United
States.
One reason for Haldane's 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 JBS's 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 fictional format, concocting
a plausible college essay written by an undergraduate many years hence
about how these biological developments during the period 1950-1990 had
transformed civilization: "The small proportion of men and women who are
selected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to
the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from the
increased output of first-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 first 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 (1872-1970) entitled Icarus,
or the Future of Science,29 which raised considerable doubts as to whether
governments or medical officials could be trusted with administering eugenic
policies. (Eight years later, Russell's reservations were given fictional form
by Haldane's 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
influence has been discussed in a number of recent publications, and it has
been reprinted with retrospective commentaries by Joshua Lederberg, Ernst
Mayr, and others.3'
What seems to have been overlooked, however, is that Daedalus was
but the first of two essays laying out Haldane's broader vision. The second,
published three years later, was entitled "The Last Judgment." Indeed, the title
of the second essay comes straight from the first: Daedalus opens with two
scenes from Haldane's memory about the Great War - the first, a battlefield;
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.... 932
"The Last Judgment" appeared as the final 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 Haldane's
essays - the first of many - fully embodied the wide range of interests at
which later biographers would marvel. Among its thirty-five 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 volume's 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 Haldane's diverse facets, and, I would suggest, it is
"The Last Judgment" - the volume's culmination and finale - 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 final 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 final days.
With these preliminaries finished, 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 defi-
nitely recognizable as monkeys. But I cannot throw my imagination forward
for ten times that period. Four hundred million years ago our ancestors were
fish of a very primitive type. I cannot imagine a corresponding change in
our descendants."35 Haldane's 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 fictional 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 earth's 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.
complete destruction of life on the earth is not the end; and the "spectators on
another planet" who view the earth's destruction are, in fact, our descendants.
Haldane's "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 insufficient and unreli-
able. Ultimately, the force of the tides is harnessed - but over millions
of years, the use of tidal energy gradually slows the earth's rotation. By
8,000,000 the length of the day has doubled; the moon gradually moves
farther away, then begins its final 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 five 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 gratified.... Human
effort was chiefly 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 artificial evolution accomplished," according
to the message. Aside from these adjustments, however, "the instinctive and
traditional preferences of the individual, which were still allowed to influence
mating, caused a certain standard body form to be preserved," and "largely
on aesthetic grounds the human form was not allowed to vary greatly": "The
slow changes due to other causes were traced to their sources and prevented
before very great effects had been produced."
As a consequence, by the year 5,000,000, "natural selection had been
abolished" and "human evolution had ceased" - leading to millions of years
of utopian stasis. "Scientific 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 flowers 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 influenced 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 significance"
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 flight. Here,
at least seen from today's perspective, Haldane's imagination appears to flag:
his account of the difficulty 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 finally 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
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 first 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-five 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
infinitely 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 artificially 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 flooding 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 modifications 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 earth's destruction, then,
there are in effect two human species: the "old" one on earth, which, having
''successfully cultivated human happiness," will be "destroyed by fire 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,"
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 influence 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
artificial gravitational field, 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: "Man's 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 infinity, and that the value of the individual is negligible in
comparison with that destiny, or the time will come 'When . . earth is but a
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 volume's preface, Haldane has indeed
"applied the scientific 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 first 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 Haldane's vision found
great resonance among others of his generation. We have already noted that
Haldane's 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 influence was principally felt through the works of Olaf
Stapledon (1886-1950). 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 influential books of its decade, a work infused with Haldane's
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
almost becomes extinct several times, and some eighteen distinct human
species succeed one another, eight of which are bioengineered by their
predecessors. Stapledon's Fifth Men undergo the events described in "The
Last Judgment" with remarkable precision. Indeed, as has been pointed out,
Stapledon used many of Haldane's 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 Stapledon's 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 author's next myth" and an invitation to his
London laboratory; soon Stapledon would become an occasional member of
Haldane's 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, Haldane's visionary ideas
rapidly spread. This is not the place to explore the enormous influence of
Haldane's essay, however, as our concern is with understanding its author.44
Where did the rich vision in Haldane's "The Last Judgment" come from?
Today, finding 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. 35-37; as cited in Crossley, 1994, pp. 190-191.
41 "Lord Birkenhead Improves his Mind," originally published in Week-End Review in 1930,
reprinted in Haldane, 1946b, pp. 13-17.
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 influences and interactions among a host of thinkers who shared many
elements of Haldane's worldview.
45 The literature on Wells is vast. Of special pertinence to the present discussion are his
"6experimental" 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 first 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. 197-198.
49 In The Causes of Evolution (Haldane, 1932a, p. 166), Haldane establishes the connection
himself. Referring to The Time Machine and "The Last Judgment," he writes: "Wells (1895)
and I (1927d) have given less alluring accounts, both involving a bifurcation of the human
species into two, each of which loses certain qualities which we admire in contemporary man."
The story ends with the perspective of a Martian astronomer observing the
Earth's 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 earth's destruction, but also the narrative device of having
that destruction viewed from another planet.
Another source for Haldane's ideas was Wells's widely read classic, The
War of the Worlds (1898), which details the invasion of the earth by scien-
tifically 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.5'
50 "The Star" was first 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 (1842-1925).
S Wells, 1897; see Seven Science Fiction Novels, pp. 452-53.
52 Wells, 1905b.
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 Haldane's "political" ideas have clear Welisian roots. Beginning
with his influential non-fictional book, A Modem 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 final human end
state, but as a necessary, emergent, relatively brief phase in a much longer
evolutionary process.
This is brought home by Wells's most widely read and influential 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 first appear in Book
II; history "dawns" in Book III; and Book IX deals entirely with the future.
That final book, "The Next Stage in History," consists of only one chapter,
entitled "Man's Coming of Age: The Probable Struggle for the Unification
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, unified,
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 unification of humanity was not a way of creating social justice or making
people happy: it was a necessary first step towards our destiny as masters of
the universe.
57 For a readable treatment of the emergence of experimental biology, see Allen, 1975.
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 fin de sie'cle Darwinian dilemma Wells had so effectively expressed.
Haldane's 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: scientific 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
Haldane's 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 Haldane's more confident, 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 wams that humanity almost goes extinct because of its habit
of looking to the past rather than being "influenced by an envisaged future" (pp. 300-301).
- 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 "deternined" specific scientific 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
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 scientific 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 "Man's Destiny."75
Haldane's 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 scientific fields
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 scientific 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 fields to which he made a
contribution.
Indeed, not infrequently, Haldane's vision actually appears in his "purely
scientific" 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. 242-249; Haldane, 1968, pp. 1-12).
75 Haldane, 1932c and 1932d.
76 Haldane, 1927b, p. 189.
begin, and where zoology must leave off."77 Similar references can be found
in his other scientific works.
An especially telling example is Haldane's influential scientific classic,
The Causes of Evolution (1932), long recognized by evolutionists and histor-
ians of biology alike as one of the first statements of the emerging "evolu-
tionary synthesis." What has been overlooked, however, is the book's sixth
and final chapter, where Haldane explains what he sees as the broader signifi-
cance of his own work.78 There, after reprising the evolutionary history of
man, he turns to the future: "Now for the first 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
fictional 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 man's 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 finalize the "evolutionary
synthesis," Haldane returned to the themes of his credo in his featured public
address, "Human Evolution: Past and Future."8'
82 Smith, 1987, p. 7.
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, scientific 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
Haldane's "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
Haldane's 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 "scientific" 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. Muller's
hope, in the mid-1930s, that Stalin would turn from engineering human
87 On Muller's "eutelegenesis," his time in the Soviet Union, and his letter to Stalin urging
implementation of his ideas, see Adams, 1 990c, pp. 152-216, and especially pp. 192-197.
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 fluid 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.
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. 59-74).
97 It appeared as a magazine serial under the pseudonym "Anson MacDonald" (Heinlein,
1942), but under the author's real name when it appeared, in revised form, as a book - one of
the earliest novels of "golden age" American science fiction to appear in hardcover (Heinlein,
1948).
98 Indeed, the most renowned SF series of recent years - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
(1993), Blue Mars (1994), and Green Mars (1996) - is simply a detailed fictional 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.
of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and many of his subsequent writ-
ings, whether stories, novels, or popular science, are infused with Haldane's
vision.1loo
Following his move to India in 1957, Haldane remained an avid science
fiction reader and befriended Arthur C. Clarke, who had emigrated to Sri
Lanka in 1956.10 I Many years before, in 1932, Haldane had written a science
fiction 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 fiction to fill a volume." 102 Yet that was apparently one of his prin-
cipal preoccupations during his final years: writing a novel. The unfinished
work, published posthumously in 1976 with a foreword by his sister, Naomi
Mitchison, was indeed, as she describes it, "rather more than straight science
fiction," a work in which he "lets his imagination go." Ranging over space
flight, 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. Suffice it to say
that, in many ways, the work was vintage JBS: "powerful, sometimes clumsy,
sometimes difficult," Mitchison notes, but the product of a man who had
"the sort of mind which ranged over everything and usually illuminated and
clarified 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, Haldane's 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. 243-248. The influence of Haldane's ideas is evident not only in
much of Clarke's science fiction, but also in his non-fictional futurology (e.g., Clarke, 1963,
especially the final chapter).
101 An Indian student who worked with him in these years recalls that he was "a vora-
cious reader of science fiction 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 first published as Haldane, 1932f; reprinted in
Conklin, 1962, pp. 125-143.
103 Haldane, 1976, pp. 3-4.
104 Haldane, 1963, pp. 337-361.
105 This discussion echoes the link between Wells's The Time Machine and Haldane's "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 "Man's Destiny" (Haldane, 1932d).
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.'07 He returned to India, where he learned the final prognosis (which had
been withheld from him in London), and died there in 1964. In a sense, the
1963 essay was Haldane's 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 final 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 find 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."-08
The note calls to mind the opening passage of Daedalus, Haldane's 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. 213-217 and 235-236.
108 Clark, 1968, p. 214.
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