Monday, January 02, 2006

Dialectical Science-JBS Haldane


Haldanes Law:Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.


Today is another science day on Le Revue Gauche. Checking out and posting stories yesterday about science and the natural world I came across J.B.S. Haldane, a marxist scientist and evolutionary theorist. So today became not just science day at Le Revue Gauche but 'Left wing' science day.


There can be no truce between science and religion. JBS Haldane
Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of the children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and it makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science. JBS Haldane
Children are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.--J. B. S. Haldane
Since science cannot be anything but radical, meaning to get to the root of , or antiestablishmentarian, since it confronts dogmas and religious ideologies, it is left wing. When it is used by the State for ideological purposes or for the technology of power it is then not Science but its similcarum, Scientism.

Scientism' may be used to imply an ignorance (or denial) of a relationship/disjunction between metaphysical and natural phenomena. This sense of the term comes close to Hannah Arendt's use of it in The Origins of Totalitarianism; in her view, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had made the human condition a matter of scientific exactitude, and thus otherwise impossible moral or ethical questions (such as, "Can a man be worthless? And if so, can we euthanize him?") are easily resolved within the internally-consistent "scientific" methods of the state. In other words, the inhuman aspects of such totalitarian states cannot be said to be entirely unrelated to their adherence to pseudo-science as the ultimate arbiter of value.



So today we will take a look at Haldanes Dialectical materialist views of science.

And low and behold when I typed in J.B.S. Haldane into Google News looking to see if anyone else had quoted this staunch defender of evolution and marxism, well I came across these two articles on ID and Creationism. One from the Left Coast, Berekely and one from Kansas City, where ID was introduced into the curriculum in the schools, prior to the recent court ruling in Pennsylvania.


Everything You Know About Lizards Could Be Wrong
Berkeley Daily Planet, CA

So there goes another paradigm. And that’s fine; that’s the way science is supposed to work, what distinguishes science from theology. Any scientific theory is potentially falsifiable. Someone once asked JBS Haldane what he would consider as clenching disproof of evolution. “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”, he replied. Fair enough; if those 600 million-year-old rabbits ever turn up, science will have some explaining to do. But no rabbit, fossil or otherwise, is ever going to convince the acolytes of faith-based pseudoscience that their belief in intelligent design is misplaced.


Windows to God’s work
Kansas City Star, MO
ntelligent design doesn’t belong in textbooks; science should be in Sunday school. Why? If nature is God’s expression — God’s language — then natural things are the Rosetta stone.

Every dyed-in-the-wool creationist should have bird-watching binoculars and a garden trowel. The anatomy of a leaf should be his verse, the workings of a dragonfly’s eye, inspiration. The spiritual seeker doesn’t replicate miracles in a laboratory or test faith like measuring cholesterol. Experience is evidence. Truth, not fact, is its realm.

British scientist and atheist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly said, “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.”

The supporters of Christian Identity Science; Creationism and ID believe that, like flouridation, evolution is a commie idea. And their idea of science is not empirical or scientific, its simply attempting to make the facts fit their ideology, not unlike Lysenkoism in the USSR. Ironic that.

In fact they even attempt to use Haldane's work to discredit Darwin. Or they attempt to use current scientific discoveries to refute his work, which they can't.

Haldane is familiar to all of us even if we don't know his name, because he postulated that life began in a primordial soup. And he was the first to apply a mathmatical formulation to biology.

Oparin-Haldane Theory
Working independently, in the 1920s, Aleksandr Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane proposed similar theoretical schemes for how life may have originated on Earth (see life, origin). Hence, the term "Oparin-Haldane Theory" is sometimes used when referring to their views. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Oparin in Russia and Haldane in Britain independently developed similar theories suggesting how conditions on the early Earth may have been conducive to the chemical evolution of life. Both postulated a primitive reducing atmosphere in which simple organic chemicals were synthesized. These organics, they argued, accumulated in the surface waters of the ocean, forming a "primordial soup", out of which, in time, life in its most elementary form emerged. In the 1950s, through the endorsement of Horowitz in the United States, Bernal in Britain, and others, the Oparin-Haldane theory achieved widespread recognition and was given powerful empirical support by the positive results of the Miller-Urey Experiment (1953). At the same time, Watson and Crick broke the genetic code, revealing the structure of DNA, and thus completed the knowledge of the structure of the basic chemical building blocks of terrestrial life).

Since evolution takes a materialist view of the natural world, and promotes empiricism and materialism which are philosophical views of the world, and since Historical Materialism and Dialectics are used by both science and Marxism, evolution therefore is a ruse to suck us all into being commies. And of course Haldane proves them right. He was a Dialectical Scientist who defended both Marxism and Evolutionary Theory.

JBS Haldane’s famous book, The Causes of Evolution (1932), was a major work of what came to be known as the “modern evolutionary synthesis,” re-establishing natural selection as the premier mechanism of evolution by explaining it in terms of the mathematical consequences of Mendelian genetics.

As one of many “fellow-travellers” of the Communist Party among the British intelligentsia in the 1930s, he wrote many articles for The Daily Worker, but only joined the Communist party in 1937. He left in 1950, shortly after having considered standing as a Communist Party candidate for Parliament. The rise of Lysenko’s pseudo-science, with the overt support of Stalin was the principal factor which turned Haldane away from the Communist Party.

In one of the last speeches of his life, Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years in 1963, he coined the word “clone,” from the Greek word for twig.
Haldane was far from being a dogmatic Marxist. In rejecting Lysenkoism he opposed Scientism or the idea of the State using science as an idelogical justification for its actions.

"there is … a very grave danger for science in so close an association with the State … it may lead to dogmatism in science and to the suppression of opinions which run counter to official theories. …


In fact he was very much a libertarian communist in later life. His ideas of decentralization ifluenced supporters of the idea of small is beautiful, and the idea of urban environments based on neighbourhoods, like the works of Canadian Jane Jacobs. What Kropotkin had predicted in his works Mutual Aid and later in Fields Farms and Factories, that decentralization was a natural phenomena of evolution, was proved by Haldane.

Another essay by Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" (1927), virtually created analytic morphology. By pointing out, for instance, that exoskeletons can only get so large before the internal organs collapse under their own weight, this essay has influenced fields as diverse as the criticism of mass urbanization, the alternative technology movement, and decentralized economics.
Haldane, JBS Summary


Writing in 1923 before the advent of large scale petrochemical production or Agribusiness Haldane said this about the future of agriculure;

But before that day comes chemistry will be applied to the production of a still more important group of physiologically active substances, namely foods. The facts about food are rather curious. Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust. Many of our foodstuffs, including the proteins, we shall probably build up from simpler sources such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen. I should be inclined to allow 120 years, but not much more, before a completely satisfactory diet can be produced in this way on a commercial scale.

This will mean that agriculture will become a luxury, and that mankind will be completely urbanized. Personally I do not regret the probable disappearance of the agricultural labourer in favour of the factory worker, who seems to me a higher type of person from most points of view. Human progress in historical time has been the progress of cities dragging a reluctant countryside in their wake. Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.

Daedalus, or, Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923. by JBS Haldane

Haldane coined the term 'cloning' as well as writing on the potential of invetro fertilization in 1924!

In 1924, Haldane published a truly remarkable work of fiction entitled “Daedalus”.

What made it so remarkable was that it introduced the concept and scientific feasibility of “test-tube babies” brought to life without sexual intercourse or pregnancy. At the time, of course, it was regarded as nothing more than shocking science fiction.

But Haldane himself knew very well that his theory would in all probability one day become a reality.

Haldane was the inspiration for Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World”
Haldane was the inspiration for Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

“Daedalus” was a hugely popular and influential book. It was the inspiration for Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (Huxley and Haldane were friends), published in 1932, in which a society based on test-tube babies turns out to be less than ideal.

By the mid-1930’s, leading geneticists announced that “in vitro” (“in glass”) fertilisations would soon be possible and within 40 years the first test-tube baby was science fact.

Ironically, in spite of his predicting its feasibility, Haldane became a fierce critic of eugenics (the science of tampering with the hereditary qualities of a race or breed), complaining that he suspected it was being distorted for political ends by what he called “ferocious enemies of human liberty”. The later work of “Doctor Death” Josef Mengele certainly demonstrated that his fears were entirely justified.

As a microcosmic example of Haldane’s massive influence on modern genetics, in one of the last speeches of his life, “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years” (1963), Haldane coined the word “clone” for the first time, from the Greek word for twig.

Daedalus-1824 (ebook) By: J. B. S. Haldane

Daedalus Summary:

Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers. The only practical consequences that they generally drew was that their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the structure of the universe.

And his work was used by Science Fiction writer Olaff Stapledon in his novel Last and First Men.Haldane himself not only inspired science fiction writers but wrote a science fiction short story in 1932 entitled the Gold Makers. He and other scientists of his time created the conditions for scientific fiction, based on current scientific understanding and not just speculative fiction. "The Cambridge Quintet": An Experiment in Scientific Fiction

This would not be the only science experimentation that Haldane predicted that was in the realm of science fiction for its day, he also narrated a Soviet film on the ability to bring dead dogs back to life. His work on life extension influenced the modern development of statistical biology, genetics and studies in theoretical biology and the more controversial area of immortality studies.

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940)

This disturbing film records the successful experiments in the resuscitation of life to dead animals (dogs), as conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. Director: D.I. Yashin. Camera: E.V. Kashina. Narrator: Professor Walter B. Cannon. Introduced by Professor J.B.S. Haldane.

Haldane was Scottish by birth, English by education and finally a naturalized Indian, dying on the contient which was his adopted home.

In protest at the British Government's response to the Suez Crisis, he immigrated to India in 1957. He adopted Indian nationaility and worked with the Indian Statistical Office (Calcutta), before establishing a genetics and biometry laboratory in Bhubaneswar (Orissa).

But how many people have read Haldane? Let alone have heard of him? And yet his work is at the crux of the modern debate around evolution and genetics. It is not Darwin the creationists wish to bury with ID but Haldane.


So I decided to check out more Haldane on the net, and found these additional links as well as the ones above. Enjoy I know I have.

Haldane's Writings

A Dialectical Account of Evolution, 1937

"The Effect of Variation on Fitness" in American Naturalist, 1937

The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences, 1939

On Being the Right Size

JBS Haldane on CS Lewis's Space Trilogy

“Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years” 1963

Marxist Writers: John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

Enzymes J. B. S. Haldane 1965

VIVOS VOCO: JBS Haldane (1892-1964)

What ails Indian science*
Various observations of JBS Haldane on slow growth and unworthiness of Indian
science

His last words; Cancer’s a Funny Thing 1964

The Faking of Genetical Results
By Professor J. B. S. Haldane

Rats By J. B. S. Haldane
J. B. S. HALDANE
THE APPROXIMATE NORMALIZATION OF A CLASS OF FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS
Biometrika 1938 29: 392-404; doi:10.1093/biomet/29.3-4.392
[PDF]


On Haldane


Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History by Helena Sheehan.
a biographical chapter from this excellent online text, is on Haldane.

Biography: Charlotte Haldane

Stephen Jay Gould on Haldane

John Haldane Biography at Spartacus

J. B. S. Haldane Transhumanist Award

Random Mutations and Evolutionary Change: Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane, & Sewall Wright.

Two Geneticists: JBS Haldane and CD Darlington

The Man who Invented the Chromosone: a Life of Cyril Darlington

A Brief History of Evolutionary Genetics Part 5: JBS Haldane

JBS Haldane at AllExperts

Words About Words - JBS Haldane

Letter from Joshua Lederberg to JBS Haldane (October 12, 1946)

J. B. S. Haldane From Wikipedia

Quotes of the Day for 5 November 2004 - JBS Haldane

Note on J. B. S. Haldane's Paper: " The Exact Value of the Moments of the Distribution...
COCHRAN Biometrika.1938; 29: 407

"A very enjoyable experience..."Was what J.B.S Haldane said of his experience in the First World War,Haldane was a chap who was obsessed, among other things, with finding ways to relieve submariners and divers from the "bends" a crippling and sometimes fatal condition where nitrogen enters the blood as a gas.

Theory of Diving Tables
All dive table theories began with the work of JBS Haldane in 1908

Centennial: JBS HALDANE, 1892-1964 -- Crow 130 (1): 1 -- Genetics

Ronald W. Clark's biography of Haldane "JBS" (now hard to find) is considered definitive

AAS Biographical Memoirs - Michael James Denham White 1910-1983

JSTOR: RA Fisher's Contributions to Genetical Statistics

Natural History: A Conversation With John Maynard Smith

Professor Peter J. Bowler, Queens University, Belfast
Popularization and the Public (Mis)understanding of Science:
Science, Religion and Public Debate in the Early Twentieth Century

The Danish Peace Academy, Avery, John: Eliminating the Causes of War
In the 1930’s, JBS Haldane and RS Fisher attempted to understand on the basis of
the Darwinian theory of natural selection why humans are willing to die in War

Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899-1980

Last judgment: the visionary biology of JBS Haldane.

Excerpts from "LIFETIDE"

Susan Merrill Squier. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995. xiii + 270 pp.

Griffiths, Paul E. (2004) Instinct in the ‘50s: The British Reception of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior.
In 1950 most students of animal behavior in Britain saw the instinct concept developed by Konrad Lorenz in the 1930s as the central theoretical construct of the new ethology. In the early 1950s J.B.S Haldane made substantial efforts to undermine Lorenz’s status, challenging his priority on key ethological concepts. Haldane was also critical of Lorenz’s sharp distinction between instinctive and learnt behavior, which was inconsistent with Haldane’s own account of the evolution of language. Haldane’s account of transitions between learning and instinct drew on a view of the genotype-phenotype relationship common amongst his contemporaries and which may have ‘preadapted’ some British biologists to respond positively to Daniel S. Lehrman’s 1953 critique of Lorenz’s instinct concept. By the 1960s Lorenz drew a clear distinction between his own views and those of the ‘English-speaking
ethologists’.

ICARUS, or the Future of Science
Bertrand Russell
Responding to J.B.S. Haldane's 1923 essay on science and the future, Russell took a more pessimistic view.



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