#jbs haldane

[thebeesareback]

I'm fascinated by the way scientists interact with religion. On one hand you have Sir David Attenborough, who said "I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy". On the other hand, you have JBS Haldane who remarked "the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them." I appreciate the diversity

#religion #science #scientists #sir david attenborough #jbs haldane #philosophy #biology

[yourneighbourhoodbiologist]

#science #mad scientists #biology #biochemistry #science academia #complete mad scientist activity #jbs haldane #hw davies

[whats-in-a-sentence]

To Haldane, sterilization smacked of economic class legislation. He noted that mental defect was "often not certified among the rich, although a glance at the press will convince anyone that they include a number of persons who satisfy the legal criterion of imbecility." It was axiomatic to Haldane that "any legislation which does not purport to apply, and is not actually applied (a very different thing), to all social classes alike, will probably be unjustly applied to the poor."¹²

12. Blacker, Voluntary Sterilization, pp. 13-14; Haldane, Heredity and Politics, pp. 108-9; Haldane, Human Biology and Politics, p. 13; Haldane, "Eugenics and Social Reform", in J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds (Harper & Bros., 1928), p. 201. Early on during the legislative initiative, legalization was denounced on the floor of the House of Commons as anti-working class. The Social Problem Group might contain numerous "feebleminded", but, said Hyacinth B. W. Morgan, a physician and Labour Member of Parliament, "there is nothing wrong with the germ plasm itself. At the bottom, mental deficiency" – at least much of the sort that absorbed so many eugenicists – "is an economic problem." Hansard, vol. 255, July, 1931, columns 1251-56.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

#book quotes #in the name of eugenics #daniel j kevles #nonfiction #jbs haldane #sterilization #classism #legislation #eugenics #imbecile #axiom

[tenth-sentence]

Its preeminence rested on neither size nor money; it hinged, rather, on the high quality of its diverse staff, above all Penrose and Haldane, and on what both fostered, particularly an offbeat, skeptical esprit and incisive style of thought that attracted original men and women and permitted them to thrive.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

#book quote #in the name of eugenics #daniel j kevles #nonfiction #preeminence #galton laboratory #size #money #high quality #diversity #lionel penrose #jbs haldane #offbeat #skeptical #esprit #incisive #original ideas

[oh-dear-so-queer]

In an unpublished autobiographical fragment, Haldane took the trouble to note that he did not join in the homosexuality rampant at Eton and that he was sexually – meaning heterosexually – ill at ease until much later.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

#book quote #in the name of eugenics #daniel j kevles #nonfiction #unpublished #autobiography #homosexuality #gay #eton college #rampant #uneasy #heterosexual #jbs haldane

[outstanding-quotes]

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

JBS Haldane

#jbs haldane #quote #science #universe #imagination #limits of the mind

[quotableandnot]

Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J.B. S. Haldane

#JBS Haldane #the universe

[fasciation-fascination]

pigeon i need you to know i think of the phrase "inordinately fond of beetles" on a daily basis because of your description. sounds so nice and makes me smile <3

thank you! it is (probably) a quote by JBS Haldane! there are a handful of different versions and he may not have actually ever said it!

some popular versions are:

The Creator, if He exists, has "an inordinate fondness for beetles".

If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation, it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles, and so we might be more likely to meet them than any other type of animal on a planet that would support life.

it is mostly referring to how common beetles are and how many of them there are, that if there was a god who wanted to create animals in his image, it might make more sense for that image to be beetles (or stars), not humans. but it's also just a kind of general statement about beetles and theology.

I've always had weirdly religious feelings about creepy crawlies and so I became kind of obsessed with this quote when I first heard it. and calling myself inordinately fond of beetles both seemed like such a nice way to announce my intense love for them, but also made me feel weirdly connected to a sort of vague, unspecified divinity.

idk sorry if this was really long and/or something you already knew

"inordinately fond of beetles" and "watching the daisies grow" (taken from a complaint that one of Alan Turing's teachers had about him) are like. my two favourite quote thingies ever. they are quite important to my, like, existing in the world, especially the second one. I could write another whole thing about that one 🥺

[ID: a screenshot from wikipedia showing a photo of a beetle walking through leaf-litter captioned "an inordinate fondness for beetles"]

#asks #actually I am changing my name on here now so that I can have daisies in there. good bye pokemon typing you can go into my description!

[ryunumber]

Not to keep pestering you, but. If you bend the definition of the Erdős number just a bit to apply to any published written work based on research, rather than specifically having to be a research *paper*, H. G. Wells would have an Erdős number of 7 (JBS Haldane has 5, Julian Huxley co-authored "Animal Biology" with Haldane, and Wells and Huxley co-authored "The Science of Life"), and a Ryu number of 3 by Bookworm Adventures volume 2 (him -> Lex -> The Creature -> Ryu), so his Erdős-Ryu is 10.

I'd make the case that the Monkey King in Volume 2 is Sun Wukong, giving H. G. Wells a Ryu Number of 2, but regardless, thank you for the submission!

#hg wells #h g wells #ryu number

[deanosaurthedinosaur]

JBS Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. “What inference,” asked the latter, “might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?” Haldane replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

[24x7newsbengal]

[tenth-sentence]

C. A. B. Smith, who liked and respected Haldane, came to consider it a blessing that Haldane's office was at the south end of University College while his was at the north, because Haldane's temper would tend to abate while he stormed across the distance between the two.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

#book quote #in the name of eugenics #daniel j kevles #nonfiction #cedric a b smith #cab smith #jbs haldane #liked #respected #blessing #opposite ends #university college #bad temper

[oh-dear-so-queer]

If, as scientist J. B. S. Haldane stated, the natural world is queerer than we can ever know, then it is also true that the lives of "queer" animals are far more diverse than we could ever have imagined.

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

#book quote #biological exuberance #bruce bagemihl #nonfiction #jbs haldane #natural world #queer #diversity

[zmkccommonplace]

I'd lay down my life for two brothers - or eight cousins.

JBS Haldane

#haldane #relativism #joke

[ieisia]

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. He served in the Great War, and obtained the rank of captain. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field, he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London. Renouncing his British citizenship, he became an Indian citizen in 1961 and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for the rest of his life.

Haldane's article on abiogenesis in 1929 introduced the "primordial soup theory", which became the foundation for the concept of the chemical origin of life.  He established human gene maps for haemophilia and colour blindnesson the X chromosome, and codified Haldane's rule on sterility in the heterogametic sex of hybrids in species. He correctly proposed that sickle-cell disease confers some immunity to malaria. He was the first to suggest the central idea of in vitro fertilisation, as well as concepts such as hydrogen economy, cis and trans-actingregulation, coupling reaction, molecular repulsion, the darwin (as a unit of evolution), and organismal cloning. 

In 1957, Haldane articulated Haldane's dilemma, a limit on the speed of beneficial evolution, an idea which is still debated today. He willed his body for medical studies, as he wanted to remain useful even in death. He is also remembered for his work in human biology, having coined "clone", "cloning", and "ectogenesis". With his sister, Naomi Mitchison, Haldane was the first to demonstrate genetic linkage in mammals. Subsequent works established a unification of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection whilst laying the groundwork for modern synthesis, and helped to create population genetics.

In his essay On Being the Right Size he outlines Haldane's principle, which states that the size very often defines what bodily equipment an animal must have: "Insects, being so small, do not have oxygen-carrying bloodstreams. What little oxygen their cells require can be absorbed by simple diffusion of air through their bodies. But being larger means an animal must have complicated oxygen pumping and distributing systems to reach all the cells."

In 1927 Haldane pointed out that because selection mainly acts on heterozygotes, newly arisen dominant mutations are much more likely to be fixed than recessive ones,  a mechanism now called  Haldane's sieve. This leads to the expectation that adaptation from new mutations in large outcrossing populations should primarily proceed via fixing non-recessive beneficial mutations.

Haldane introduced the modern concept of abiogenesis in an eight-page article titled The origin of life, in The Rationalist Annual in 1929, describing the primitive ocean as a "vast chemical laboratory" containing a mixture of inorganic compounds – like a "hot dilute soup" in which organic compounds could have formed. Under the solar energy the anoxic atmospherecontaining carbon dioxide, ammonia and water vapour gave rise to a variety of organic compounds, "living or half-living things". The first molecules reacted with one another to produce more complex compounds, and ultimately the cellular components. At some point a kind of "oily film" was produced that enclosed self-replicatingnucleic acids, thereby becoming the first cell. J. D. Bernal named the hypothesis biopoiesis or biopoesis, the process of living matter spontaneously evolving from self-replicating but lifeless molecules. Haldane further hypothesised that viruses were the intermediate entities between the prebiotic soup and the first cells. He asserted that prebiotic life would have been "in the virus stage for many millions of years before a suitable assemblage of elementary units was brought together in the first cell." The idea was generally dismissed as "wild speculation".

Haldane was the first to realise the evolutionary link between genetic disorder and infection in humans. While estimating the rates of human mutation in different situations and diseases, he noted that mutations expressed in red blood cells, like thalassemias, were prevalent only in tropical regions where deadly infection like malaria has been endemic. He further observed that these were favourable traits (heterozygous inheritance of sickle cell trait) for natural selection which protected individuals from receiving malarial infection. He introduced his hypothesis at the Eighth International Congress of Genetics held in 1948 at Stockholm on a topic "The Rate of Mutation of Human Genes". He proposed that genetic disorders in humans living in malaria-endemic regions provided a condition (phenotype) that makes them relatively immune to malarial infections. He formalised in a technical paper published in 1949 in which he made a prophetic statement: "The corpuscles of the anaemic heterozygotes are smaller than normal, and more resistant to hypotonic solutions. It is at least conceivable that they are also more resistant to attacks by the sporozoa which cause malaria."  This became known as "Haldane's malaria hypothesis", or concisely, the "malaria hypothesis". This hypothesis was eventually confirmed by Anthony C. Allison in 1954 in the case of sickle-cell anemia.

Haldane was one of the three major figures to develop the mathematical theory of population genetics, along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. He thus played an important role in the modern evolutionary synthesis of the early 20th century. He re-established natural selection as the central mechanism of evolution by explaining it as a mathematical consequence of Mendelian inheritance.  He wrote a series of ten papers, A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection, deriving expressions for the direction and rate of change of gene frequencies, and also analyzing the interaction of natural selection with mutation and migration. The series consists of ten papers published between 1924 and 1934 in journals such as Biological Reviews(part II), Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (parts I and from III to IX) and Genetics (part X). He gave a set of lectures based on this series at the University of Wales in 1931, and were summarised in a book, The Causes of Evolutionin 1932.

His first paper on the series in 1924 specifically treats the rate of natural selection in peppered moth evolution. He predicted that environmental condition can favour the increase or decline of either the dominant (in this case the black or melanic forms) or the recessive (the grey or wild type) moths. For a sooty environment such as Manchester, where the phenomenon was discovered in 1848, he predicted that the dominant melanic moths will have fifty times more survival fitness than the typical grey ones. According to his estimate, assuming 1% dominant form in 1848 and about 99% in 1898, "48 generations are needed for the change [for the dominant to appear]... After only 13 generations the dominants would be in a majority." Such mathematical prediction was considered improbable for natural selection in nature. But it was subsequently proven by an elaborate experiment (named Kettlewell's experiment) performed by an Oxford zoologist Bernard Kettlewell between 1953 and 1958 and further by a Cambridge geneticists Michael Majerus in his experiments conducted between 2001 and 2007.

His contributions to statistical human genetics included: the first methods using maximum likelihood for the estimation of human linkage maps; pioneering methods for estimating human mutation rates; the first estimates of mutation rate in humans (2 × 10−5 mutations per gene per generation for the X-linked haemophilia gene); and the first notion that there is a "cost of natural selection". He was the first to estimate the rate of human mutation in his 1932 book The Causes of Evolution. At the John Innes Horticultural Institution, he developed the complicated linkage theory for polyploids, and extended the idea of gene/enzyme relationships with the biochemical and genetic study of plant pigments.

Haldane was the first to have thought of the genetic basis for human cloning, and the eventual artificial breeding of superior individuals. For this he introduced the terms "clone" and "cloning",  modifying the earlier "clon" which had been used in agriculture since the early 20th century (from Greek klōn, twig). He introduced the term in his speech on "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years" at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future in 1963.

[teachingmycattoread]

New episode is up! In which the universe is queerer than we can suppose, whimsical vigilante justice is dispensed, and we contemplate our inevitable spin-off knitting podcast.

Also available on Spotify

#tmctr #teaching my cat to read #my friend mr leakey #jbs haldane #also featuring: a much beloved childhood favourite of Eli's #a righteous and deserved dragging of cs lewis #and turning people into grasshoppers just for the drama