-Caveat Lector-
Two Geneticists: J.B.S. Haldane and C.D. Darlington
By Gavan Tredoux
J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) and C.D. Darlington (1903-1981) belong to
the great school of British geneticists and biological statisticians
produced by a country basking in the afterglow of the eminent
Victorians, Sir Francis Galton and his cousin Charles Darwin.
Darwin, of course, introduced evolution and banished superstition, but
it was the more versatile Galton who elevated the studying of human
traits to the level of science; inventing modern statistics,
psychometrics and behavioural genetics in the process.
Galton's long intellectual coattails started with his prot�g� and
biographer, Karl Pearson, who followed Galton's lead in developing the
mathematical statistics required to perform what came to be known as
biometry - the measurement of biological phenomena, including the
rigorous study of evolution. Where Galton invented the 'regression'
and 'correlation' statistics, and 'percentiles of the normal
distribution', Pearson generalized these concepts to provide an
unprecedented level of mathematical sophistication and technical
capability, most notably in goodness of fit to statistical models, and
skew distributions. Pearson's rival Sir Ronald Fisher formulated the
analysis of variance; but he too was following Galton's lead, since
attention to statistical variance was totally absent before Galton
insisted on it. Joining Pearson and Fisher were Julian Huxley, J.B.S.
Haldane and C.D. Darlington: between them, this eminent group not only
cured the concrete foundations of the modern science of evolutionary
biology, they also built the first dozen floors. What is more, they
were all eugenicists; commencing with Pearson, who become an
especially zealous convert to Galton's dominating passion.
Galton himself had coined the word 'eugenics' in 1883, and had used
his considerable prestige in the last decade of his life to publicly
promote its cause. Few realize now that this was always an unpopular
cause, so much so that Galton kept relatively quiet about it for the
first 30 years after he had first raised in in his pivotal Hereditary
Genius (1869). Things had turned round by 1939, largely due to the
work of Galton's disciples, when the Hermann Muller's "Geneticist's
Manifesto" was signed by the leading scientists of the day, including
Fisher, Haldane, Huxley, and Lancelot Hogben. This near-consensus of
leading scientific opinion was destroyed by WWII and the aftermath of
Nazi atrocities.
The eminent geneticists and Galtonians, J.B.S. Haldane and C.D.
Darlington, have now slipped from popular memory. First Haldane
volunteered himself into obscurity by self-imposed Indian exile, then
Darlington was drowned out by the Sixties cacophony and its
after-din. This despite both being highly successful, best-selling
authors of popular science in their day. Both still repay careful
attention: Haldane for his tragic descent into Stalinist orthodoxy and
irrelevance, Darlington for his genetically-based universal history -
which is still unique, challenging and richly suggestive.
J.B.S. Haldane was the son of an distinguished scientist in his own
right, J.S. Haldane. An outstanding student at school, and rigorously
trained at home by his father, he had original work on genetics
accepted for publication while still a schoolboy. Going up to
Cambridge, he surprised everyone by changing his field of study after
a year, from science to classics; exactly why we still don't know for
sure. Nonetheless he took first class and went on to become an
outstanding scientist anyway. Haldane could do this because he
possessed a rare combination of literary and scientific ability,
becoming one of the most outstanding authors of science writing for
broader audience - a field now known as popular science. There are
many writers of popular science, but few are first-rate scientists in
their own right; Haldane was one, Richard Dawkins is another.
The field Haldane devoted his career to was genetics, more
specifically the mathematical theory of evolutionary genetics, which
he helped to construct from the elements put in place by Galton,
Pearson, and Mendel. His career moved from Cambridge, to the John
Innes Agricultural Institute, to University College London, and
eventually exile in India; not because he liked to travel, but because
he inevitably quarreled with any and every institution he encountered.
Stubborn and prickly, with a near-Serbian capacity for bearing
grudges, and hard to get along with, he either made enemies or
acolytes. Yet his career might easily have been stillborn altogether
when he interrupted his Cambridge education to enlist in the Great War
of 1914-8.
Haldane stands alone as the one veteran of the Great War to publicly
admit that he thoroughly enjoyed the conflict. Robert Graves sullenly
suffered in the trenches, and then bitterly wrote Goodbye to All
That. Siegfried Sassoon wrote poignant poems. Haldane conducted
unsanctioned night-raids in no-man's land and mortared the Hun for
kicks. He devised new bombs and thoroughly enjoyed the scientific
aspects of poison gas and gas-masks. After the war, he would write a
very interesting pamphlet on the merits of chemical warfare, pointing
out (unanswerably) that fatalities and injuries due to poison gas were
modest compared to bullets, bayonets and bombs; and his claim that
governments supported the suppression of poison gas because they
preferred prolonged and bloody conflicts to shorter and more clinical
ones is still worth considering.
Haldane had an unusually robust constitution, perhaps due to his
Scottish ancestry, and a rock-solid grip of his sanity. When he
became interested in physiology, he experimented on himself and anyone
who would care to volunteer with him. He injected himself with
substances and calmly noted their harmful effect. He exposed himself
to gases in closed chambers and calmly observed his deterioration
under the influence of the gases. Eventually this affected his health
permanently, but not until he had scores of self-experiments under his
belt.
Haldane was always left-leaning, a tendency that became exaggerated
with age. Between the wars it was still possible to be a scientist, a
socialist, a meritocrat and a eugenicist. The left believed then in
the value of science, and hoped that the Soviet union would lead the
way in solving social problems through application of science and
reason, replacing what they considered irrational superstition and
prejudice. For the left, science was a liberator. This is why Cyril
Burt, the great psychometrician, was really a progressive and a social
reformer, destroying the irrational elements of the class system by
enabling elevation on the basis of objectively determined merit -
which is what the new IQ tests did. Likewise, Karl Pearson considered
himself a socialist, and pointedly refused a knighthood. Of course,
the enthusiasm of the left for the Soviet union was misplaced; some
saw this immediately and broke ties, like Bertrand Russell, but others
became fellow-travelers or worse.
Aside from his work on mathematical biology, Haldane quickly
established a reputation as an outstanding writer of popular science,
turning out a steady stream of magazine and newspaper articles,
interspersed with best-selling books. This allowed him to live more
comfortably than an academic might, and to acquire a degree of fame
that few of his colleagues or rivals could match. Though he was gruff
and difficult, he was generous with his relatively comfortable means,
and often subsidized his students from his own pocket when he was
unable to obtain grants for them. This happened more than once, since
Haldane was not suited to, and could not be bothered to play, the
academic grant game.
Together with Haldane's growing popular reputation came a gradual
descent into open politics, which sharply accelerated in the 1930s, by
the end of which he had become a full-blown Marxist. Nevertheless,
Haldane was a biological realist, however strained the relationship
between those views and his growing socialism, then Marxism, became.
Marxism might obscure those views, but it never completely subsumed
them. The most accessible guide to his biological realism, and his
recognition of hereditary individual differences, can be found in his
collection of popular essays, The Inequality of Man. First published
in 1932, this predated his descent into ideological Marxism. Here we
find him remarking that:
The progress of biology in the next century will lead to a
recognition of the innate inequality of man. ... In a
scientifically ordered society innate human differences would be
accepted as a natural phenomenon like the weather, predictable to a
considerable extent, but very difficult to control.
Like many of his left-wing contemporaries, Haldane also endorsed a
version of eugenics. Indeed, Haldane was a thoroughgoing Galtonian in
all important aspects: not merely because he worked for many years in
the division of University College, London, that Galton had
established and endowed; but because he had absorbed the Galtonian
spirit that infused and sustained his field :
The only clear task of eugenics is to prevent the inevitably
inefficient one per cent. of the population from being born, and to
encourage the breeding of persons of exceptional ability where that
ability is known to be hereditary.
Haldane was much impressed by a pioneering study of twins carried out
by the German, Johannes Lange.. Lange had discovered that criminality
is heritable, by showing that the criminality of a twin significantly
increased the likelihood that the other twin would be a criminal.
Haldane energetically promoted Lange, writing a foreword for the
English edition of Lange's engaging Crime as Destiny: A Study of
Criminal Twins (German edition 1929, English edition 1931). His
then-wife, Charlotte Haldane, did the English translation. In his
foreword, Haldane referred to Lange's study as a "masterpiece" of
"scientific psychology". So he was well aware of the inheritance of
behaviour traits. Anticipating Richard Herrnstein's syllogism by 40
years, he was also aware that heritability rises with equality of
opportunity:
Universal education leads, not to equality, but to inequality based
on real differences of talent. Where there is equality of
opportunity there is no excuse for failure. The self-made American
man who realizes this fact, commonly appears ruthless to the
European aristocrat, who, just because he knows that he does not
owe his position to innate ability, is often more considerate of
his inferiors.
But Haldane knew full well that these ideas were not going to be well
received by the Marxists, and was able to state this clearly when his
socialism had not yet developed into a full-blown case of Marxism:
The test of the devotion of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics
to science will, I think, come when the accumulation of the results
of human genetics, demonstrating what I believe to be the facts of
innate human inequality, becomes important. I am a very strong
believer in innate human inequality, but I would like to point out
that there is another source of innate inequality, namely,
segregation ... So a belief in innate inequality does not mean a
belief in the omnipotence of heredity. But this belief is certainly
incompatible with the sentimental and unscientific views often
associated with Socialism.
Haldane resolved this obstacle for his own socialist (then
pre-Marxist) beliefs by imagining a socialist that embraced human
inequality. It was never clear exactly what this kind of socialism
would entail, because Haldane's politics inclined to the sentimental
and not the systematic, so we have no exposition from him on the
subject; just vaguely stated hopes of the following kind:
It seems to me ... that while the conclusions to be drawn from a
study of human inequality are not necessarily favourable to
capitalism, they are, at any rate, favourable to some forms of
socialism, though perhaps not to all forms.
[The Inequality of Man, 1932]
As it was, his socialism became hard-core Marxism. He was drawn into
organized labour circles in the 1930s and eventually became a
card-holding member of the Communist Party. He relished being
photographed with striking labourites, and churned out 345 articles
for the Daily Worker. His attachment to the Soviets had become a
distinct liability by the onset of WWII. The military valued his
scientific advice, not to mention his generous habit of subjecting
himself, and those foolish enough to accept his dare, to the effects
of atmospheric poisoning while testing the prolonged confinement in
submarines; but by now the military had to consider Haldane a security
risk. His liberal scorn for the opinions of the military could not
completely disguise his steady alienation from society. This was a
very English society of public intellectuals, ensconced safely in the
freedom of academic institutions; their eccentricities tolerated and
even admired. But Haldane's socialist eccentricity developed into a
form of subjection, to the discipline of a party organization
controlled and funded by an external power. Whereas the college
eccentric is very much a part of his surrounding society, Haldane was
progressively part of an external party and not of his own society.
How did this square with his bloody-minded independence? It was the
triumph of sheer stubbornness over good sense.
The Lysenko affair provides a striking illustration of Haldane's
damaging intransigence. The story of Stalin's glorified peasant
farmer, Trofim Lysenko, and his stranglehold over Soviet science, has
been definitively recorded by the Russian geneticist Valery Soyfer, in
his recently republished samizdat: Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet
Science (1994) . Lysenko was a Lamarckian who relentlessly pushed a
cockamamie account of agricultural genetics that amounted to the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, well-larded with boundless
contempt for those who would study flies rather than
honest-to-goodness wheat. This idea resonated with the creation of
the "new Soviet man" by the sheer act of Stalinist will, so Mendelian
genetics was exiled, its practitioners banished and murdered, and the
biological sciences within the Soviet union were set back decades. It
is less well-known that the Lysenko farce played to smaller audiences
in the West, among the intellectuals and scientists who had flocked to
the communist left, like Haldane, before and during the war.
Some turned away from Lysenko and the Soviets in disgust, notably
Hermann Muller; others leapt to Lysenko's defense. One either defended
Lysenko or left the party. Darlington and other mainstream Western
geneticists were instrumental in exposing Lysenko's folly, especially
in the pages of the journal Heredity (which Darlington had co-founded
with R. A. Fisher). But Haldane came to Lysenko's defense, according
him every benefit of the doubt; using his still considerable public
prestige when appearing on radio debates, where he would argue
Lysenko's case against none other than Darlington and Ronald Fisher,
among others. Eventually, this fiction became impossible for anyone
to bear, and Haldane's intransigence could no longer restrain his
intelligence. But rather than speak out against the destruction of
Soviet biological science, he chose a sullen silence instead, and
withdrew from active party activities. Up to his death, Haldane
remained loyal to Stalin, even years after the revelations by
Khrushchev!
If Haldane noticed that his friend, the great Soviet geneticist
Nikolai Vavilov, had died in the "Saratov" Soviet labour camp in 1943,
he didn't dwell much on it in public. Vavilov had trained in Britain
with William Bateson, and had pioneered the study of plant genetics.
It was Vavilov who had suggested that the history of humans could be
traced through the genetic history of domesticated agricultural
plants, the spread of the plant varieties giving a good idea of human
migration. Vavilov had invited Haldane to visit the Soviet Union in
1928 and had befriended him. They corresponded for many years, and
Haldane mentioned Vavilov frequently in his science popularizations.
But Vavilov had become the leader of (classical) Soviet genetics by
the early 1930s, and this earned him the undying enmity of Lysenko.
Arrested and tortured by Stalin's henchmen, he was relentlessly
interrogated in sessions of the following kind:
Interrogator Khvat: Who are you?
Vavilov: I am academician Vavilov.
Interrogator Khvat: You're a bag of shit, not an academician.
[Soyfer, 1994: 145]
Vavilov eventually broke down and confessed to various crimes against
the Soviet Union, including the cultivation of corn, implicating a
galaxy of agriculture experts in the usual manner. He was sentenced to
death but languished on death row until he died of the effects of
malnutrition and ill-treatment, shortly after his sentence was
commuted to 20 years of hard labour.
By the early 1950s, Haldane had run out of British institutions to
quarrel with. He used the Suez crisis to announce that he was
emigrating to India, to join the Indian Statistical Institute, in high
dudgeon over "Western imperialism". The Vietnam war would later show
that academic conceit really does know no bounds, when the eminent
French mathematician Serge Lange visited Hanoi in the belief that his
presence would deter US bombing. Haldane cultivated precisely this
sort of conceit, but not entirely honestly. In fact, he had been
planning to emigrate some time before the Suez flap. He was nearing
retirement anyway, and was attracted to India because he had served
there for a while in the First World War, training soldiers in the use
of bombs, and had liked it. Inevitably, his tenure in Indian academic
institutions would proceed from enthusiastic beginnings to bitter
endings. Despite all this, he continued to produce the stream of
superb scientific work that distinguished his career, just as he had
moved from squabble to squabble in England without diminishing his
intellectual reputation.
Haldane was diagnosed with rectal cancer in the early 1960s, and bore
the news with characteristic fortitude and a wickedly grim sense of
humour. He composed a poem called "Cancer's a Funny Thing", which
commenced:
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
The longer-term effect of exile was obscurity. By the time of his
death in 1964, Haldane was no longer of figure of much public
importance in the West, even if he was revered in India. Today Haldane
is barely remembered in either India or England. His unswerving
loyalty to Stalin is a great pity, since he deserves far better than
the notice that we are forced to give him today: J.B.S. Haldane, the
eminent geneticist, war hero and fellow-traveler to the end.
Cyril Darlington lived in much the same world as Haldane, but was
entirely unlike him in temperament and politics. Where Haldane leaned,
and then lurched, to the left; Darlington tended to the right. His
conservatism may have owed something to his own progress from
unremarkable middle-class beginnings to the very peak of genetic
science between the wars. Younger than Haldane, he was schoolboy
during the Great War. At age 20, he entered the John Innes
Agricultural Institute in 1923, as an unpaid voluntary worker,
eventually becoming its director in 1939. The Innes institute was the
center of British genetics at the time, and was home to another of
Karl Pearson's bitter rivals, William Bateson. (Bateson had rejected
one of Pearson's papers submitted to the Royal Society, which forced
Pearson to found the journal Biometrika, assisted by Galton's backing,
financially and intellectually; and Bateson had also trained Haldane's
friend Nikolai Vavilov). Haldane himself had coveted the directorship
that Darlington assumed, but he had been denied it by his reputation
for being difficult and a poor administrator.
Darlington pioneered the study of chromosomes, through the study of
plant genetics. Elected to the Royal Society in 1941, he moved to
Oxford in 1953, becoming the Keeper of the Botanic Gardens and
Sherardian Professor of Biology. He remained at the University until
his retirement in 1971, and Oxford itself until his death in 1981.
Like Haldane, he also reached a wide audience with popular expositions
of genetic fundamentals, and published a prodigious bestseller; first
issued as The Facts of Life in 1953, this eventually became Genetics
and Man and went through many editions ( like Haldane's popular
science, it was published by the Pelican imprint of Penguin, in an
inexpensive mass-market paperback). He would also publish widely in
fields that might be considered on the periphery of genetics:
linguistics, scientific education, psychology and philosophy.
Variation in human abilities (a more accurate notion than 'human
inequality') was as obvious to Darlington as it was to Haldane, and he
completed his career with a remarkable universal history from the
standpoint of a geneticist, The Evolution of Man and Society (1969).
Universal history was then as much in decline and disrepute as it is
now; but Darlington succeeded marvelously. There are few aspects of
human history that he did not touch on, from human prehistory,
through the foundations of agriculture, the ancient and classical
civilizations, and the rise of Europe to the present day. He also
found time to explain why it was that early Christianity embraced
monasticism and nunneries (lack of fertility due to overly aggressive
outbreeding), why the Jews collected taxes for Mediaeval Europe, and
how it is that the genetic Irish propensity for story-telling made its
way into Norse mythology (through the Irish settlement of Iceland).
The key to this history is the influence of genetic capability, as
channeled and regulated by human breeding systems. Darlington's
interest in the broader ramifications of genetic variation can be
traced back, in print at least, to the early stages of WWII. An
article in Nature in 1943, "Race, Class and Mating in the Evolution
of Man", Darlington laid the foundations for his massive universal
history:
"The group effect of inbreeding is that it gives homogeneity,
predictability of offspring from parent, adaptation, easy
transmission of culture, sometimes too easy, and hence potential
stability of culture, It is a conservative agent and it conserves
itself best in the most conservative peasant communities. It
opposes initiative. It reduces conflict, sometimes disastrously. If
applied to specialized classes it conserves their differences and
increases their fitness. In India the endogamous caste system has
preserved a store of variation which, if released by free crossing
or recombination, might well enable us to reconstruct the whole
genetic range of mankind.
On the other hand, inbreeding, while increasing temporary fitness,
reduces flexibility. It reduces the means of acquiring fitness to
new conditions. ... Homogeneity provides the optimum condition for
epidemic. Heterogeneity permits selective survival and recovery.
This advantage of heterogeneity merely shows in a special way how
inbreeding frustrates the long-term function of sexual
reproduction, the recombination of genetic differences,
recombination which cannot take effect without the combination of
these differences by outbreeding.
The long-term function of outbreeding has moreover come to imply a
short-term advantage. Species become adapted to outbreeding and the
adaptation ... cannot be overridden without risk. ... [T]here is a
conflict between the advantages and the disadvantages of out
breeding at both genotypic and phenotypic levels and as between the
short view and the long one.
How then is this conflict to be resolved ? In general the
combination of inbreeding and outbreeding in parallel rather than
in sequence gives the greatest efficiency in the utilization and
selection of the available variation of mankind and, consequently.
the most rapid evolution. A subdivision of mankind into races and
classes is, therefore, highly advantageous provided that we can
assure its instability. This seems to be no insuperable difficulty
at present. The rapidity of differential population changes, the
increase of mobility, the changes of methods of production, and the
technical requirements of government, have upset the stability of
races and classes as well as the adaptation which partly justified
that stability."
[Nature, no 3855; September 18, 1943; p 318]
Darlington was a race-realist, and an unusual proponent of the virtues
of both inbreeding (race formation) and outbreeding (race submersion),
depending on the historical context. He was also a thoroughgoing
sociobiologist, well before both William Hamilton and Edward O Wilson
had made the subject famous. He took the influence of genes on all
aspects of human society and history for granted, proceeding to work
out a sweeping account of human history that properly concentrated on
details and implications. This is much more productive and
interesting than yet another rehash of a pseudo-debate that had
already been settled conclusively by Galton in the previous century.
In his history, Darlington is especially aware of the distinctive
contributions of certain populations (races) to their societies, and
of their genetic adaptation to economic and cultural activities
peculiar to them. Thus, Cornish tin miners, who were probably from
Anatolia originally, were successful miners all over the world; not
because of a fortuitous culture, but because they were genetically
adapted to mining - that is, to those traits which tend to make better
miners. Similarly, the ancient Beaker culture was spread throughout
Europe, not by imitation, but by the migration of the Beaker people
themselves.
Inbreeding, coupled with long-term selection, produces groups with
special abilities; historically, many societies have existed in more
or less stable form as highly successful collections of specialized
inbreeding groups laminated together by a caste system. At time, these
societies have expelled some of their constituent racial castes. Spain
expelled the Jews in the late 15th century; their catastrophic loss
was Holland's priceless gain. Likewise, the French expelled the
Huguenots in the 17th century, only to lose a highly skilled and
accomplished population to Britain, South Africa and other regions.
It is a central theme of Darlington's history that this loss was not
simply a loss of acquired skills, it was a loss of genetic capability,
and a permanent one at that. This is a genuinely profound rethink of
traditional history, which has always dealt in the acquisition of
knowledge by culture alone, through education and imitation. But
notice that Galton too was well aware of the same phenomenon and had
frequently drawn attention to the example of the Huguenot migration,
and the distinctive contributions of natural ability that they had
made to English society; typically, he had anticipated everyone else
by over half a century:
Whatever other countries may or may not have lost, ours has
certainly gained on more than one occasion by the infusion of the
breed of selected sub-races, especially that of Protestant refugees
from religious persecution on the Continent. It seems reasonable
to look upon the Huguenots as men who, on the whole, had inborn
qualities of the most distinctive kind from the majority of their
countrymen ... . Consequently England has been largely indebted to
the natural refinement and to the solid worth of the Huguenot
breed, as well as to the culture and technical knowledge that the
Huguenots brought with them.
[Hereditary Genius, p xxii, Prefatory Chapter to the 1892 edition]
It need hardly be said that Darlington's view of history fell rapidly
into disfavour as the radicalization of the 1960s took effect. His
acceptance of racial differences in intelligence did not endear him to
the new breed of academics or the professional intellectuals of the
magazine and 'new media' circuit. If Hume's Treatise 'fell still-born
from the press', Darlington's crowning achievement, The Evolution of
Man and Society, all but withered away in infancy. But do not judge a
work by its current critical reputation.
Darlington's final work, The Little Universe of Man, was published in
1978. Together with Genetics and Man and The Evolution of Man and
Society, this completed his trilogy on Man. Darlington acknowledged
his debt to Haldane:
I may also add that, although I parted company with him over
communism, it was in the long youthful discussions with the late J.
B. S. Haldane, twenty years earlier, that my three books on Man had
their roots.
[The Little Universe of Man, p. 17]
The theme of this final work is what Darlington called the 'created
environment', and individual human differences. Behaviour geneticists
have recently realized that genes seek out conducive environments, but
Darlington had long anticipated this. Not only do genes seek out
favourable environments, among humans they create them too. This
complicates any separation of the effects of heredity from
environment, since, in practice, human heredity must completely
dominate the environment. Darlington was well aware that he was on
dangerous ground here. He identifies three taboos surrounding the
study of man:
The European taboo on the discussion of man as an animal lasted
until it was eventually broken by Darwin and Huxley. But in our
dynamic world its place on the forbidden list was already being
taken by another taboo, that on the discussion of sexual behaviour
and this lasted, as we can still remember, more than another fifty
years. In due course in the 1930s there followed a third taboo
which now dominates the study of human problems and is likely to
continue until another generation rejects and ridicules its
parents' prejudices. This third line of defence against the
understanding of man is the taboo on the study of hereditary
differences. The one belief or emotion that unites the jarring
nations today appears to be the need not to notice, and certainly
not to discuss, the existence of differences between them in terms
of their permanent underlying causes. Innate hereditary or genetic
differences must not be admitted between individuals or groups,
between classes or races, or even between the sexes. But above all
what must not be discussed, what must be rejected, are differences
in the foundations of human behaviour, the study of brains, of
instincts, and of intelligence. These foundations are complex and
happily concealed from the public view. They must remain concealed.
In a world already overcrowded and over-troubled they might cause
more trouble.
Concealment, of course, means deception, pretence, and confusion.
Successively with evolution, sex, and human differences, it has
meant that scientists are pushed into deceiving, first themselves,
then their pupils, and then the public. Thus fear of the truth, on
the part of the public or of the establishment, which used to
protect the central mystery of religion, has now shifted to fields
of inquiry which are, next to religion, the most difficult. For in
heredity and intelligence we have two subjects which inherently we
can never entirely understand. Established opinion is objecting
only to our making a start.
The heredity of man is contained in a sperm having atoms in number
of the order of 10^12. The cells in his brain are of a lower order
of multiplication (about 10^10). In their totality, in the sense
that every cell is qualitatively useful, these numbers are still
inconceivable. Yet we can reach illuminating and even revolutionary
generalizations about both sperm and brain. They are most
illuminating and most revolutionary ... when we use what we know of
heredity to enlarge what we know of intelligence.
[The Little Universe of Man, pp. 81-2]
Little has changed since Darlington wrote this. If anything, the
taboos have strengthened and the penalties for violating them have
been toughened. As the 'old guard' of modern genetics perished, few
notable geneticists were prepared to take their place. We are left
with an embarrassed silence.
Further Reading:
The Darlington papers, some 240 boxes, are held in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford (Reference code: GB 0161 C.D. Darlington papers).
The Haldane papers are housed in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.
Clark, Ronald JBS: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane Hodder &
Stoughton, 1968 (Oxford, 1984)
Darlington, C.D. "Race, Class and Mating in the The Evolution of Man"
Nature, 3855 (1943), 315-319
Genetics and Man Penguin, 1953
"Psychology, Genetics and the Process of History" British Journal of
Psychology 54 (1963), 293-298.
The Evolution of Man and Society Simon and Schuster, 1969
The Little Universe of Man George Allen & Unwin, 1978
Galton, Francis Hereditary Genius 1869
Inquiries into Human Faculty 1883
Haldane, J.B.S. The Inequality of Man Penguin, 1932
Soyfer, Valery Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science samizdat 1983
(Rutgers, 1994)
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