Queerer Than We Can Imagine

This post is a review of A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane by Samanth Subramanian.

Haldane was a giant of population genetics and evolutionary biology, a prolific science popularizer, and intimately involved in the politics of his time. I will stick mostly to the science, but since biology is not my expertise, everything I say must be given a license. I will mostly stay away from the politics, since I know even less about it than I do about biology.

In fact, let's get the politics out of the way right away. The book describes Haldane's birth in Edinburgh to a liberal father and conservative mother; Haldane eventually became a communist. The book considers in detail the impact of his politics on his science, his membership in the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), and especially his support of Lysenko, the Soviet biologist who opposed Mendelian genetics.

Haldane's childhood manifestations - his mathematical leanings; his contempt for easy assignments; the bullying he endured at school; his hatred of sports and his frail health; a large number of experiments (some of them involving mildly electrocuting other people, others included drinking hydrochloric acid) at home inspired by his father (who was an expert on respiration and found himself called up when the Germans started using poison gas in the war); his many academic prizes and scholarships; his phenomenal memory - offer many clues to his adult behavior.

It's a little unsettling to see Haldane confessedly enjoy war and killing (he was involved in WWI, where he was wounded by a bomb, and in the Spanish civil war). Haldane also had a fraught relationship with the topic of eugenics. On the positive side, he was generous, promoting books by rival academics even when they did not cite his work. And only a brave man could have written a comic poem, reproduced in full in the book, about his bout with colorectal cancer.

Aldous Huxley, a friend (his brother Julian Huxley was a biologist), used Haldane's colorful character and his ideas about eugenics in writing his famous book Brave New World. Haldane's disappointment on not fathering children, his academic rivalries, his opinion of America (and the linguistic liberties taken by the residents of that country with English), and his eventual renunciation of England to become an Indian citizen (a busy avenue in Kolkata was named after him) are all in the book.

His many scientific accomplishments are discussed in some detail (in places I did not have the expertise to follow the technical exposition closely). The depth of his contributions can be gauged by the fact that several of them carry his name: the Briggs-Haldane equation; Haldane's rule; Haldane's dilemma; the Oparin- Haldane hypothesis; the Haldane shelter.

My specifically favorite Haldane scientific discovery is his mapping of the location of the color blindness gene (I am color blind). Overall, I found myself pleasantly surprised by his persistent introduction of mathematics into biology; in the early days things were generally less quantitative. He was definitely a pioneer.

Haldane realized my death wish - that of having his skeleton displayed in an anatomy museum.

Summary

The book is fairly extensive (379 pages). The research seems solid and painstaking. The prose quality is high and the subject is treated with impressive scholarship, though I found it a bit strange that the book does not have an index.

The picture that emerges of Haldane might be described in his own words (said originally about the universe) as 'not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.'

A good and informative read, overall.