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Who was J. B. S. Haldane?

Samanth Subramanian: A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane; W. W. Norton, New York, 2020, 400 pp, $40 hbk, ISBN 978-0-393-63424-2

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Abstract

Subramanian has produced a new biography of Haldane taking into account archival material that has only become public during the last decade. He has been able to provide a more complete picture of Haldane’s personal life than earlier biographers, such as his difficult schooldays at Eton and the deterioration of his first marriage. He has also highlighted the extent to which Haldane was kept under constant secret surveillance by British intelligence services because of his politics. However, the book is less successful in its account of Haldane’s scientific work including what he contributed to modern evolutionary theory, the Fisher–Haldane relationship, Haldane’s role in the Lysenko controversy, and what he achieved after emigration to India in 1957.

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Notes

  1. Haldane’s papers, the material that he took to India, now reside in the National Library of Scotland, where they were deposited by his nephew, Graeme Mitchison, after Spurway’s death in Hyderabad in 1978. By that time they bore signs of rodent depredations.

  2. Even in the 1990s, the Haldane family was reluctant to provide access to this resource. JBS’s sister, Naomi Mitchison, rebuffed several of my requests even when she provided permission to me to use, quote, and publish many of his unpublished works.

  3. Dronamraju (1985) has devoted an entire other book to this topic.

  4. Haldane was clear on the issue: “I didn’t publish until 1927 ...I think if [Oparin’s] first book was in 1924, the question of priority doesn’t arise. The question of plagiarism might” (Subramanian 2020, p. 303). He emphasized the same point again: “I have very little doubt that Professor Oparin has the priority over me. ...There was precious little in my small article which was not to be found in his books” (Subramanian 2020, pp. 127–128).

  5. See, for example, W.E. Tisdale’s letter to Haldane, 7 December 1937, Box 26, Haldane Papers, UCL Library.

  6. It is unclear why Subramanian ignores this story, which can be gleaned from both the MIT and UCL archives. Clark had no access to the material in the UCL archives, which Haldane had failed to take to India with him, presumably by accident. They apparently remained unknown, packed in boxes, until being “found” in the 1980s.

  7. Both McOuat and Winsor (1995) and Sarkar (2017) argue that answering religious critics may have been the major reason why Haldane first turned to mathematical models of natural selection.

  8. Fisher, letter to Haldane, 24 May 1933 (Bennett 1983, pp. 214–215).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Jean-Baptiste Grodwohol, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, and Veena Rao for comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

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  1. University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Sahotra Sarkar

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Sarkar, S. Who was J. B. S. Haldane?. Biol Theory 16, 268–275 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00389-4

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