SCIENCE ADVANCES by J. B. S. Haldane MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES HEREDITY AND POLITICS SCIENCE ADVANCES by J. B. S. HALDANE GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD 40 Museum Street London FIRST PUBLISHED IN I947 SECOND IMPRESSION 1948 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN in 12-Point Fournier Type BY UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED WOKING PREFACE T he majority o f these essays have appeared in the Daily Worker, one in the New Statesman and Nation,, one in Science and Society, while the final article was published in N ature. In so far as one theme runs through them, it is the growth of pure and applied science. I have described some old and new discoveries and inventions, and the way in which they are being, or could be, used for the benefit of humanity or otherwise. I anticipate two criticisms. I have sometimes repeated the same statement in several articles. This was inevitable, since they were written over a period of over four years, and also because the same facts are of importance in different contexts. And I shall be told that I have dragged in Marxism like King Charles’s head. This is again inevitable if the writer thinks, as I do, that Marxism is the application of scientific method to the widest field so far achieved by man. If Marxism were takea for granted, or even if its general principles were widely understood in this country, such emphasis would be unnecessary. But the facts which I describe fit into a general framework, and Marxism is the best account of this framework which I know. I f other writers on science can fit them into a better framework, by all means let them do so. But they are not isolated from one another, or from ordinary life, and it is a mistake to present them as if they were so. I must thank colleagues who have helped me with facts, and readers of the Daily Worker who have criticized the articles and suggested topics. For this book is definitely a social product rather than the efflorescence of my own mind. October 1944 CONTENTS PAGE Preface 5 l Some Great Men Newton 11 Marx M Archimedes 17 Copernicus *9 Landsteiner 22 de Geer 25 Eddington 28 Wilson and Bragg 31 Boys 35 Milne 37 2 Animals and Plants Newts 4i Cats 44 Flying ants 47 Bird migration 50 The starling on trial 52 Instinct 55 The origin of species 57 Species in the making 60 Back to the water 62 No caterpillars by request 65 Domestic animals 68 What to do with the Zoo 7i Spring 74 Potatoes 76 Britain’s trees 78 3 Human Physiology and Evolution Temperature 82 Quantity and quality 85 Blood 88 8 SCIENCE ADVANCES j . Human Physiology and Evolution — contd. PAGE Blood analysis 91 Blood and individuality 93 How muscles work 96 Sense organs . 98 Brainwaves 101 Learning 104 Fatigue during skilled work 107 Hygiene or sales talk? 109 Measuring human needs 112 Beyond the microscope 115 Evolution, and our weak points 118 Man’s ancestors 120 There were giants 123 4 Medicine The common cold 126 Moulds versus bacteria 128 Venereal diseases 131 Causes of cancer 134 A new attack on cancer 137 Nature cures 139 Inoculation 142 Immunization to diphtheria 145 5 -ygiene Overcrowding and heart disease 149 Overcrowding and children’s diseases 151 Overcrowding and tuberculosis 154 Dangerous trades 157 The drink trade 160 Factory ventilation, heating, and lighting 163 Badly housed occupations 165 When air burns 168 X-rays and their dangers 170 Colliery explosions 173 Euthanasia 17 6 CONTENTS 9 6 Inven tions PAGE Inventions that made men free 179 Polarized light and its uses 182 The spectroscope 185 The electron microscope 188 The reading machine 190 Listening to doodlebugs 192 Farming the sea 195 A substitute for morphine ? 198 7 Soviet Science and N a f Science The cruise o f the Sedov 201 How two thousand geologists saved the world 205 Colder than the pole 207 Vavilov 210 Soviet scientists and blood transfusion 213 Marxism and prehistory 214 A banned film 2 17 Genetics in the Soviet Union 220 Soviet children as scientists 226 Blubo 227 Nazi lessons in British schools 233 Race theory and Vansittartism 236 What to do with German science 238 8 Human Life and Death at High Pressures 242 1 SOME GREAT MEN Newton Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in the first year o f the Great Rebellion. Many people regard him as the greatest man whom England has produced. But we mostly know very little about him. This is largely due to ridiculous propaganda about his life. We think o f Wordsworth’s lines a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone or the story that a falling apple set him thinking about gravitation. He is made out to be a thinker divorced from ordinary life. As a matter of fact he was a very skilled craftsman. As a boy we know that he interested himself in conjuring tricks. As a man he made the first reflecting telescope, whose most important part is a concave mirror, not a lens. For this purpose he had to experiment with various alloys, and to grind his own mirrors. To-day all large astronomical telescopes rely on mirrors rather than lenses to concentrate the light from distant stars. As an experimenter he showed that white light could be split up into colours in two different ways. A glass prism refracts blue light, that is to say bends it out of its original path, more strongly than red light. And a thin film of air between two layers o f glass reflects light o f a colour whose wave-length is just equal to twice the thickness o f the gap, or some multiple of this length. He also worked on static electrification. I f Newton had never done a sum in his life he would be remembered as a great technician and a very great experimental physicist. In addition he was one of the greatest mathematicians, 12 SCIENCE ADVANCES perhaps the greatest, who ever lived. At the age of twenty-two he invented what is now called the differential calculus, and at the age of twenty-three the integral calculus. These were inde­ pendently invented by Leibniz in Germany within a few years. Both these branches of mathematics were essentially tools for his great project of producing a mechanical account of natural events which would allow of their exact prediction. The principles governing the flight o f cannon balls were being worked out at this time. Newton showed that the moon in its course round the earth, and the earth and other planets in their courses round the sun, obeyed the same laws. This was a very great mathematical achievement. He also discovered the laws governing the flow of heat and of some fluids. He believed that he was describing the properties of real matter in real space and real time. Some modern physicists say that this is impossible, and that we cannot know the real nature of things, but only devise theories which fit our experience more or less exactly. They point out that the work of the last forty years proves that matter, space, and time are not what Newton thought them, and that newer theories enable us to predict what will happen more accurately than do Newton's theories. This is true. They go on to say that this shows that one can never know what matter, space, and time really are. Certainly we can never know all about them. Lenin thought that the properties of even a single electron, the smallest bit of matter that we know, are inexhaustible. But most scientists think it nonsense to say that because we cannot know all about matter, we do not know anything about it. How deeply Newton penetrated into the nature of matter is shown by a simple fact. The moving stars do not obey Newton's laws exactly. But their largest deviations from these laws are about one three hundredth part of the errors of measurement made by astronomers in Newton's day. If he had merely been making theories to fit the available observations, the theories would have been disproved as soon as more accurate measure­ ments were made. He went far beyond the observations, a long way to the truth about matter. SOME GREAT MEN *3 Newton’s world picture fitted in extraordinarily well with the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie. The need for it arose out of practical problems of his day, especially those o f navigation and artillery. He pictured a world consisting of particles, each moving in a way which could be predicted accurately once the forces on it were calculated. In the same way society has been supposed to consist o f isolated individuals, each behaving according to economic and psychological laws which governed their conduct. As a result of the operation o f these laws the universe was thought to behave in an orderly way. And if economic laws were allowed free play, with everyone acting according to his or her self-interest, bourgeois economists thought that society would function as perfectly as the stars in their courses. History has disproved this latter theory, and about the beginning of this century it was shown that in some important respects matter did not behave in a Newtonian manner. If it did so, to take only one example, solid bodies would collapse. But modern physicists build on Newton’s foundations, as Marx built on those laid down by such economists as Petty, Smith, and Ricardo.