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John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-born scientist who later moved to India and acquired Indian citizenship. He worked in the fields of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field, he taught biology at th…
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culture · Geneticist and evolutionary biologist (1892–1964) · biologist · geneticist · physiologist · biochemist · university teacher · philosopher · scientific collector · also J.B.S. Haldane, J. B. S. Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, Haldane
Born 5 November 1892 · Died 1 December 1964 · Q156333
76 published statements · 0 followers
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It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
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“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
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“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
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“I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) This is worthless nonsense; (ii) This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) This is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so.”
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“an inordinate fondness for beetles”
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“s arguments for the existence of God, entitled”
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“the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment”
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Encyclopaedia Britannica: Oparin-Haldane theory | Hypothesis, Origin of Life, & Miller-Urey Experiment
The Guardian: Make pension tax relief only available to savers prepared to invest in UK, Andy Haldane says
Published “Array programming with NumPy” in Nature — cited 23,766 times.
Published “Systemic risk in banking ecosystems” in Nature — cited 1,115 times.
New Scientist: Review: What I Require from Life: Writings on science and life from J. B. S. Haldane
Published “Analogs of quantum-Hall-effect edge states in photonic crystals” in Physical Review A — cited 1,200 times.
Published “Possible Realization of Directional Optical Waveguides in Photonic Crystals with Broken Time-Reversal Symmetry” in Physical Review Letters — cited 2,534 times.
Published “Entanglement Spectrum as a Generalization of Entanglement Entropy: Identification of Topological Order in Non-Abelian Fractional Quantum Hall Effect States” in Physical Review Letters — cited 1,424 times.
Published “Model for a Quantum Hall Effect without Landau Levels: Condensed-Matter Realization of the "Parity Anomaly"” in Physical Review Letters — cited 5,564 times.
Published “Continuum dynamics of the 1-D Heisenberg antiferromagnet: Identification with the O(3) nonlinear sigma model” in Physics Letters A — cited 2,610 times.
Published “Nonlinear Field Theory of Large-Spin Heisenberg Antiferromagnets: Semiclassically Quantized Solitons of the One-Dimensional Easy-Axis Néel State” in Physical Review Letters — cited 3,352 times.
Published “Fractional Quantization of the Hall Effect: A Hierarchy of Incompressible Quantum Fluid States” in Physical Review Letters — cited 1,982 times.
Published “Epidemic Listeriosis — Evidence for Transmission by Food” in New England Journal of Medicine — cited 1,107 times.
Published “'Luttinger liquid theory' of one-dimensional quantum fluids. I. Properties of the Luttinger model and their extension to the general 1D interacting spinless Fermi gas” in Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics — cited 2,245 times.
Died 1964-12-01.
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“There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.”
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“An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.”
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“Dios debe albergar una desorbitada predilección por los escarabajos.”
“A minha suspeita é de que o universo seja não apenas mais estranho de quanto supomos, porém mais estranho do que podemos supor.”
As "a very great man who did a very good job"
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Awarded Kimber Genetics Award (1961).
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And worked at the Indian Statistical Institute until his death in 1964
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Haldane described India as "the closest approximation to the Free World"
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Won Darwin–Wallace Medal (1958).
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Awarded honorary doctor of the University of Poitiers (1958).
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Stated: "For one thing I prefer Indian food to American
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Haldane articulated Haldane's dilemma, a limit on the speed of beneficial evolution, an idea that is still debated today
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The avenue runs past the prominent Science City complex and serves as a key traffic link in the eastern part of the city
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And live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961
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Haldane left University College London, and joined the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta where he worked in the biometry unit
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Was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
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Won Darwin Medal (1952).
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Received the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society
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Shortly after considering standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate
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In which he made a prophetic statement: "The corpuscles of the anaemic heterozygotes are smaller than normal, and more resistant to hypotonic solutions
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At Stockholm on a topic "The Rate of Mutation of Human Genes"
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Awarded doctor honoris causa from the University of Paris (1947).
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Won Croonian Medal and Lecture (1946).
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Wrote about the Soviet trial of his friend and fellow geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov:
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Haldane proclaimed enthusiastically: "I think that Marxism is true
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To become the first Weldon Professor of biometry at University College London
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Haldane accepted Oparin's originality and said, "I have very little doubt that Professor Oparin has the priority over me
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“I have very little doubt that Professor Oparin has the priority over me.”
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Became Professor of Genetics at University College London, where he spent most of his academic career
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His partisan, Edgar Adrian (a 1932 Nobel laureate), had almost convinced Trinity College to offer him an appointment as a Fellow, but that was ruined by an incident when Haldane arrived at the dining table carrying a gallon jar of urine from his laboratory.
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I was the first person to estimate the rate of mutation of a human gene
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Described how "he enjoyed the opportunity of killing people and regarded this as a respectable relic of primitive man"
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Was elected Fellow of the Royal Society
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And they were summarised in his book, The Causes of Evolution in 1932
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Introduced the "primordial soup theory", which became the foundation for the concept of the chemical origin of life
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Haldane introduced the modern concept of abiogenesis in an eight-page article entitled "The Origin of Life" in The Rationalist Annual, describing the primitive ocean as a "vast chemical laboratory" containing a mixture o
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Haldane pointed out that because selection mainly acts on heterozygotes, newly arisen dominant mutations are much more likely to be fixed, than are recessive ones, a mechanism now called Haldane's sieve
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One of his earliest tasks was to appoint as assistant director "a man of high quality in the study of genetics" who could become his successor
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Specifically deals with the rate of natural selection in peppered moth evolution
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Haldane met Charlotte Franken, who was a journalist for the Daily Express and married to Jack Burghes
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In a talk given in Cambridge entitled "Science and the Future", Haldane, foreseeing the exhaustion of coal for power generation in Britain, proposed a network of hydrogen-generating windmills
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Published “Sex ratio and unisexual sterility in hybrid animals” in Journal of Genetics — cited 1,495 times.
And relinquished his commission on 1 April 1920, retaining his rank of captain
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Joined the war in Mesopotamia (Iraq), where an enemy bomb severely wounded him
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Won Baly Medal (1913).
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With William Bateson, invited him to become editor in 1933, a post he retained until his death
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Joined Eton, where he experienced severe abuse from senior students for allegedly being arrogant, but was befriended by Julian Huxley
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Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire published a paper on an experiment attempting to test Mendelian inheritance between Japanese waltzing and albino mice
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Better known as the 1913 Michaelis–Menten equation
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His father brought him to the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club to listen to a lecture on Mendelian genetics, which had been recently rediscovered
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His family moved to "Cherwell", a late Victorian house at the outskirts of Oxford with its own private laboratory
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At Oxford Preparatory School (now Dragon School), where he gained a First Scholarship in 1904 to Eton College
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Born 1892-11-05.
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Predicted that the "fertility of the dominants must be 50% greater than that of the recessives"
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And about 99% in 1898, "48 generations are needed for the change [for the dominant to appear]
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