J.B.S. Haldane Quotes

I had it for about fifteen years until I read Lenin and other writers, who showed me what was wrong with our society and how to cure it... Since then I have needed no magnesia.

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.

Where natural selection slackens, new forms may arise which would not survive under more rigid competition, and many ultimately hardy combinations will thus have a chance of arising. ...Thus the distinction between the principal mammalian orders seems to have arisen during an orgy of variation in the early Eocene which followed the doom of the great reptiles... Since that date mammalian evolution has been a slower affair, largely a progressive improvement of the types originally laid down in the Eocene.
Another possible mode of making rapid evolutionary jumps is by hybridisation. ...hybridisation (where the hybrids are fertile) usually causes an epidemic of variation in the second generation which may include new and valuable types which could not have arisen within a species by slower evolution.

An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

We can fortell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be.

My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. ... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy for myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

If He exists the creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles.

Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

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.

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.....I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

Darwin believed that the crossing of two types generally led to a blend, and that consequently bisexual reproduction tended to make a species uniform. He therefore had to postulate some cause constantly at work to keep up the inheritable variation within a species. He very naturally looked to the effects of differences of environment. ...It was shown that Darwin had been wrong in supposing that variations due to environment were inheritable. Selection merely picked out the best available line from a given population, and would not, as Darwin had believed, give rise to an unlimited amount of change.

To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down ones house to roast one's pork.

El universo no sólo es más raro de lo que suponemos. Es más raro de lo que podemos suponer