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I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

John B. S. Haldane

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John B. S. Haldane
Age: 72 †
Born: 1892
Born: November 5
Died: 1964
Died: December 1
Biochemist
Biologist
Geneticist
Physiologist
Scientist
University Teacher
Hartford
Connecticut
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Natural
Occurred
Science
Selection
Different
Studied
Would
Convinced
Evolution
Views
Biologists
Quite
Biologist
Sure
Genetics

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Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
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Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
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I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.
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You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
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We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.
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Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.
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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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This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.
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I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.
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A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
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I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now 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 think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.
John B. S. Haldane
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Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
John B. S. Haldane
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I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
John B. S. Haldane
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The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
John B. S. Haldane
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Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch, and being killed with an automatic pistol or shell in place of a dagger or a battle-axe.
John B. S. Haldane
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If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.
John B. S. Haldane
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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.
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So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.
John B. S. Haldane
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An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
John B. S. Haldane