Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  It is an empirical question whether such interactions exist and are non-negligible. In a statistical regression context, one seldom, if ever, models an effect as the result of an interaction alone: the main (additive) effects are usually modeled too. All may contribute with different weights. Interaction may be negligible, or it may not; but it is highly unusual for a factor to matter in an interaction only, and not in its own right. For the example that Haldane addresses, intelligence, what needs to be argued is whether, as an empirical fact, interaction matters for the outcome. And if it does, to determine how much its components contribute in their own right. Merely raising the possibility of an interaction gets us nowhere—which is where Haldane leaves the question.

  By now, Haldane had evolved from his early position, in which he advocated the importance of innate differences and a positive eugenics program, to one in which nothing is clear about innate differences, due to the possibility of interactions, and nothing is clear about eugenics, except that negative eugenics makes sense only in limited cases. Along the way, there are some unexplained reversions to more definite ideas. In his 1954 review of Cyril Darlington’s Facts of Life, he finds new zones of uncertainty.15 He thinks that Darlington “greatly exaggerates the importance of genetically determined differences between human beings,” but may be proved right in the long run, because of a phenomenon later known as “Herrnstein’s syllogism,” but clearly stated here two decades earlier.16 “In so far as nutritional, educational, and other facilities are equalized, and, if the school of Freud is right, in so far as psychological damage by infantile experiences is prevented or cured, human differences within a community will come more and more to depend on differences determined by genetical rather than environmental causes.” To this he adds a qualification that runs directly counter to his own work on population genetics. “But even if they were so determined today, they would not be hereditary, in the ordinary sense of that word, as for example the differences between greyhounds and bulldogs are. This is because men and women are not bred as dogs have been; so two short parents may produce a tall child and conversely, even though children tend to resemble their parents in this respect.” What is heredity if not an alteration in probability and a shift in a distribution, and where did Darlington imply that “determine” meant certainty?

  Darlington cropped up again in this debate when Haldane reviewed the 1962 reissue of Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius, to which Darlington supplied a foreword.17 Here Haldane claims that Galton had refuted his own arguments in favor of eugenics, since he had already conceded that the extremes of his ability distribution were less fecund than the mediocre. “Centripetal selection was discovered in sparrows by Bumpus in 1898, and in snails by Weldon in 1901. It is a component of ‘genetic homeostasis,’ which makes it much harder than Galton thought to change the characters of a population by selection.” Since Galton was proposing to artificially apply directional selection, and as Haldane himself had shown, along with Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher, that directional selection would inexorably shift the gene distribution, the argument is inscrutable. If Haldane means that centripetal selection is unavoidable in the current human population, he is wrong, given what we know about variation in a normally distributed population. As a purely hypothetical exercise, employ the Stalinist methods that Haldane admired so much, but in the reverse direction, and simply shoot the lower half of the population. The new breeding population now has a higher mean. Nor is this an accurate representation of Galton’s settled position, which was that the lower classes of ability were slightly more fecund in recent times, but had been slightly less fecund through most of human history, where fecund means leaving survivors. Hence the evolution of human ability, which Galton wished to actively direct through eugenics (though he did not use that word in his Hereditary Genius).

  The following year, Haldane contributed a piece to a CIBA foundation symposium, on the theme “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years.” He returned to human abilities. “Some successful people believe that everyone could do as well as themselves if they tried, others that rare innate gifts are needed. On what are probably quite inadequate grounds I consider that the truth is between these extremes.” Vague and safe enough. But now eugenics was reanimated, at least for physiology.

  The recognition of human physiological diversity may have enormous consequences. As soon as its genetical basis is understood large-scale negative eugenics will become possible. There may be no need to forbid marriage; few people will wish to marry a spouse with whom they share a recessive gene for microcephaly, congenital deafness, or cystic disease of the pancreas, so that a quarter of their children are expected to develop this condition. I cannot predict the later steps which will make positive eugenics possible, since we know the genetic basis of few desirable characters.18

  With regard to race, he was agnostic. “I do not believe in racial equality, though of course there is plenty of overlap; but I have no idea who surpasses whom in what.” He then indulged in a raft of speculations about breeding varieties of men optimized to perform well as full-time space travelers—for example, space travelers might not need legs in zero gravity. But his position was to be refined again the following year.

  In 1964, Haldane wrote the chapter “The Proper Social Application of the Knowledge of Human Genetics” for the Penguin collection The Science of Science.19 Considering whether “Good and bad qualities are hereditary,” he calculates that the probability of inheriting a specific configuration of genes responsible for a “good” quality has to be very low; therefore it won’t happen often and could not be a basis for social policy. His argument here simply assumes that a character is entirely epistatic, depending on the interaction of the specific configuration of genes involved. He assumes that the character is entirely present or entirely absent. Characters that are not binary, and are inherited additively to a greater or lesser degree (though they may have an epistatic component), do not fall under this analysis, specifically intelligence. But Haldane knew all this well enough.

  He goes on to consider whether “Higher social classes are congenitally superior.” He now supposes this is true to a modest degree, and therefore that the upper classes should be encouraged to breed—a reversion to his original opinion from the 1930s. His suggestions for positive eugenics remain the same: socialist engineering of the class system by limiting the ability to bequeath wealth and eliminating access to expensive schools. The idea seems to be that those parents would then have to hedge their bets by having more children, rather than investing all their resources in just a few. He also suggests cultural changes to the sexual mores of the upper classes, based on his enthusiastic reading of the Kinsey Report. He is noncommittal about whether mean genetic endowment for intelligence is falling over time. He accepts that modern medicine is slowly building up genetic load by neutralizing natural selection, but hopes that some solution will be found in the future. Addressing whether “Some human races are congenitally superior to others in respect of socially valuable innate characters,” he reiterates his agnostic stance from the previous year, but adds that he doubts if historical performance can be used as a guide to inherent capability.

  After following Haldane’s endless twists and turns, now coy and now forthcoming, on the core issues of social biology, it is worth pointing out that he conducted no original research of his own on any of its topics. His long list of several hundred technical papers covers many other subjects, but not those. He did no relevant experimental or observational work on the subject—unlike Hermann Muller, who had worked with separated twins—nor did he do any theoretical work about the specific techniques used by behavior geneticists, nor did he even reanalyze data gathered by others. Though he commented often on the broader questions, and was regularly asked for his opinion, which was always taken seriously, he did so from only a reading knowledge of the field.

  An evaluation of Haldane’s references to the literature over the years s
hows that his reading was well up to date in the early 1930s but badly out of date and inadequate, even idiosyncratic, in the 1960s. People have a widespread inclination to take the opinions of anyone who is considered a geneticist seriously when it comes to any topic affected by genetics. Authority, especially in the case of an eminent scientist like Haldane, is seldom questioned. But it should be questioned. Haldane’s own fields lay mainly in mathematical population genetics, the biochemistry of genes, general physiology, the statistical issues raised by small samples, and, to a lesser extent, some aspects of animal behavior—an impressive list, but not directly relevant to the topics at hand. The facts about human social biology are contingent, and can only be informed by real data. But even leaving all that aside, Haldane was also often flippant and insincere in his arguments. This suggests that he did not take his own opinions on the topic at all seriously.

  12. ANIMAL BEHAVIOR FROM LONDON TO INDIA

  Once outside the enveloping folds of the Party structure, but still convinced of Communist ends and methods, Haldane subsided into morose discontent through the rest of the 1950s. Professional frustration was involved in this. He had not been offered the command of organizations that could be used to carry out research programs. He was anti-establishment, but the Party didn’t want him either. Some vignettes from this period illustrate his frustration and unpredictable behavior.

  John Maynard Smith had written to Haldane in October 1947 to ask for advice, leading with “Dear Comrade” and closing with “Yours fraternally.”1 He was already twenty-seven years old and living in Reading, employed as an aircraft technician working on structural design. Earlier he had studied engineering at Cambridge and there had joined the Communist Party, which he had worked for during the war and was still a member of. Maynard Smith had decided that science interested him more than aircraft, and wanted to meet Haldane to hear his thoughts on possible programs of study at UCL. “As an explanation of the ‘Comrade’, I am at present secretary of the Reading Branch of the Party—a fact for which you are partly responsible.” Maynard Smith had long been an admirer of Haldane from a distance, after hearing about him as a schoolboy at Eton, where JBS was then considered disreputable. A copy of Haldane’s Possible Worlds (or perhaps The Inequality of Man) in the Eton library drew Maynard Smith in further.2 Haldane responded positively with “Dear Comrade Smith,” and plenty of advice. Comrade Smith ended up starting all over by doing another B.Sc. at UCL, this time in zoology, with the long-term intention of applying mathematical techniques to problems in evolutionary theory, topics germane to Haldane.

  Maynard Smith and Haldane seem to have become close remarkably quickly, more than just comrades, though Maynard Smith later wondered whether he would have gone to UCL if he had known in advance of Haldane’s explosive temperament.3 He was “a very difficult person to work with. He was one of those people who liked the feeling of adrenaline circulating, I think. He enjoyed being either angry or afraid.” Nevertheless they got on. “I knew him well, obviously, I worked with him, I loved him. I was, I think, close to him. But I never quite understood him, and why should one? Why should one expect to understand one’s friends?” Maynard Smith admired Haldane’s intellect, “I mean, he was staggeringly intelligent, I mean, there’s no question about that,” but noted that “he was not a naturalist, his skills were not from natural history, they were essentially from mathematics.” Haldane’s method when approaching any problem, from biochemistry to genetics, was to formulate a mathematical model that captured the essential elements but was simple enough to solve and make deductions from. In this Maynard Smith thought JBS uniquely skilled, but only as an applied mathematician—“I don’t think he was a particularly good mathematician.”4

  When Haldane wrote out his will on December 12, 1951, he made Maynard Smith his executor and the recipient of the Journal of Genetics in the event of Helen Spurway’s death—she was the recipient of all goods and effects otherwise. One of the witnesses was Peter Medawar. Haldane estimated that the Journal would provide 100 pounds of spare money per year.5 This act shows remarkable trust in Maynard Smith after just a few years. Moreover, Haldane made no mention of his own family in this will. The estrangement that had set in before the war was long and deep; his mother, Louisa Kathleen, was still alive, as was his sister, Naomi Mitchison. He left his body to science, and if they had no use for it, forbade any headstone.

  Maynard Smith later confessed to Richard Dawkins that he, too, had been under the sway of Lamarxism at this time. “I was still enough of a Marxist to feel that . . . that there was something very suspect about the classical Mendelian attitude in genetics. And indeed, I spent a substantial amount of time doing an experiment which was not, so to speak, intended to demonstrate the falsity of the inheritance of acquired characters, but was deliberately looking for a situation in which an acquired character would be inherited.” Inevitably, it didn’t work. “I did quite a bit of work on the acclimatisation of fruit flies to a change of temperatures. I showed that they can acclimatise during their lifetime. And then I bred from flies that I’d acclimatised, and compared them with flies that I’d not acclimatised. And it will not surprise you to learn that there was no difference, in other words, the acquired character was not inherited.” But he did not publish this failure. In retrospect, Maynard Smith thought that the Lysenko episode helped to drive himself away from the Communist Party, a process that culminated in his response to the Hungary Invasion of 1956, which made the break solid. But, as we have seen, neither of these events had that effect on Haldane himself.

  In 1949, Spurway, and later Haldane, too, became interested in the study of animal behavior and its pioneer, Konrad Lorenz. That July, Lorenz was in Cambridge attending a Society for Experimental Biology symposium, where Spurway appears to have met him. According to a story attributed to the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who was at the conference, an affair developed between Lorenz and Spurway, though both were married. Lorenz had a wife back in Austria who had to turn from gynecology to farming in order to support their family. He had already established his reputation in ethology before the war, but had spent five years in the Russian Gulag, ultimately transferring through thirteen different prisons before his release in early 1949. His affair with Spurway is said to have lasted over a year, but had later repercussions. In the meantime, Haldane himself had joined Spurway in working on the evolutionary aspects of ethology.

  At a conference on instinct held in Paris in June 1954, Desmond Morris ran into JBS and Spurway—“spiky, shrill voiced”—and also Konrad Lorenz, though he noticed that Lorenz seemed to be avoiding the Haldanes. When he raised this evasion with them at dinner, he was given a frank answer.

  ‘Shall I tell him?’ screeched Helen Spurway. Haldane paused for a while and then nodded. ‘I have been fucked by Konrad Lorenz!’, she shouted at the top of her voice, staring at me with a strange smile on her face.6

  Morris later learned from Tinbergen that there was more to it. The Haldanes had attempted to persuade Lorenz to inseminate Spurway so that she could have a child—JBS was infertile and going on sixty-three. When Lorenz refused to cooperate, Haldane is said to have threatened to report him to some of his Russian friends, who would have been able to pack members of Lorenz’s family still in East Germany off to the Gulag. Whether this was a grotesque joke or not—Haldane may well have had those kinds of contacts—it supposedly gave Lorenz a horror of the Haldanes. Since much of this information is at third-hand, it should be treated with caution. But Tinbergen himself retained a strongly negative view of Haldane, perhaps because of this incident.7 There are two other clues. First, when Ernst Mayr visited the Haldanes in India a few years later, he found to his embarrassment (so he said) that Spurway became infatuated with him, with Haldane’s encouragement.8 Second, Peter Medawar reported confidences from Julian Huxley that Haldane was not “physically equipped to perform sexually.”9 This matches earlier stories from “Chatty’s addled salon” days about alleged incapacities (see above). It ma
y be that Haldane’s wounds from the First World War were responsible.

  Lorenz featured prominently in the contributions made by Spurway and Haldane to ethology. Spurway published a minutely considered review of Lorenz’s popular book on animal behavior King Solomon’s Ring that suggested, through its exaggerated interest, that hostility had begun to dominate affection.10 Politics had intruded. The title of the review, “Behold My Child, the Nordic Dog!,” immediately suggested National Socialism. Nothing in King Solomon’s Ring is political, but Spurway made heavy work of some common manner-of-speaking phrases used by Lorenz to explain ideas to his lay audience. He had casually speculated that some more aggressive domestic breeds of dogs owed this to their higher “amount” of “wolf’s blood.” Spurway took a harpoon to this guppy, though her phrasing strongly suggests ventriloquism on the part of Haldane. What could Lorenz possibly mean by “quantity” of “blood,” and how could he ignore the possibility of recent selection for aggression, as opposed to persistence of ancestral aggression? Spurway gratuitously speculated that the problems with Lorenz’s thinking were linked to his homeland of Austria, where “discussion of evolution has been impossible, not only under the Nazis but under the Roman Catholic Church.” Here she blithely ignores the effects of communist orthodoxy in circles more familiar to her.

  At the Paris conference, Morris and his wife were treated to an exhibition. “Haldane, for some reason, was at his most outrageous and rebellious, and we provided the perfect audience for his antics.” JBS demonstrated how to cross a busy road by extending his arms and barging through traffic, on the principle that he was signaling that he was bigger; somehow he survived. He alarmed the conference organizers by setting piles of paper on fire to illustrate a point during a lecture. When Karl von Frisch described his bee-dance language experiments, he wept openly and rose to mystify the German by introducing information-theoretical improvements from the floor. Vexed by some slight during a meal, he threw fish on the floor and stormed around the room. Touring the French countryside in a bus, the Haldanes disconcerted the other passengers by intimately caressing each other, producing a novel mating signal via the roiling flesh on JBS’s bald head, as Morris saw it. At newly discovered Lascaux, Spurway confounded their tour guides by shrilly insisting that their rhinoceros rock-art was not a rhinoceros after all.11