A Review of 'Possible Worlds' by J.B.S. Haldane

This book is a lucid scrying pool amidst inthe dark and murky inter-war years. It is like stumbling through a grey andmisty land and discovering a cave within which crouches a wizard who gazes intoclear and glittering pool crystal visions of a future time.

We are in that future time right now and ithas turned out to be just as dark and murky as the bog around the wizards cave,but we can look upwards, at the point of view of his scrying pool, wherepresumably he looks down on us from the past, and wave 'Hello' to the Wizard.

We are looking at Haldane looking at us andthat is where much of the interest arises.

THETRENCHES

I read this based on its near-unanimousrecommendation by anyone involved in the life sciences and I was surprised,(though perhaps I should not have been), to find another WW1 connection. Aswell as occupying seemingly every role possible related to genetics and biologyin the inter-war years, Haldane was a WW1 veteran, a grenades expert with theBlack Watch (for non-military and U.S. readers the Black Watch is generallyconsidered a very high-competence if not elite regiment).

I would love to shove Haldane, the atheistcommunist, Studdert-Kennedy, the fallen Anglican and Sebastian Junger, themedieval knight and not-quite Fascist, all in a room together and have themtalk it out. It would be a hell of a debate.

A VERYBEAUTIFUL MIND

'Possible Worlds' was originally a series ofnewspaper articles written for 'the ordinary man' 'in intervals betweenresearch work and teaching and largely on railway trains'.

These are about science, biology, thescientific life, the future of humanity and Haldane. Many are short, all areclear. A very blessed clarity considering the dithering and extemperousblathering and 'chummy' simplifications of much science writing both now andthen. Haldane writes like a man who does not have much time and earnestly wantsto get to the point.

Some are so simple and so clear and highlightor describe a concept so exactly that nearly 100 years later they are stillbeing quoted mentioned and recommended today

'On Scales' regards thinking about reaches orscales of time and distance far beyond our immediate ken. If you have watchedthe Sagan video, or its modern repetitions then you have seen a visual versionof this essay.

'On Being the Right Size' is quoted ormentioned in many discussions of biodynamics I know of;

"You can drop a mouse down athousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slightshock and walks away, so long as the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, aman is broken, a horse splashes."

HALDANEAND TERRIBLE AND QUESTIONABLE IDEAS

Haldane had a lot of sketchy ideas, the mostprovably-awful are probably being a freestyle vivisectionist, a Communist and aChemical Warfare enthusiast.

Haldane grew up experimenting on animals withhis dad, he was quite willing to experiment on himself, to the extent ofdrinking dilute hydrochloric acid, sealing himself inside sealed atmospherechambers and slowly removing the oxygen and attempting experimental divingsuits at the age of 13, (not all at the same time). If you added some sadismand race-hatred he would probably have done well in various German or Japaneselabs during the oncoming war, but Haldane had little hatred in him, and no sadism,he seems to have regarded the animals around him, and his own body, the way afarmer regards a horse or dog; useful, interesting, necessary, valuable, butnot sacred. He reported that, (like Junger), he enjoyed killing peoplequite a bit. He was an explosives expert, wrote a book on the benefits ofchemical warfare and thought it was stupid not to use more mustard gas than wedid.

He belongs in that very slightly discomfortingmargin of humanity who will quite happily take living beings, including themselves,apart in laboratories and their fellow man apart in wars, but won't do itfreestyle, for pleasure, for no reason or to anyone who asks them not to(except in war).

In 'Some Enemies of Science' Haldanerecommends the complete deregulation of vivisection in the interests of scienceand of popular science.

"... I killed two rats in the course ofexperimental work intended to advance medical science. One of them, if we canjudge from human experience (and we have no more direct means of evaluating theconsciousness of animals), died after a period of rather pleasant delirium likethat of alcoholic intoxication. The other had convulsions, and may have been inpain for three or four minutes. I should be very thankful if I knew that Ishould suffer no more than it did before my death. It therefore seemsridiculous that, wheras my wife" [she had poisoned rats] "isencouraged by the Government and the Press, I should be compelled to apply tothe President of the Royal Society and other eminent man of science forsignature to an application to the already overworked Home Secretary, before Ican even kill a mouse in a slightly novel manner."

Haldanes arguments for the deregulation ofVivisection are strong, coherent, logical and possibly a little mad. His unrelentinghatred for the 'Anti-Vivisectionists' whose hypocrisy, delusion and hatred ofscience is stopping him from killing mice in novel ways, is genuine, deeplyfelt and extremely expressed. He is really outraged about the mouse-chopping.

If Haldanes Lassaiz-Fiare Vivisection policyhad been made real, the results would have been interesting, but probably morebad than good. Mouse-chopping should be licensed.

Like most high-I.Q. lefties in the inter-waryears, Haldane was a Marxist and a Communist. He was wrong and held on to theidea too long. You can tell how sane an inter-war western intellectual was bythe date they stopped believing in Communism. Cordwainer Smith, Rebecca Westand Bertrand Russel; quite soon, the French; never.

Haldane went full-Commie in the mid 30's, whenthe saner types were already leaving. He objected to Lysenkos imaginarygenetics in 1949 but didn't leave and finally resigned from the Communist Partyin 1956. In 1957 he resigned from being British over the Suez incident and wentoff to spend his final years in India. His stupid murder-god had failed infront of him, Britian was still masturbating to dreams of Imperialism so hetook the third way. I think he was also attracted to India because  it washere that the direct connection with nature, vast range of life and ability todeal with large populations was closest to the experimental world of his earlyyouth. (He grew up as the son of an aristocrat-scientist the late 19thcentury.) By the mid 20th century the U.K. was even more intensely urbanisedand Haldanes dream of widespread 'Citizen Science' based on animal collections,(and vivisection), and interacting with nature was looking less and lesspossible. But in India, more space, more nature, and a great diversity ofpeople.

In 1925 he also wrote 'Callinicus: A Defenceof Chemical Warfare', which I have not read but his defence of Mustard Gas in'Possible Worlds' is based on the relative bodily destructive power of machineguns and Mustard Gas. His logic is very like that of the pro-Vivisectionargument which is "If we are eating animals and hunting animals why can'tI chop them up when I like since I have very good reasons for doing so?""Likewise, if we are machine gunning each other and bombing each other(ask me how), why not gas each other since it will have the same effect &less human bodies will be destroyed in the process?"

Against Haldanes iron logic I can only offerthe midwits response of 'I think that might not turn out the way you think itwill'.

He was also an atheist, which I don't consideramongst his terrible and questionable ideas but it is slightly boring from amodern-day perspective, listening to him go on about it is a bit dull. Itsinteresting to hear from his perspective about how cowardly and useless mostChristian Padres were in the war, even more interesting that he signals out forrare praise; the Quakers, for their Pacifistic ambulance-driving and more war service.

DON'TTRUST THE SCIENCE BRO

Haldane has largely (and inadvertently)convinced me that scientists shouldn't get involved in politics. They have nointuitive grasp on what politics is on any level, assuming it to be somekind of social machine to produce 'optimum results'.

They should be consulted closely on theirspecial subjects, should not set policy and generally should be kept in specialboxes far from the levers of power.

This applies especially to biologists andother life-science types, especially the more intelligent sort. Their deepunderstanding of the processes of nature and the human body has been bought atthe price of any intuitive grasp of the meaning of nature or the human body anda scientist, if allowed near policy, if asked not to investigate but to decide,will proceed on the basis of optimisation towards a concrete goal, as if theywere dealing with a malfunctioning machine.

This is not what society, a nation or humanityis.

Furthermore, there are politicians whom it isnecessary to have make decisions and who must be fired afterwards. During Covidmost possible choices carried serious moral hazard. Decisions had to be made.Those decisions would by necessity have terrible effects on someone. After theemergency had passed those decisions must be rejected by the very populationsthat required them and the decision-makers disposed of. This is unpleasant butit is the nature of things. If we had hyper-expert scientists actually makingthose decisions instead of advising on them, firstly they would proceed on thebasis of blind optimisation as stated above, secondly when we inevitably had toturn against them after the emergency was over, we would lose, not afundamentally-replaceable politician, but a useful expert, and finally becausethe necessary moral hazard of those choices would ultimately reflect not on oneindividual or administration but on the scientist and on science itself. Fauci,before he dies, may well drag virology in the U.S. back into the stone age,purely as part of the counter-reaction to his mistakes.

EUGENICS

We live in a new age of Eugenics, though wedon't quite realise it yet.

Really, any form of Eugenics that becomescommon enough stops being thought of as 'Eugenics'. It’s not a completelysliding scale but it’s pretty slippery. Condoms, I.U.D.s the Pill, sonic scansof developing foetus' and risk-free Abortions are all fruit of the Eugenictree.

Hasidic Jewish populations are already usinggenome sequencing to avoid dangerous genetic combinations in their (arguablyquite inbred) community.

Genome sequencing is becoming cheaper andcheaper, more and more accurate, and the power of algorithms to predict andcontrol for certain desired qualities in the genome is becoming more and moreeffective.

(Reading between the lines of variousGeneticists, its probably possible to run an algo on a range of IVF foetusesand select for high I.Q. Even though I.Q. is insanely polygenic and we have noidea how it works, the algo doesn't need to understand that and can just findrelationships regardless. The reason this hasn't been done publicly isn'tbecause it can't be done but because Geneticists are nuclear-avoidant oftalking about it or doing it.

Theoretical - likely someone has already triedselecting IVF foetuses for I.Q. and these children have been born.)

Haldane only writes directly about this oncein 'Possible Worlds', though as a Genetor-Prime of the British Empire, he knewas much about it as anyone of his generation, and as the ever-lucid andprescient Haldane, he could predict more than most of his generation.

In 'Eugenics and Social Reform', Haldane is..mixed. Ultimately he thinks it’s necessary and probably inevitable but weshouldn't do it now as we don't know what we are doing and it’s probably morecomplex than we think.

On 'feeble-mindedness', the majority of whichI take to be Downs Syndrome, Haldane might be surprised that it is not ahereditary problem, that we can't find it in the parents genes but can find itthrough embryo testing and more commonly, through scans, and that we arelargely utterly ruthless in aborting the vast majority of such children.Perhaps he wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps our relationship with DownsSyndrome is more like how our relationship with Eugenics will proceed, not butgrand unified programmes but by quiet invisible decisions made by parents indoctors offices, made with ever-increasing data and in invisibly-shiftingsocial consensus, and made silently and not spoken of.

What Haldane seems to be saying is thatthe rich, intelligent and successful, inevitably put themselves out of geneticbuisness by not breeding at a replacement level. They are always outweighed bythe poor or common who breed a lot more. This seems to have been true inHaldanes time, looks to have been true for much of European history, and istrue now. (Despite going on about this at length and being married twice, andbeing pretty well-off, Haldane had no children.)

Yet we still have rich, successful andintelligent people. Whether we have as much as we did in Haldanes time it’shard to tell but it doesn't seem that different. 

Probably we do not really understand how thisworks at all, especially on a larger scale and across deep reaches of time.

'On Eugenics and Social Reform' is a must-readbecause of the ideas it deals with, its weaving sometimes-ironic arguments andthe pretty explosive mind-bombs, both when considered as cold intellectualarguments which might apply the same from his time to ours, and for thewild and whacky cultural Messines-level mines woven into every part of it asyou listen to an aristocratic, Marxist, inter-war atheist high-Anglo scientistdrop... comments;

"It was only the emancipation of thenegroes which saved the United States from twice its present black population.This event gave them access to alcohol, venereal diseases, andconsumption."

I think (if I understand his totalargument), that I might agree with Haldane? Eugenics is probably inevitable,but we don't understand it and probably shouldn't do it, especially on a largescale or in a top-down way. Hopefully, like Pratchetts Dwaven Bread, it willremain 'probably inevitable', inevitably.

POSSIBLEWORLDS

Probably Haldanes most beautiful idea is inthe essay which gives this collection its name; 'Possible Worlds'.

This is basically that Dr Doolittle willcreate a University of Animal Minds to help unify our theories of physics andphilosophy into a Unified theory of Everything.

Perhaps only Haldane or someone very like himcould have come close to having this idea because only Haldane was enough of abatty polymath to allow it. He was deeply enmeshed in the life sciences,genetics, the world of blood and animals, and was intelligent enough to also bedeeply interested in and largely up to date in physics, mathematics, logic andfor him the natural companion of those; philosophy.

He was thinking always of the Whole Thing, ofReality itself, and all these little strands were just ways of getting thereand looking at it.

One of Haldanes predictions that never came astrue as he would have wished was that we would 'talk to the animals'. In hisfuture Humanity would gain a deep understanding of animal psychology andcommunication and in effect, be able to communicate with and understand theworld-views of other living beings.

This has not worked out that well but Haldanessynthesis is that the fundamental nature of reality is necessarily opaque to usbecause the way we are made fundamentally limits us from apprehending it. Asenmeshed in both biology and philosophy as he was, he could conceive ofsomething like a Fundamental Human Blind Spot. This wouldn't really be a 'spot'but whole areas and methods of thought that would be not only impossible but,more importantly, inconcievable, to us.

Like there are ways of thinking and perceivingthat you literally can't think about and if you try to conceive of them thenyour mind will just loop around them like an ant walking along a mobius strip,without ever even considering them.

The point here being; how do you try tounderstand that which you are inherently made not to understand?

In 'Possible Worlds' Haldane tries to beginimagining the philosophy of reality of a Bee, or a hyper-intelligent Barnacle.Since they occupy reality in a fundamentally different way their structure ofreality, the pattern of their thought, perceptions and therefore, philosophy,would be utterly different.

Yet if we accept that we are all perceivingthe same Reality, the Bee and the Barnacle would both have world-views which ultimatelycoincide or match up with ours. So if we could learn the 'language' of, orenter in communion with, Bee and Barnacle, we could learn something of theirParadigm and that might help us see the gaps in our own, to ask the questionspreviously inconceivable to us.

(A slightly boring and lessened version ofthis which might sound less weird and whacky to a modern reader is like in aStar Trek world where there are a bunch of forehead aliens and we can fly offto this or that alien world and talk to them and learn their weird alienphysics and philosophies which are all very strange and different but which stillactually work, if we could learn them, we might understand more about reality.Except we don't have aliens but we do have Bees and Barnacles.)

THE LASTJUDGEMENT

Haldanes last article is a deep-time ScienceFiction story in the report of a Venusian historian describing the death ofEarth in forty million years time.

This future is one in which humanity hasdiverged into two species which, curiously, match the dystopian futuresimagined by many 20tC authors; the engineered, happy, incurious andunadventurous sybarites similar to the humanity of 'Brave New World', and theVenusian Collective who are a mix of the Borg and the final evolution of thesociety depicted in 'We'.

This is a reality where rocketry is very veryhard, (Haldane had not yet seen the V2s landing on London, let alone the SpaceRace), and where moving between planets takes multi-thousand-year plans,including engineering specific new versions of Humanity to live on them.Therefore, Humanity barely leaves earth and only a bunch of radicals get toVenus. Terran Man monopolises the tidal gravatic power of the Moon to energisetheir vast aesthetic schemes of global pleasure, which speeds up the moonsdescent into the earth. Terran man can't be bothered to stop this andeventually the two crash into each other, though not without a few thousandyears of excitingly apocalyptic but still-liveable earth with the moon giganticin the sky, vast discs and spumes of lunar matter forming a silver river in theair, mountains quaking, seas rolling around the planet, its pretty great stuff.

Haldane absorbed in Deep Time and the meaning,if any, of humanity, exhibits all of his elegance, imagination, mediocrity,didactic authoritarianism and weakness.

"If it is true, as the higher religionsteach, that the individual can only achieve a good life by conforming to a plangreater than his own, it is our duty to realize the possible magnitude of sucha plan, whether it be God's or man's. Only so can we come to see that most goodactions merely serve to stave off the constant inroads of chaos on the humanrace. They are necessary, but not sufficient. They cannot be regarded as activeco-operation in the Plan. The man who creates a new idea, whether expressed inlanguage, art or invention., may at least be co-operating actively. The averageman cannot do this, but he must learn that the highest of his duties is toassist those who are creating and the worst of his sins to hinder them."