Cabinet 25: Insects

Cabinet #25

by J.B.S. Haldane, George Pendle, Margaret Wertheim

The sheer numbers are scientists estimate that at any one time there are ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on the earth, the group's more than 900,000 different known types accounting for some 80 percent of the world's total species. Yet despite the ubiquity of insects, our knowledge about their true character and extent is riddled with gaps--many experts believe that for every one insect species that has been described and cataloged by entomologists, as many as 30 others remain unidentified and unstudied. Cabinet 25 includes interviews with Eugene Thacker on swarming and with Deborah Gordon on colony organization, J.B.S. Haldane on the reasons why insects are thankfully small, George Pendle on Virgil's elaborate funeral for his pet house fly, Margaret Wertheim on insect vision, Viktoria Tkaczyk on Robert Hooke's flea and Steven Connor on the cultural history of the fly. Plus, an interview with food historian Harold McGee, Frances Richard on U.S. government standards for fruits and vegetables, Sina Najafi in conversation with accent coach Sam Schwa, Sandy Zipp on the aphorisms carved into rock by auto-didact John Samuelson, Louis Kaplan on Arthur Mole's "living photographs" and Joshua Glenn on the semiotics of the Coca-Cola bottle.

112 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was a British geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and popularizer of science who opened new paths of research in population genetics and evolution.

Son of the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford (M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932), and the University of London (1933–57).

In the 1930s Haldane became a Marxist. He joined the British Communist Party and assumed editorship of the party’s London paper, the Daily Worker. Later, he became disillusioned with the official party line and with the rise of the controversial Soviet biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. In 1957 Haldane moved to India, where he took citizenship and headed the government Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Orissa.

Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Sewall Wright, in separate mathematical arguments based on analyses of mutation rates, population size, patterns of reproduction, and other factors, related Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s concepts of heredity. Haldane also contributed to the theory of enzyme action and to studies in human physiology. He possessed a combination of analytic powers, literary abilities, a wide range of knowledge, and a force of personality that produced numerous discoveries in several scientific fields and proved stimulating to an entire generation of research workers.