I’m reading, as time permits, The Inequality of Man. This was written around when Haldane was converting to Marxism. You can tell he was deeply fascinated by the doings in the Soviet Union at the time. Haldane was convinced humanity was in decline, as he thought that was the natural evolution of all species. The only way to arrest that would be for man to alter his evolution. The only way to do that would be to alter his social arrangements.

I suppose it was only natural for him to be fascinated with what the Western intellectuals thought was the greatest social experiment in human relations since the French Revolution. According to his Wiki biography he became a full-throated Marxist in 1937, which was the start of the Yezhovshchina, the most intense of Stalin’s purges. A recurring theme of the time is the academic communists in the West became true believers just when the slaughter in the Soviet Union got going.

Two things keep popping into my head as I read through what is rather dry and painfully out of date genetic discussions in the book. One is that the most of the popular social theories of my grandparent’s age were mostly nonsense. Haldane talks about psychology as being the great savior of mankind because it will lead to the end of crime and mental illness. His fondness for eugenics is a bit chilling, even if what came next was wildly exaggerated.

The second thing is how belief and science are not incompatible. Haldane was an atheist, but he was a Marxist. There’s nothing rational or logical about Marxism. It starts with the assumption that heaven on earth is possible if things can be arranged just the right way. There’s no reason to believe it, but adherents do and they do so in order to be a part of the cause.

Catholics have no logical reason to have warm feelings toward the Pope, but they do because that’s what you do in that religion. Haldane was a rigorous and talented scientist, a brilliant scientist. Yet, he believed in some crazy religions like Marxism and eventually Hinduism. It is often assumed that belief and empiricism operate at polar opposites on the plane of human thought. It is simply not the case. True believers often make the best scientists.

I’m not sure if this is true today, I have no way of knowing, but science had a teleological thread to it well into the modern era. A guy like Haldane set aside God, but he still believed nature had a purpose and a design. Chance really did not figure into the science of his day. Discovering the truths about nature meant solving the purpose. “Why does a duck have a bill?” is a different starting point than “How did the bill win over the known alternatives?”

If I head off to Home Depot for a hammer and return with one, there’s agency involved throughout. If I head off to Home Depot and end up married to a Ukrainian in Florida, it is a series of choices that appear to be chance from a great enough distance.  It may not be chance in the strict sense of the word, but it is certainly not design. Teleology drove a good deal of early science and may be driving current science.