Daedalus

Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

1. New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

2. Typographical errors and hyphenation inconsistencies were silently corrected.

3. The text version is coded for italics and the like mark-ups i.e.,

(a) italics are indicated thus italic; (b) small-caps are indicated thus +CAPS+; (c) Images are indicated as [Illustration: (with narration...)] (d) Footnotes were moved to the end of the book.

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DAEDALUS

SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

DAEDALUS, +OR SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE+

By J. B. S. Haldane

ICARUS, +OR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE+

By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST, +OR MAN AND HIS THREE FACES+

By F. G. Crookshank, M.C., F.R.C.P.

WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES

By Prof. A. M. Low

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

DAEDALUS

Science and the Future

A PAPER READ TO THE HERETICS, CAMBRIDGE ON FEBRUARY 4TH, 1923.

J. B. S. HALDANE

Sir William Dunn Reader in Bio-chemistry Cambridge University

+NEW YORK+

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

+681 FIFTH AVENUE+

Copyright, 1924

By E. P. Dutton & Company

Part 2

All Rights Reserved

First Printing, April, 1924 Second Printing, May, 1924 Third Printing, August, 1924 Fourth Printing, October, 1924 Fifth Printing, December, 1924 Sixth Printing, December, 1924 Seventh Printing, April, 1925 Eighth Printing, June, 1925 Ninth Printing, June, 1925

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

I have slightly expanded certain parts of this paper since reading it. It has therefore probably lost any unity which it may once have possessed. It will be criticized for its undue and unpleasant emphasis on certain topics. This is necessary if people are to be induced to think about them, and it is the whole business of a university teacher to induce people to think.

DAEDALUS

SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE

As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. These form the chief parts of the picture, but somewhere in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous, and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in the combat. It is possible, after all, that this view is correct.

Had I been privileged to watch a battle three years later, the general aspect would have been very similar, but there would have been fewer men and more shell-bursts. There would probably, however, have been one very significant addition. The men would have been running, with mad terror in their eyes, from gigantic steel slugs, which were deliberately, relentlessly, and successfully pursuing them.

The other picture is of three Europeans in India looking at a great new star in the milky way. These were apparently all of the guests at a large dance who were interested in such matters. Amongst those who were at all competent to form views as to the origin of this cosmoclastic explosion, the most popular theory attributed it to a collision between two stars, or a star and a nebula. There seem, however, to be at least two possible alternatives to this hypothesis. Perhaps it was the last judgment of some inhabited world, perhaps a too successful experiment in induced radio-activity on the part of some of the dwellers there. And perhaps also these two hypotheses are identical, and what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.

These two scenes suggest, very briefly, a part of the case against science. Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler’s even more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage to the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the machine-minder engaged on repetition-work the goal and ideal to which humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science may throw some light on these questions.

But first we may consider for a moment, the question of whether there is any hope of stopping the progress of scientific research. It is after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now. In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be practically impossible, and I am inclined to suspect that Mr. Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this state of things. The late M. Joseph Reinach, an able and not wholly illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it.

I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear. Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table. And competitive nationalism, even if war is wholly or largely prevented, will hardly forego the national advantages accruing from scientific research.

If we look at the other most probable alternative the prospect is little more hopeful. In this country the labour party alone among political organizations includes the fostering of research in its official programme. Indeed as far as biological research is concerned labour may prove a better master than capitalism, and there can be little doubt that it would be equally friendly to physical and chemical research if these came to lead immediately to shortened hours rather than to unemployment. In particular there is perhaps reason to think that that form of sentimentalism which hampers medical research in this country by legislation would be less likely to flourish in a robust and selfish labour party of the Australian type than in parties whose members enjoy the leisure which seems necessary to the development of such emotional luxuries.

It is of course possible that civilisation may collapse throughout the world as it has done in parts of Russia, and science with it, but such an event would in all probability, only postpone the problem for a few thousand years. And even in Russia we must not forget that first-rate scientific research is still being carried on.

The possibility has been suggested--I do not know how seriously--that the progress of science may cease through lack of new problems for investigation. Mr. Chesterton in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a book written fifteen years or so ago, prophesied that hansom-cabs would still be in existence a hundred years hence owing to a cessation of invention. Within six years there was a hansom-cab in a museum, and now that romantic but tardy vehicle is a memory like the trireme, the velocipede, and the 1907 Voisin biplane. I do not suggest that Mr. Chesterton be dragged--a heavier Hector--behind the last hansom-cab, but I do contend that, in so far as he claims to be a prophet rather than the voice of one crying in the wilderness, he may be regarded as negligible for the purpose of our discussion. I shall try shortly to show how far from complete are any branches of science at the present time.

But first a word on Mr. H. G. Wells might not be out of place. The very mention of the future suggests him. There are two points which I wish to make about Mr. Wells. In the first place, considered as a serious prophet, as opposed to a fantastic romancer, he is singularly modest. In 1902, for example, in a book called “Anticipations,” he gave it as his personal opinion that by 1950 there would be heavier than air flying machines capable of practical use in war. That, said he, was his own view, though he was well aware that it would excite considerable ridicule. I propose in this paper to make no prophecies rasher than the above.

The second and more important point is that he is a generation behind the time. When his scientific ideas were formed, flying and radiotelegraphy, for example, were scientific problems, and the centre of scientific interest still lay in physics and chemistry. Now these are commercial problems, and I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology. A generation hence it may be elsewhere, and the views expressed in this paper will appear as modest, conservative, and unimaginative as do many of those of Mr. Wells to-day.

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