28 quotes
An inordinate fondness for beetles.
Another possible mode of making rapid evolutionary jumps is by hybridisation.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
Our ancestors were mostly rather rare creatures.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.
Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927)
The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)
An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
his obituary by Maynard Smith in Nature 206 (1965)
No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.
You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes.
Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927)
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923)
I do not propose to argue the case for evolution, which I regard as being quite as well proven as most other historical facts, but to discuss its possible causes, which are certainly debatable.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
The tendency of applied science is to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move turns at last and extinguishes the evil at its source.
We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
At Oxford, the young Haldane was frequently asked whether he was related to the "famous John Scott Haldane", his father, and he would answer "That depends on whether you consider identity to be a relationship."
Comparative parasitology supports the evolutionary hypothesis. If two animals have a common ancestor, their parasites are likely to be descended from those of the ancestor. This principle has been applied with considerable effect to the classification of frogs and other groups.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
If much of the investigation here summarised has only proved the obvious, the obvious is worth proving when this can be done. And if the relative importance of selection and mutation is obvious, it has certainly not always been recognised as such.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.....I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927)
Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923)
The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways...
The Causes of Evolution (1932)