One of C. S. Lewis’s intellectual nemeses was J. B. S. Haldane, the famed evolutionary biologist who came up with the idea that life originated in a “primordial soup.” Haldane even humorously compared himself to the inventor of anti-Lewisite, a chemical that neutralizes the toxin Lewisite. Other than their opinions, they had a lot in common. Not only were both men science fiction writers and public intellectuals, they moved in the same circles: Haldane was also a professor at Oxford and later Cambridge, and his sister, the writer and scientist Naomi Mitchison, was a good friend of J. R. R. Tolkien. 

Taking advantage of his own main advantage, Haldane accused Lewis of insufficient scientific accuracy in a mocking review of his science fiction trilogy.¹  “Of course, the reason is clear enough,” Haldane wrote. “Christian mythology incorporated the cosmological theories current 18 centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible.” 

A bit disappointingly, the specific scientific criticisms Haldane offers are all pretty tangential — I’m not sure what the atmosphere of Mars, or the correct lifespan of a severed head perfused with blood, has to do with “Christian mythology.” But I’d like to borrow Haldane’s striking wording for a different diagnosis:

Darwinist mythology incorporated the racial theories current to the 18th century. Charles Darwin found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his day. J. B. S. Haldane found it harder. Contemporary biologists find it impossible.

Race Science in the Early 20th Century 

In recent posts, I’ve argued that the modern theory of evolution was not merely influenced by the racial ideas of the time — it was founded on them. In the 18th century it was possible to believe that there were primitive savages who did not even possess the gift of speech (although they may have possessed tails). The apparently unbroken gradation from the higher apes to “civilized man” made it easy for Lord Monboddo, and later Erasmus Darwin, to propose that man had evolved from apes. By the 19th century, however, more facts had come to light, and Charles Darwin was well aware that there was actually an enormous gap between the “lowest savages” and the highest apes. Nevertheless, he argued that the evolutionary progression could still be observed in the gradation of the races above the gap, ranging from the best of the civilized Europeans down to the worst of the Fuegians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Australian aboriginals. 

When J. B. S. Haldane was starting his scientific career in the early 20th century, that idea was still widely accepted. In his 1927 collection Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Haldane writes that if a new religion were to be invented in the modern world, it would include the scientific ideas of the day just as the ancient religions had included the science of their day — and that therefore the modern religion would affirm “the existence of innate psychological difference between the human races,” among other things.²

Haldane initially subscribed to some of the racism of the era — but, to his credit, his views shifted over time as more evidence came to light. Haldane was an anti-imperialist with a taste for contrarianism and an instinct to side with the weak and oppressed (and those strong and powerful who claimed to be their benefactors, such as Stalin and Mao). Perhaps because of these sentiments, he seemed eager to accept the new evidence on race as it emerged. Thus, Haldane’s evolving views on race are a useful “canary in the coal mine” for the death of scientific racism. As the cutting edge of race science moved farther away from what Darwin’s premises, Haldane moved with it. 

The Evolution of Race Science

Thus, in an essay written to combat the racial propaganda of the Third Reich, Haldane presents a rather ambiguous picture of racial differences, in accordance with the ambiguous state of the data available to him. He wrote:    

As for intelligence, it is certain that races overlap, for clever negroes are cleverer than stupid Englishmen, and musical Englishmen are more musical than unmusical negroes. 

We don’t know much about averages. In the United States whites do better than negroes, on the average, in intelligence tests. But this may have nothing to do with race, for education counts in these tests. In the army tests of 1914, the negroes of Ohio scored a higher average than the whites of Arkansas. 

Even if it were found that, given equal opportunities, whites were found to do better than negroes on tests drawn up by whites, it is quite likely that negro examiners could design test on which their own race would beat the whites!

Haldane thought the different races were each superior in their natural habitats, and that it therefore didn’t make sense to label one or another as absolutely superior. As for the question of general intelligence, he hoped that would finally be answered “when the different races have enjoyed real equality for another generation.” 

It turned out he didn’t have to wait that long. In 1945, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established along with the rest of the UN, and found itself faced with the prospect of coming up with an official stance on the contentious issue of race. To solve the problem, the agency summoned luminaries in biology from around the world to a conference in Paris. 

As an eminent evolutionary biologist, Haldane was among the summoned. Afterwards, Haldane wrote that he had found the conference helpful, because he learned the views of other scientists on the matter. He wrote: 

One thing that came clearly out of our discussion is that there was no evidence for inborn differences in any important aptitudes between people of different races. Certainly their performances are very different… It is only when the children of other races have been brought up like Europeans that the differences disappear. Fortunately this has happened often enough to tell a clear story. Thus on the whole American Red Indians have rather low intelligences quotients, and their half-breeds with whites are somewhere in between. But a number of Red Indian children adopted by whites did just as well as white children, and the children of the Caegi tribe, who used some of the money got from oil found on their territory to build schools, did equally well. There are also a few converse cases, as where poor whites on a small West Indian island did no better than their negro neighbours.

When the UNESCO statement was released in 1951, it presented these conclusions: 

When intelligence tests, even non-verbal, are made on a group of non-literate people, their scores are usually lower than those of more civilized people. It has also been recorded that even different groups of the same race occupying similarly high levels of civilization may also yield considerable differences in intelligence tests. When, however, the two groups have been brought up from childhood in similar environments the differences are usually very slight. There is good evidence that, given similar opportunities, the median performance (that is to say, the performance of the individual who is representative because he is surpassed by as many as he surpasses), and the variation around it, do not differ from one race to another.

Therefore, they concluded, any psychological attribute common to a group of people “is more likely to be due to a common history and social background” than to race. 

In other words, Lord Monboddo and Charles Darwin were wrong about humankind, and the centuries-old racial paradigm was finally at an end. This meant that a crucial piece of evidence in Darwin’s Descent of Man was also gone — though I’m not aware that Haldane ever acknowledged that. 

Environmental Pressure 

C. S. Lewis would not have been surprised. Since he was well aware of the limits of his scientific expertise, he was wary of getting involved in any scientific debates. But as an expert in the history of ideas, he knew that scientific theories don’t appear ex nihilo, but rather emerge out of the primordial intellectual soup of their time. When the environment changes, the theory either evolves or goes extinct. 

Haldane was no dummy³, and he also understood that the science of his day was fallible. But he was slower to skepticism than Lewis, because he believed science had a saving grace: the ease with which scientists accept new data. Haldane wrote: 

[T]he experience of the past makes it clear that many of our most cherished scientific theories contain so much falsehood as to deserve the title of myths… The main objection to religious myths [in contrast] is that, once made, they are so difficult to destroy. Chemistry is not haunted by the phlogiston theory as Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.

This is partly true. Haldane is right that most scientific theories die easily and do not leave a haunting ghost. But that is because most scientific theories do not merit intense emotional investment. No one cares too much about, say, the structure of bromine, or the atmosphere of Mars. Granted, people tend to have an emotional investment in the theories they themselves invented or have publicly defended — but when those scientists die, the scientific community usually moves on. 

But a few scientific theories do provoke strong emotional investment. These are theories that have implications about the things humans find most important: who we are, what we’re made for, who gets to decide the ultimate meaning of our lives, whether we will continue to exist after death (for better or worse), whether or not we’re allowed to have sex with the person we want to have sex with at a given moment…etc. In those cases, we should expect a dead scientific theory to leave a haunting for a long time, just as a religious theories do. 

Modern Darwinism has been undergoing severe environmental pressure since the time of J. B. S. Haldane, including (among other things) from new evidence on race and human origins. Neither Darwinism nor scientific racialism has given up the ghost easily, though there have been many efforts to extricate the former from the latter. In my next post, we’ll consider some contemporary challenges neo-Darwinists face in their attempt to make the theory retroactively imply racial equality.

Notes

1. Haldane was so pleased with it that he included it in one of his essay anthologies, despite admitting that it didn’t really fit.
2. Haldane, J. B. S. (1927). “Science and Theology as Art Forms.” In Of Possible Worlds and Other Essays, pages 228-231. Chatto and Windus. 
3. Except when it came to Joseph Stalin.