Russia puts the clock back : a study of Soviet science and some British scientists / With a foreword by Sir Henry Dale.

  • John Langdon-Davies
Date:
1949
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Russia puts the clock back : a study of Soviet science and some British scientists / With a foreword by Sir Henry Dale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/168 (page 57)
    A PROPHECY FULFILLED 57 Haldane called this collection of essays The In¬ equality of Man, because he wanted to emphasise that genetic facts involve the dogma that men are born unequal as well as different. But other interesting subjects are discussed. Thus in one essay, The Place of Science in Western Civilisation, Haldane writes (i6, p. 135): There is an enormous interest in Russia in biology, because evolution is part of the Communist faith. To take an example, in the whole world the only quantitative work on natural selection, as it actually happens in real life as opposed to the laboratory, is being done in Russia, mostly on crop plants and dandelions. In the scientific study of animal heredity Russia is ahead of all the rest of the world except the United States, and I think that in another ten years it will probably be ahead of the United States. Now, I am not going for one moment to suggest that there is not a very grave danger for science in so close an association with the State. It may possibly be that as a result of that association science in Russia will undergo somewhat the same fate as overtook Christianity after its association with the State in the time of Constantine. It is possible that it may lead to dogmatism in science and to the suppression of opinions which run counter to official theories, but it has not yet done so \_1932]. . . . ''''The test of the devotion of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics to science will, I think, come when the accumulation of the results of human genetics, demonstra¬ ting what I believe to be the fact of innate human in¬ equality, becomes important. (My italics.) Four years after Haldane published these Venerable words in book form, Pravda began to attack Levit's work on human twins at the Russian Medicogenetical Institute. He was getting exactly the same sort of