A Brief History of Creation (25 page)

Like Darwin and Wallace, both men had come up with their theories independently, each unaware of the work of the other. One was a young scientist from the Soviet Union whose work was virtually unknown in the West. The other was an eccentric whose skill as an essayist had earned him a reputation as England's most popular writer of science. But they had a couple of things in common. In their theories, both men made use of the vast advances in understanding the ancient Earth and ancient life that had been achieved by the 1920s. And both were impassioned Marxists for whom politics was almost as important as science.

Eventually, their ideas came to be merged into a single theory that represented a monumental reconfiguration of the understanding of how life appeared on the planet Earth. It would come to be called the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis, named for the Russian Alexander Oparin and the Scotsman J. B. S. Haldane.

J
OHN BURTON SANDERSON HALDANE
—Jack to his friends and J. B. S. to everyone else—was a contrarian who enjoyed setting himself apart from the crowd. In his later years, when his theories on the origin of life gained acceptance in mainstream science, he joked that it made him wonder what he'd gotten wrong. He had little time for social propriety. He liked to shock people, brazenly boasting about sexual conquests that those who knew him best seldom believed actually happened. Though he was a handsome man—strikingly so during his younger years—Haldane was always insecure around women, probably as a result of a childhood of bullying brought on by the intellect that distanced him from children his own age. He reveled in his peculiarities, and exaggerated them, but they were quite real.

Haldane was always a bit of a pyromaniac, notorious in his army years for carrying explosives and loose matches together in his pockets. “Those who lived in close contact with him regarded his presence in the mess or officers' quarters with some degree of suspicion or fear,” one of his military colleagues later recalled. Haldane never lost his love of explosions and fires, something he had in common with English folk legend Guy Fawkes,
whose birthday he shared. When lighting the tobacco pipe he habitually smoked, Haldane would let the match burn down until the tips of his fingers were black. He was one of those individuals who had what Thomas Huxley would have called “a screw missing.” Haldane compensated for this deficit by having a host of screws other people simply did not possess.

Haldane's remarkable intelligence had been apparent from a very young age. After injuring his forehead when he was four, he asked a doctor whether his blood was “oxyhemoglobin or carboxyhemoglobin.” Such terminology was common in the household in which he was raised. His father, Lord Haldane, was a Scottish aristocrat and noted Oxford physiologist who had constructed a private laboratory in their home. Whenever possible, Lord Haldane tried to involve his children in his scientific work, even if it sometimes meant putting them in danger. He often used them as human guinea pigs to test the effects of gases. Many years later, when investigating the effects of different gases on submariners for the British government during World War II, J. B. S. Haldane would continue his father's practice by using himself as a test subject.

Much of Lord Haldane's work revolved around the study of gases encountered by British coal miners, work that would one day lead to his design of Britain's first effective gas mask during World War I. During Lord Haldane's investigative trips into some of Britain's most dangerous mines, he sometimes brought his son, who would be lowered by bucket into the miserable crawlspaces the miners used. On one such trip, father and son were nearly killed by a pocket of deadly combustible methane gas. They were saved
by Humphry Davy's safety lamp, which alerted them to the presence of the gas when it reacted by shutting itself off. The trips were J. B. S. Haldane's first exposure to the dangers and miseries heaped upon the British working classes, on whose behalf he would agitate for the rest of his life.

J. B. S. Haldane in 1941.

During his college years at Eton, Haldane so distinguished himself in the sciences that many of his fellow students felt as if he was teaching the teachers. Yet halfway through completion of an undergraduate degree, he changed his course of study to the classics. This lack of a formal specialization had a lot to do with the way Haldane approached science. Since the time of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, science had slowly but steadily become increasingly specialized, being studied and taught in separate faculties, with physics, chemistry, medicine, and other fields becoming more and more compartmentalized. By the twentieth century, the barriers between these disciplines were firmly in place, but Haldane could hold his own on nearly any scientific subject.

W
ITH THE OUTBREAK
of World War I, Haldane joined the Scottish Black Watch regiment. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he found himself in command of one of the first trench mortar detachments. These early experimental mortars were little more than explosive-laden stovepipes used to harass the enemy through constant bombardment. They were exceedingly unpredictable, “almost as dangerous to their users as the enemy” in the words of the official regimental history. Haldane thrived on such risks, actually encouraging his men to smoke around their mortars. He later recalled that he “thought it important that we should have absolute confidence in ourselves and in our weapons.”

In combat, Haldane distinguished himself with a bravery that sometimes bordered on insanity. At night, during lulls in the fighting, he would sneak out into the no-man's-land between the opposing armies' trenches hoping to catch snippets of the enemy's conversations. In letters home, he compared the thrill of war favorably to the feelings of exhilaration he had experienced in the mines that he explored with his father, when a single lapse could lead to the worst kind of catastrophe. Sir Douglas Haig, commander
of all British expeditionary forces fighting in France, called Haldane “the bravest and dirtiest officer in my Army.”

After he was wounded in an artillery barrage, Haldane was sent to Iraq to fight Germany's Turkish allies. When he returned to Britain at the war's end in 1919, he carried few of the deep psychological scars that haunted millions of his fellow soldiers. Haldane would tell people that he had enjoyed the war, “loved it,” in fact. He chalked this fact up to evolution, his ancestry from early humans for whom the urge to kill would have been an evolutionary advantage. Eventually, after witnessing the horrors of war as an observer rather than a participant, he became uneasy about his own, favorable experience of World War I. In his final years, he came to embrace Ghandian nonviolence.

After the war, even though he never took any kind of scientific degree, Haldane was offered a teaching post at Oxford in any subject he desired. He chose physiology. Later, he accepted an appointment at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and married a young Jewish reporter for the
Daily Express
named Charlotte Burghes, a socialist and a feminist. In 1926, their first year together, they traveled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Haldane found himself drawn to the young Soviet state, and in the years to follow, he drifted slowly toward communism, particularly after the spread of European fascism and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

When fighting broke out in Spain in 1936, Haldane determined to help the Republican side. Decked out in a visored motorcycle cap, breeches, and a black leather jacket, he flew to Madrid, where he hoped to advise the government on dealing with air raids and the possibility that Francisco Franco's fascist rebels would resort to chemical warfare. At one point, his fanciful dress got him arrested by Republicans who mistook him for a fascist spy.

While in Spain, Haldane began sending back accounts of his experiences for publication in the communist
Daily Worker
. When he returned to Great Britain, he became the paper's science correspondent and, eventually, the chairman of its editorial board. His involvement amounted to
a huge coup for the Communist Party. Haldane had already acquired a reputation as a superb essayist. He had a unique ability to present complex subjects in a simple way that the average person could read and comprehend. Haldane's admirer Arthur C. Clarke, the author of
2001: A Space Odyssey
, called him “perhaps the most brilliant scientific popularizer of his generation.”

Haldane counted many science fiction writers among his friends. One of the best known was Aldous Huxley. The influence of Haldane's theories could be found in Huxley's
Brave New World
, and it was Haldane who first used the term “clone.” Many of Haldane's topics seemed so far out—the concept of in vitro fertilization and test-tube babies, the idea that power could be harnessed from hydrogen—that his early writings were sometimes miscast as science fiction. And because of his popularity among lay audiences, scientists found it easy to underestimate his impact as a serious scientist and researcher, particularly in the field of evolutionary theory and the burgeoning field of genetics.

Haldane's most lasting impact was on the subject of the origin of life. His first and most important essay on that topic, entitled, simply, “The Origin of Life,” was written in 1929. He began the essay with a defense of his materialistic vision of the world, lampooning the widely held notion that Pasteur had somehow proved that life could not spring from nonlife. Such a notion could be held only by those who “clung to the supernatural.” Either an act of abiogenesis had at some point occurred or “a living thing is a piece of dead matter plus a soul (a view which finds little support in modern biology).” Perhaps the most striking feature of Haldane's theory was that it conjured up a well-supported vision of what the Earth would have looked like when life first appeared billions of years in the past. It was a world altogether different from the one Charles Darwin had once speculated about. Where Darwin had imagined a “warm little pond,” Haldane imagined a “hot dilute soup”
^†
that would have been hostile to any form of life we would be familiar with.

Haldane's model for the origin of life reflected new advances in geology, biochemistry, and our understanding of the evolutionary process. It was a modern theory that could be researched and built upon, far more sophisticated than the simple concepts of spontaneous generation that had dominated earlier thinking. But it took a while for the implications of his essay to sink in among serious scientists. At first, it was often brushed aside as mere speculation. Gradually, though, the plausibility of Haldane's theories began to gain traction. They garnered even more credibility as scientists in the West became aware of a similar but more elaborate hypothesis that had been worked out in the Soviet Union.

Though few scientists in the West could understand Russian, news started to spread of a short book on the origin of life that had been published in 1924, five years before Haldane's essay. Its author, Alexander Oparin, had worked out a model remarkably similar to that of Haldane. And Oparin's treatment of the question had been more exhaustive and scientifically rigorous. Unlike Haldane, who had moved on to other subjects, Oparin spent the rest of his life honing and developing his theory, and by 1936, when an English translation of Oparin's second, longer book on the subject began to arrive in Western universities, students of evolutionary biology rushed to get their hands on copies of what was to become the seminal work on the subject for much of the century. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication,
Nature
magazine remembered Oparin as deserving of a place in “the pantheon of the twentieth century's greatest scientists,” though few in the West, outside of the narrow disciplines touched by his work, would recognize his name.

A
LEXANDER OPARIN
was the child of a Russia that had almost entirely disappeared by the time he left his mark on science. He was born in a small town along the Volga River north of Moscow called Uglich. It was a rural community that might have been lifted from a nineteenth-century Russian novel, filled with wooden houses and horse-drawn carts carrying crops to market. Oparin's simple background often surprised those who knew him later in life. He had a fondness for well-tailored suits, always accompanied
by a trademark bow tie that seemed outlandish in postrevolutionary Russia. His cosmopolitan attire and his peculiar Yaroslavl accent, with its pronounced emphasis on the “O” sound, often led his countrymen to mistake him for a foreigner.

Marxism and a faith in evolutionary natural history had come early to Oparin. Both were introduced to him by his boyhood idol, the Russian botanist Kliment Timiryazev. Oparin had picked up an interest in botany during his childhood in Uglich, where he often spent his days roaming the countryside in search of new plants for his collection. He read Timiryazev's book,
The Life of the Plant
, so many times that he felt as if he could almost recite it by heart. During the waning years of tsarist Russia, when Oparin was a teenager living in Moscow, he would often visit the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, where Timiryazev would regularly lecture in a splendorous amphitheater designed by the talented Ippolit Monighetti, the favorite architect of the Romanovs.