J. B. S. Haldane

One was the, one was the, the sort of crumpling in the, in the car, um, scenario.

The other thing is this really amazing essay by, uh, Haldane in the 1920s, which was called On Being the Right Size.

Hmm.

And essentially, it was asking the question of, if you did fall from a great height, from a, from a, from a very tall building or an airplane or whatever it might be, is there a point at which you could act as your own parachute?

Hmm.

Uh, and so what Haldane writes in this essay, he's, he's imagining a, a sort of disused mineshaft, right? And, uh, what would happen if you threw certain animals down.

No animals were harmed in the making of this essay.

Um, [laughs] but what would happen if you threw certain animals down this mineshaft.

Uh, I'll just mention a few names.

A physicist, uh, J.D. Bernal, uh, P.M.S. Blackett, who, who went on to get a Nobel Prize, uh, J.B.S. Haldane, who was a biochemist and geneticist.

These were, these were, you know, polymaths who were, who were brilliant people.

Uh, the wonderfully named Lancelot Hogben, who was a, a colleague of Hayek's at LSE, who was in the social biology chair.

Well, Charlotte had worked for newspapers.

And when she married JBS Haldane, the famous scientist, she took a break from daily newspaper work and focused on popularizing his many discoveries in statistics, biology, you name it.

He was a very brilliant man.

Towards the end of the 30s, she devoted herself to drumming up money and recruits to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

I just have no answer to it.

So as JBS Haldane said, not only is the world queerer than we think it is, it's queerer than we could think it is.

And for me, something like body-mind is that's a miracle.

Why the hell can molecules think? I mean, don't give me all the stuff about Dan Dennett and materialism or others, Dick Humphrey and emergentism.