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| Author | J. B. S. Haldane |
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Publication date | 1924 |
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future is a book by the BritishscientistJ. B. S. Haldane, published in England in 1924. It was the text of a lecture[1] read to theHeretics Society (an intellectual club at theUniversity of Cambridge) on 4 February 1923.
Haldane uses the Greek myth ofDaedalus as a symbol for the revolutionary nature ofscience with particular regard to his own discipline ofbiology.
The chemical or physical inventor is always aPrometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is ablasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
He also expressedskepticism over the human benefits of some scientific advances, arguing that scientific advance would bring grief, rather than progress to mankind, unless it was accompanied by a similar advance inethics.
The book is an early vision oftranshumanism[2][3] and his vision of a future in which humanscontrolled their own evolution through directedmutation and use ofin vitro fertilisation ("ectogenesis")[4] was a major influence onAldous Huxley'sBrave New World. The book ends with the image of abiologist, much like Haldane himself, in a laboratory: "just a poor little scrubby underpaid man groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultramicroscope... conscious of his ghastly mission and proud of it."
The book has been discussed at length by other writers, includingFreeman Dyson in his bookImagined Worlds andSal Restivo inScience, Society, and Values,[5] and the concept has been used in contemporary science lectures.[6]