Haldane on the 4 Stages of Acceptance

In his 1963 book review of life tables, entitled “The Truth about Death”, the British geneticist and polymath John Haldane (1892-1964) noted that resistance to more biologically accurate estimates of death and survival would go through the following 4 stages of acceptance:

1) this is worthless nonsense;
2) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
3) this is true, but quite unimportant;
4) I always said so.

J.B.S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics (1963) 58: 464.

A few other gems from his review:

Natural selection sees to it that genes causing early death or sterility are fairly rare.  On the other hand post-reproductive mortality seems to be genetically determined to a large extent.

 ….One does not have to be a profound Marxist to realise that a system of life tables which consistently overestimates future death rates will find favour with companies whose main business is "life insurance", i.e. payment of fixed sums at death, rather than payment of life annuities to the aged. 

Cheers, 

Colin