On Being the Right Size (1926) [pdf]

http://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRightSize.pdf

by benbreen • 3 years ago

77 47 3 years ago

phys.ufl.edu

andrewl• 3 years ago

This is by the fascinating J.B.S. Haldane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane

The essay title is also the title of an anthology of his essays which you can still sometimes find in bookstores. One of his famous quotes is “Not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”

ggm2• 3 years ago

He wrote very sweet, innocent children's fiction "My friend Mr Leakey" which is about a rational scientist who lives next door to a wizard.

Haldane did amazing work on decompression and other things, using himself as a test subject in quite dangerous experiments.

His family was interesting, quite apart from himself. His sister Naomi is a well known Scots Author under her married Name Naomi Mitchison.

sdeer• 3 years ago

I think the work on decompression was done by his father? His father did experiment on both himself and his son.

His uncle was the Liberal Party politician Richard Haldane who was the secretary of war for UK just before WWI and carried out some reforms which were pretty important in setting how the British army fought in the early part of the great war.

abecedarius• 3 years ago

https://jbshaldane.org/index.html was pretty interesting too.

eru4• 3 years ago

At the end, the author gets slightly political, when talking about the size of human institutions.

People interested in that kind of speculation might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

arisbe__• 3 years ago

I hope in the future the notion of scale (or just more concrete conceptual frameworks in economics and politics) will be made more known in the popular consciousness. I find Taleb to be onto some interesting writing here: PRINCIPIA POLITICA Politics & Ethics under Scaling and Uncertainty. see https://www.taesch.com/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/lib/reque...

WWWWH• 3 years ago

The author was an interesting character (and a very prominent scientist--some of his work on enzymes is still taught to undergraduates) and a committed communist. Many of his essays were first written for the a newspaper. I think it was the Daily Star.

eru4• 3 years ago

That's very interesting! I would have read that ending of the article as a dig against communism. But perhaps the other had a more interesting point in mind.

earthboundkid6• 3 years ago

At the end, the author gets slightly political

Lol, that's the whole point of the piece! The whole rest of it is just a set dressing to sell you on his political theory. It's political from beginning to end, but you just don't know where he's going with it for most of the piece.

jhbadger• 3 years ago

No, it really isn't, any more than Darwin's Origin of Species is primarily about the evolution of humanity (Darwin later wrote an entire book on that later). It's just that most non-biologists don't care that much about the parts where Darwin or Haldane were talking about animals and their evolution or optimal size and just fixate on the parts dealing with humanity.

walterbell2• 3 years ago

  Four stages of acceptance [of a scientific theory]:

  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.

ftxbro• 3 years ago

stages of llm skepticism

    1. llm are stochastic parrots and blurry jpegs they can never be good at language because it would need a world model and symbolic understanding
    2. so what if llm are good at language they were trained on it lol. they can never be good at human creativity and emotions
    3. it's bad that llm are so good at human creativity and emotions. it makes them hallucinate too much
    4. ai is obviously better than humans at every cognitive capability which makes them dangerous and untrustworthy. i was always against ai

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Is there any species with as much adult size variation as dogs (probably about 100x by mass from smallest to largest)?

alberto_ol• 3 years ago

The differences between dogs is due to selective breeding not to natuaral selection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding

ghaff• 3 years ago

While true it probably means the answer to the posed question is no—but there’s a reason for that.

eru4• 3 years ago

Some ants probably do something like selective breeding to their mushroom colonies.

eru4• 3 years ago

Are you talking about any species at all, or only about animals?

Fungi and even plants can easily span that kind of size range.

Some animal species with extreme sexual dimorphism also count. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish

Some anglerfish are notable for extreme sexual dimorphism and sexual symbiosis of the small male with the much larger female, seen in the suborder Ceratioidei, the deep sea anglerfish. In these species, males may be several orders of magnitude smaller than females.[4]

mitthrowaway2• 3 years ago

Do bonsai trees count?

earthboundkid6• 3 years ago

I was thinking this yesterday: why are plants so much bigger than animals? Is it just that it's easier to be big when you're standing still and have strong cell walls? Is it because photosynthesis makes it easier to scale nutrition up? A blue whale is an exceptionally large animal and it's a rare megafauna, but a tree that is as long as a whale is a totally normal and boring thing. Why are they so much better at being big?

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

Interesting question. Clams, maybe?

As another response notes, dogs have a wide range because of selective breeding, a/k/a artificial selection. Dogs, amongst domesticated animals, are also distinguished in serving as service animals principally, rather than (widely at least) for meat, fur, feathers, milk, eggs, or other attributes. Draught animals (horses, donkeys, mules, oxen, water buffalo, llamas, and camels) would be somewhat similar in that regard, though dogs provide other services, with transport being a relatively limited role. (Others: hunting, vermin control, companionship, guard or sentry, managing herd animals, off the top of my head.). Food- and fur-bearing animals are typically selected for reasonably large sizes for yield maximisation.

So even among other service species the incentives to breed for

Then there's the question of what species we're considering: animals only, vertebrates, and/or mammals? I'm going to mostly stick with vertebrates.

Looking again at artificial selection, this involves two characteristics that are difficult to match in the wild: persistence of interbreeding, that is, even the most widely disparate sized do breeds can still mutually reproduce (though possibly by artificial insemination), and cultivation of different phenotypes, that is, a given breed typically is protected against unwanted crossings with others having differing characteristics. This combination is difficult to obtain in the wild, as interbreeding requires shared habitat whilst variant-cultivation requires exclusive breeding.

The species which might be best suited to this would probably be highly numerous, capable of surviving across a wide range of habitats, and see at least some chance for mating across their entire geographic distribution, and at the same time cultivating localised specialised populations favouring highly divergent sizes. That's ... a fairly tall order.

I'd expect that you'd most likely find that amongst rodents or grazing herd animals, where specific island populations (in the geographic and/or biological senses) emerge. Possibly amongst a species such as wild boar or pigs --- domesticated pigs see fairly high variance. I'd expect that most bird populations would tend to have fairly high interbreeding capabilities (though Darwin's Finches suggest otherwise). Salt-water fish in the open oceans would likely intercommunicate across populations to too great an extent, though individual isolated populations within lakes or caves might rapidly diverge.

I know that pygmyism and gigantistic traits have been seen among elephants, mammoths, hippos, and sloths, though I don't know if these were considered separate species. To take one example, giant sloths could way over 1,000 kg, whilst a typical sloth today weighs about 5 kg, for a 200:1 mass ratio, though probably of different species. Among giant sloths, full-grown adults ranged from ~2 ft (60 cm) to 20 ft (6 m), again among what we'd probably consider different species. (There are currently 6 recognised distinct sloth species.)

It's also worth keeping in mind that dogs have been domesticated for a relatively short time, about 40,000 years, and most dog breed development has occurred far more recently than that, with the oldest distinct breed dating back only 10,000 years. My understanding is that many of the breeds we're familiar with now date back only to the 19th century or so, see: <https://www.businessinsider.com/dog-breeds-victorian-england...>. This means that dogs have seen immensely fast divergence in morphology while preserving genetic compatibility. For species in the wild, you'd likely have to find examples of similar separation and selective differences over a comparable time period.

Outside of mammalia: I'd expect arthropods, shellfish, coral, or similar sealife to be the most likely candidates for widely-divergent sizes within a single species, just given sheer abundance of species. Giant clams range up to 200 kg, and grow continuously through their life, so you might find individuals with widely ranging sizes, though not necessarily different breeds or populations.

j7ake3• 3 years ago

The clarity and authority in his writing is remarkable.

His writing is in contrast to todays blog post style writing.

Today it is a catchy intro graphic, a low-information intro paragraph, a barely relevant graphic separates every two paragraphs, a gigantic quote in bold letters separates every four paragraphs, and the entire essay can be digested by rapidly scrolling down website without reading any content.

HenryBemis• 3 years ago

I came in JUST to comment on the writing. I usually 'autodownload' PDFs posted in HN, and (almost immediately) read the first paragraph.

And WOW what writing was this (unlike mine just now). I am looking forward to read this, and it's a pitty it's only 8 pages long.

walterbell2• 3 years ago

Some of his other writing is available: https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/

benbreen• 3 years ago

Agreed, the style is strikingly crisp and witty in a way I associate with early twentieth century English writers, especially around Oxford/Cambridge (Isaiah Berlin, C. S. Lewis). The title is notably good too. I love how Haldane writes.

arcanemachiner• 3 years ago

Some also have meme images every page or so. Blegh.

earthboundkid6• 3 years ago

It's very well written, but also it's bullshit.

The basic argument is "I, a biologist, know a lot about how animals need to be different sizes, therefore I also know about whether socialism or democracy or whatever is a good idea now." When you write it out like that, it's very clearly a bullshit argument that relies on appeal to authority, but because the essay is well written, it just comes across as logical and commonsense when you read it.

j7ake3• 3 years ago

He did not say whether socialism is better versus democracy.

He said human institutions have an optimum size. An institution or system that works at small scale is not guaranteed to work at large.

That is not common sense, and in fact many contemporary people believe in scale-free properties of institutions, which have led to catastrophic failures (eg large interconnected banks that all fail together).

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies:

Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on....

Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored.

<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=0899C2F4CD20BF73FC1E150...>

codeulike• 3 years ago

Yes exactly, it only switches to politics in the last paragraph. The point might be accurate but the evidence is sleight of hand from biological examples. Classic rhetoric, the sort of thing no one would pull you up for in 1926.

tempaway85751• 3 years ago

In 1926 if you were privileged enough to get published you could write in an authoritative voice knowing that no-one would challenge you, or if they did it would take many months for any such challenge to appear. Perhaps a letter to a newspaper or something. These days anyone can publish anything at any time and if you write in that authoritative sort of style its just begging for someone to come in and contradict you (you see it in HN comments all the time).

Hence people write differently now

And so I thusly declare that is a most elegant explanation, without possible rebuttal, for why this most elegant authoritative style is so rarely seen in these times.

j7ake3• 3 years ago

It’s 2023, you’re welcome to contradict this article if you wish, if you think this person is wrong.

The fact this essay continues to be shared 100 years later suggests that this excellent essay could simply be a result of selection: bad essays don’t get shared and they quickly fade into obscurity.

jomic• 3 years ago

I can only recommend "Scale" by Geoffrey West who covers this and equally interesting scaling laws in nature to great detail: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31670196

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

A strong second to that.

froh• 3 years ago

four and a half pages of build up to come to this:

And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.
To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business 5 concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge

I love it

rexpop3• 3 years ago

This is confusing because Ford was a fascist autocrat.

michael19992• 3 years ago

Perhaps Haldane was making an analogy between fascist autocrats and the commissars that run a Leninist society.

On Being the Right Size (1926) [pdf]

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