TOWARDS THE end of his life, J.B.S. Hal-dane was inseparable from a pebble that had been found in the Valley of Elah in Israel, where David felled Goliath with a similar projectile. A king-size man who towered over British biology for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, Jack Haldane-the "half-Dane"-was a more obvious Goliath, but he always took the side of the underdog. That is the contradiction at the heart of Samanth Subramanian's astute and sympathetic biography. An Eton- and Oxford-educated communist, who with a handful of others fleshed out Darwin's theory of natural selection by marrying it to genetics and grounding it in maths, Haldane was born into privilege but came to identify himself with the masses. And if his unconscious sense of entitlement can sometimes be grating, it is more than offset by his humour, facility for language, intellectual generosity and-the product of all this-his giant contribution to the popularisation of science.
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