History And The Origins Of Life

Abstract

Abstract Bernal’s friends were among the most important science writers of their time. Restricting the group to those who worked in England, and leaving aside C.P. Snow and J.G. Crowther who lived by their pens, they were remarkable for the range, quality and volume of their collective output. Haldane inherited H.G. Wells’ mantle as the best popular writer about science, but even he could not match the sales of Lancelot Hogben whose Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self-Educator is estimated to have sold over half a million copies during its four editions. The doyen of the set was Joseph Needham, who abandoned his own career as an embryologist during the Second World War and devoted the remainder of his life to a landmark study of China, concentrating on the history of scientific development and the influence played by Chinese religion, politics and customs. Over a period of forty years, Needham published successive volumes of Science and Civilization in China, the early numbers of which were eagerly read, and often reviewed, by Sage. Needham came to believe that the predominance of Chinese science and technology for Wfteen hundred years and its subsequent eclipse by European science from the seventeenth century onwards could be understood only in terms of differences between the social and economic systems of China and the West – an historical approach stimulated by his conversations with Bernal in Cambridge before the war.