[Based on a lecture delivered by J.B.S. Haldane at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi, on 15th, 16th and 17th December, 1957 and later broadcast by All India Radio].
Lecture 1.
The Government of India has done me a very great honour in inviting me to deliver these lectures. I felt even further honoured when I learned that my predecessors had been Rajagopalachari and Krishnan. But worthy successors to them could certainly have been chosen from amongst my colleagues in this country. And I could, I believe, have given a better course of lectures after two or three years in India. By that time I hope not only to know your plants and animals better than I do, but to have learned enough Sanskrit to make a more direct contact with some of the great minds of India's past than is possible through translations and summaries. Perhaps I should have done better to lecture on the subjects on which I am carrying out research and teaching at the Indian Statistical Institute, namely, genetics and statistics. If India had television I could perhaps have shown you different breeds of cows, hens, rice, jute, and so on, and told you something of how the differences between them are inherited, and what is their economic importance.
I have decided to deal with a more general topic both because I can speak of plants and animals which are familiar to you, and because the question of unity and plurality has interested Indian thinkers for more than two thousand years. And I believe that this subject is particularly appropriate to a series of lectures memorising Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. His most remarkable single achievement was, I believe, the unification of the princely States into the Indian Republic, a task which India's enemies hoped, and her friends feared, would prove impossible.
What do I mean by the phrase "the Diversity of Life"? I mean several different things. In the first place, there are many different sorts of living creatures, for example cows, koels, rice plants, and pipal trees. We use the word species to denote these different sorts, and there are more than a million of them. Secondly, each species consists of a great many members, and they are all a little different. Thirdly, each one of these is made up of different parts, such as hair and bone, leaves and roots, and can alter its behaviour, for example running at one time and eating at another, flowering at one time and fruiting at another.
