QFI 559 – Meet the Beetles

To whom is this display at the Oxford U Museum of Natural History dedicated to and why?


Answer: Only Kapatchoco and Raji weren’t bugged by the question and got it right – John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS the British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist and one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.

Quoting from Wikipedia…“He is famous for the (possibly apocryphal) response he gave when some theologians asked him what could be inferred about the mind of the Creator from the works of His Creation: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” This is in reference to there being over 350,000 known species of beetles in the world, and that this represents 40% of all known insect species (at the time of the quote, it was over half of all known insect species).”

Link to image.

2 thoughts on “QFI 559 – Meet the Beetles

  1. Haldane, who remarked that God had an inordinate fondness for beetles!

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