Inordinately

Mentioning Haldane a post or two ago couldn't help but remind me of  his famous saying about God being 'inordinately fond of beetles'.  Which upon further examination is hard to track down. The Quote Investigator site seems to summarise what we know quite well.

And the phrase certainly gets around, including Pterry's conclusion that the God who is fond of beetles is - paradoxically - the God of Evolution (see The Lost Continent)...

Its also worth noting that On Being the Right Size does not end up as an essay about comparative anatomy.  The last two paragraphs read:

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 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.

So he's actually using arguments from biology to question whether socialism is able to run large Nation states or Empires.  Can it ever be used effectively to run the British Empire?  Haldane was a socialist for much of his life, but he could and did apply a sense of scientific scepticism to his ideology.
 
He was a somewhat controversial figure to some. From Wikipedia:

Haldane was a friend of the author Aldous Huxley, who parodied him in the novel Antic Hay (1923) as Shearwater, "the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife". Haldane's discourse in Daedalus on ectogenesis was an influence on Huxley's Brave New World (1932) which features a eugenic society.
C.S. Lewis wrote much of his three interplanetary space novels, The Space Trilogy, in response to Haldane, whom Lewis considered to be an immoral man. Lewis modelled the character Weston, featured in the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, on Haldane.

- and Weston is of course the baddie. 

Much of this also ties in quite nicely with the Mark Miodownik RI Christmas lectures (not the bit about sleeping with his wife, but the  linking across disciplines and the predictive, futures-oriented visionary scientific rhetoric).

And of course Haldane was known for a clutch of other quotations, including:

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], p.286

and:

Theories have four stages of acceptance:
i. this is worthless nonsense,
ii. this is interesting, but perverse,
iii. this is true, but quite unimportant,
iv. I always said so

(Source unknown)

Which sounds a very familiar position, to me at least.