Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

Until recently the British zoologist Lancelot Hogben has usually appeared as a campaigning socialist, an anti-eugenicist or a popularizer of science in the literature. The focus has mainly been on Hogben after he became a professor of social biology at the London School of Economics in 1930. This paper focuses on Hogben’s life in the 1920s. Early in the decade, while based in London, he focused on cytology, but in 1922, after moving to Edinburgh, he turned his focus on experimental (...) zoology, first concentrating on vertebrate endocrinology and later moving over to the comparative physiology of invertebrate muscle. In the early 1920s Hogben played an active role in the development of experimental zoology in Britain. As such he was a fearless critic of evolutionary and metaphysical speculations. But in this period Hogben’s career prospects were seriously hampered by his confrontational nature and serious depression. As a result he was forced to leave Britain in 1925. He first accepted a position in Canada and in the period 1927–1930 he was a professor of zoology in South Africa. This paper will also add crucial new material to James Tabery’s recent discussion of the history behind Hogben’s ideas about the interaction of heredity and environment in individual development. In addition a previously unknown Lamarckian controversy will be discussed. (shrink)

This paper argues that that political context of British science popularization in the inter-war period was intimately tied to contemporary debates about religion and science. A leading science popularizer, the Quaker astronomer A.S. Eddington, and one of his opponents, the materialist Chapman Cohen, are examined in detail to show the intertwined nature of science, philosophy, religion, and politics.

Much has been written about the relationship between biology and social science during the early twentieth century. However, discussion is often drawn toward a particular conception of eugenics, which tends to obscure our understanding of not only the wide range of intersections between biology and social science during the period but also their impact on subsequent developments. This paper draws attention to one of those intersections: the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge’s controversial efforts to establish a Department of (...) Social Biology at London School of Economics during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring a fully equipped laboratory headed by a leading geneticist, the Department of Social Biology was Beveridge’s attempt to “cross-fertilise” biology and social science and, in so doing, take the ideological heat out of social scientific, in particular economic, methods of investigation. Exploring why Beveridge’s project failed and throwing light on its long-term legacies, this paper considers what we can learn from the short-lived Department of Social Biology. (shrink)

This essay examines the origin of genotype-environment interaction, or G×E. "Origin" and not "the origin" because the thesis is that there were actually two distinct concepts of G×E at this beginning: a biometric concept, or \[G \times E_B\], and a developmental concept, or \[G \times E_D \]. R. A. Fisher, one of the founders of population genetics and the creator of the statistical analysis of variance, introduced the biometric concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in (...) the biometric tradition of biology - partitioning the relative contributions of nature and nurture responsible for variation in a population. Lancelot Hogben, an experimental embryologist and also a statistician, introduced the developmental concept as he attempted to resolve one of the main problems in the developmental tradition of biology - determining the role that developmental relationships between genotype and environment played in the generation of variation. To argue for this thesis, I outline Fisher and Hogben's separate routes to their respective concepts of G × E; then these separate interpretations of G × E are drawn on to explicate a debate between Fisher and Hogben over the importance of G × E, the first installment of a persistent controversy. Finally, Fisher's \[G \times E_B\] and Hogben's \[G \times E_D \] are traced beyond their own work into mid-2Oth century population and developmental genetics, and then into the infamous IQ Controversy of the 1970s. (shrink)

It may be thought that the title of this paper betrays a regrettable lack of sensitivity and good taste; it is as well, therefore, to explain its origin. Lewis Dexter was, I think, the first sociologist to apply a deviance perspective to the high-grade mentally retarded. ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’ argues that our discriminatory attitudes to the retarded have deep ideological roots; our social institutions tend ‘automatically’ to penalize stupidity; and repugnance often characterizes our (...) face-to-face interactions with the stupid. The pejorative label ‘stupid’ was justified precisely because identifying the stupid is a ‘commonsense’ rather than a scientific process, although commonsense does not have long to wait before it is bolstered by science. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show that adaptational sentences (i.e. sentences containing the terms "adaptive", "adapted", etc.) in evolutionary biology are best interpreted as equivalent to sentences about Darwinian or genetical selection. Thus, the use of adaptational languages does not introduce final purposes or other nonempirical notions into biology. I also try to demonstrate that adaptational sentences and functional sentences are not equivalent in an evolutionary context so that an analysis of function does not dispense with the need for (...) an analysis of adaptation. Finally, it is argued that, although some adaptational sentences might be construed as teleological explanations, given an empirical content, they do not serve as explanations. Rather, they express the outcome of selection, regarded in one way, and regarded in another, they express data for which a theory of evolution must account. (shrink)