Líffræðifélag Íslands
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2015

Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster E91

Lancelot Hogben (1895-1975) and the false antithesis of heredity vs. environment

Steindór J. Erlingsson

Rannsóknasetrið Svarthömrum

Kynnir / Presenter: Steindór J. Erlingsson

Tengiliður / Corresponding author: Steindór J. Erlingsson (steindor@akademia.is)

Until recently the British zoologist Lancelot Hogben (1895-1975) has usually appeared in the literature as a campaigning socialist, an anti-eugenicist or a popularizer of science. The focus has mainly been on Hogben after he became a professor of social biology at the London School of Economics in 1930. My research has extended this story by bringing attention to the crucial role that Hogben played in the development experimental zoology in Britain in the early 1920s (Erlingsson 2009, 2013). Recently a new perspective was added to this picture when James Tabery (2008, 2014) discussed Hogben’s early 1930s ideas about the interaction of heredity and environment in individual development and his confrontation with R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) concerning this matter. As I reveal in a new paper, forthcoming in Journal of the History of Biology, Tabery's depiction of the history behind Hogben's ideas is far from complete. In this presentation I will discuss the 12 years that Tabery omitted and show that Hogben’s developmental ideas were closely related to his anti-Lamarckian stance, the latest experimental work in embryology and to Wilhelm Johannsen’s (1857-1927) pure lines and the fluctuating variability that he observed within them. With all this in mind Hogben urged scientists in 1927 to “relegate this false antithesis of ‘heredity versus environment’ to the school debating societies, where it properly belongs”.