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Continued from the December 2001 issue
The London School of Economics and Political Science, founded in 1895 by the Fabians, became a separate College and the Faculty of Economics at the University of London in 1900, but remained an institution dedicated to the propagation of a political creed and of little prestige in academic circles. It was only when Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge became Director in 1919 that the curriculum was widened, “contrary to the approval of the political activists of the academic staff”, to include the natural sciences. Beveridge asked Hogben to define the terms of reference for a chair of social biology and then with Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science, persuaded him to become “the first, last and only professor of social biology” at the LSE in 1930. This was at a time when Hogben was trying to “escape from an ethically intolerable and personally menacing situation in Cape Town”, but “had no intention of jumping from the frying pan of apartheid into the cross fire between Viennese mystics and professional partisans of the left”.
Hogben surmised that:
Laski’s main concern in inveigling me into taking the chair of social biology was that the brass hats of the Eugenics Society were already congratulating themselves on the prospect of one of their co-religionists getting the job [for which only R.A. Fisher was, in truth, encouraged by Leonard Darwin, President of the Eugenics Society, to be an aspirant: ‘You must not mind failure. They are, I think, a cranky body, and one cannot guess what line they will take.”13]. At the time, the Society was truculently antisocialist and a stronghold of racial prejudice…. Laski did not underrate the sinister significance of racist doctrines upholstered with bogus biology then gaining ground in Germany. He sensed that my appointment would insure that the new chair would not be a platform for racist propaganda of that sort. He was right. My inaugural lecture14 was a blistering attack on the scientific credentials of dogmas then sponsored by the Eugenics Society.
This was followed by Genetic principles in medicine and social science,15 in a review of which Haldane wrote in Nature16 of the ‘unfortunate breach between genetic research and eugenic propaganda’, and Fisher commented that he found the book ‘cleverly derivative, but superficial, especially in its appearance of originality’.17
When Hogben was at Imperial College, from 1919 to 1922, the head of his department, Professor E.W. MacBride, had been an Ulsterman who “in a precocious dotage, had exchanged the Calvinism of his forefathers for eugenics and had become a pillar of the Eugenics Education Society. This was a circus of snobs and racist cranks … MacBride invited me to attend a lecture he gave on behalf of the Society. To improve the race, he urged on his audience the desirability of legislation to make sterilisation by vasectomy obligatory for males earning less than £400 a year. At that date my own modest salary was £350 and I had already committed paternity.”
At the LSE, where his post carried no teaching responsibility, Hogben continued his research on reproductive physiology in a dilapidated Baptist Chapel, with a basement for keeping tiers of rabbits and tanks of Xenopus. Beveridge, concerned with population problems, had been interested in having the “rubbish about allegedly biological laws of population growth” sorted out, at a time when:
“human genetics was a morass of surmise and superstition. It had as yet no sufficient theoretical foundation for firm conclusions about the results of matings necessarily beyond the range of experimental control. No advance could materialise without further mathematical exploration of the postulates of experimentally established principles. … The rationalisation of race prejudice by appeal to biological principles was then plausible only because human genetics was so immature.”
Hogben, in giving the William Withering Lectures at Birmingham University in 1932, published under the title Nature and nurture,18 chose medical genetics as their theme. C.P. Blacker commented that the nature-nurture argument in this book was that of an anti-eugenic experimental biologist, who ‘contended that the influence of bad heredity could not be correctly assessed when such enormous disparities in social conditions still persisted’. First the environment had to be equalized, and the results examined; only then would be the time to put forward eugenic policies.19
The LSE social biology department undertook mathematical investigations bearing on human genetics, studying population growth, differential fertility and, with Louis Herrman, the responses of monozygotic and dizygotic twins to intelligence tests, besides becoming a centre for demography. Hogben was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1936, and awarded the Keith Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his work on human genetics the same year.
By 1936, Lancelot Hogben had become restless at the LSE from his isolation from colleagues with similar physiological interests, and wanted to concentrate his energies again on experimental research. But another reason was that Beveridge was about to retire from the directorship of the LSE and become Master of University College, Oxford. The next director was to be (Sir) Alexander Carr-Saunders, a social biologist whom Hogben had met in the 1920s with Julian Huxley, and whom he felt was someone he was unlikely to get on with. Besides becoming Director of the LSE, Carr-Saunders was on the Council of the Eugenics Education Society from 1920, Editor of the Eugenics Review (1920-27), Vice-President of the Eugenics Society (1936-39) and its President (1949-53).
In 1937, Hogben was appointed Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen, where he had the support of Sir John (later Lord) Boyd Orr, nutritional physiologist and director and founder of the Rowett Institute for Animal Nutrition. He soon greatly expanded his new department and, besides the teaching, became vigorously engaged in experimental research. He exploited theoretical mathematical genetics “from a scientific rather than an emotional viewpoint” to denounce “the bogus genetic credentials” used by the exponents “of what the Germans called Rassenhygiene and what their British counterparts called Eugenics, [who] presented pedigree charts [inevitably not made from] within the frame-work of a highly standardised environment, as evidence of the role of heredity vis-à-vis human behaviour”. In 1940, on his way back from Norway, where, as already mentioned, he had been lecturing against racial prejudice when the Germans invaded, he spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin before returning to Aberdeen in 1941.
Hogben’s next move was to become Mason Professor of Zoology at Birmingham University in 1942, a year in which he delivered the Croonian Lecture20 on ‘Chromatic behaviour’ to the Royal Society, and underwent a difficult partial thyroidectomy for toxic nodular retrosternal goitre. In 1943, when he was in better health, though still a pacifist he joined Frank Crew, who was in charge of biological research at the War Office, to overhaul army medical statistics and reorganize army medical documentation. He became first editor of the British Journal of Social Medicine, which he co-founded with Crew, and remained at the War Office as Director of Medical Statistics until 1946, when he returned full time to Birmingham. Here he was made Professor of Medical Statistics and Human Genetics in 1947, the first chair of human genetics in the country. His hyperthyroidism recurred in 1951, and was treated by a second thyroidectomy.
In 1957, he published a book, Statistical theory,21 in which he was particularly concerned from a behaviourist viewpoint with the meaning of statistical significance. He claimed that in this book he “repudiated the still almost universally accepted assumptions of Fisherian statistics”, which, it is noted by Adrian Hogben, included analysis of variance, factor analysis and maximum likelihood.
He had bought a cottage in Wales for his retirement, and in 1957 was very happily married, for the second time, to Jane Evans, the headmistress of a little school on the mountain above the cottage, who had given him Welsh lessons. He retired from Birmingham University in 1961, and before taking full retirement was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana from 1963 to 1964. In Wales he continued to write and edit books, still “labouring in the Lord’s vineyard”, before he died in 1975 in his eightieth year.
Hogben’s mention of eugenics and the Eugenics Society (since 1989 renamed The Galton Institute) in his autobiography has been quoted, and makes it obvious why he never became a member of the Society, even though he worked on so many subjects of close interest to the Society, particularly human genetics. With his usual uncompromising stand on principle he never came to understand how much the views of the Eugenics Society had changed from the 1930s and became those described by Hans Eysenck, Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry and a former German refugee, who (as quoted in the December 1997 Newsletter of the Galton Institute) found that ‘the eugenics movement as I have known it has been concerned with research into genetic problems and, on the practical side, with disseminating knowledge about
… genetically transmitted diseases; it had nothing to do with rationalising class divisions and justifying an educational system of any kind’.The widespread, popular and eugenic belief that such measures as enforced sterilization could effectively constrain the supposed greater fecundity of mental defectives and problem families to prevent an overall decline in national intelligence, is an instance of what Hogben found extremely contentious. In any case, he claimed, as already mentioned, that the influence of bad heredity could not be correctly assessed where enormous disparities in social conditions still persisted. The medical policy of eugenic selection by enforced sterilization was first implemented in 1907, in Indiana, ‘to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’, and by 1913 such sterilization had been legalized in 12 US States. Between 1907 and the 1970s more than 60 000 people had been sterilized under laws, upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1927, which had been drafted by doctors and were still valid in 19 States in 1985. These US laws were used as models for legislation in Denmark and Switzerland (1928), Germany (1933), Norway and Sweden (1934), and Finland (1935), and were neither social democrat nor Nazi in origin. It was the medical geneticist, Lionel Penrose, emphasizing Mendelian genetics, who particularly argued that inherited characters are genes and not characters, so that the scope of practical eugenics was extremely limited.22
Adrian Hogben in his introduction to his father’s autobiography writes: “Society owes perhaps its greatest debt to Lancelot for being one of the earliest and most eloquent opponents of Eugenics.” He then quotes from Daniel J. Kevles’s In the name of eugenics23 ‘The leading scientists in the anti-mainline [eugenics] assault, those most powerful and sustained in their critique, were the British biologists J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, and Lancelot Hogben and their American colleague, Herbert S. Jennings’, who, Kevles continues, ‘were advocates of the new mode in biology – experimentalism, the interpretation of life phenomenon in terms of physics and chemistry, and the subjection of biological problems, where appropriate, to mathematical analysis
… to deploy mathematics in aid of establishing the theory of evolution on a genetic basis, that Huxley summarised in his classic book of 1942, Evolution, the modern synthesis.’Kevles23 found that: ‘The rapidly advancing field of genetics helped turn all four men against mainline eugenics, but so did factors of background, temperament, and sociopolitical belief … from early in his career Hogben uncompromisingly resisted the mainline movement, identifying it with ‘ancestor worship, anti-Semitism, colour prejudice, anti-feminism, snobbery, and obstruction to educational progress.’ In contrast, as an undergraduate, Haldane joined the Oxford branch of the Eugenics Society, but remained over the years generally, though by no means invariably, unhelpful to C.P. Blacker and the Society.24 Huxley was continuously an active member from Oxford days, serving as President of the Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. Lionel Penrose, Professor of Human Genetics at the Galton Laboratory, was also closely involved with the Eugenics Society, though he never became a member.
Lancelot Hogben, whose family’s fundamentalist religiosity had set him apart as a boy, remained a prickly and restless lone individual all his life.
NOTES
1 L. Hogben, Lancelot Hogben—scientiflc humanist. An unauthorised autobiography edited by Adrian and Anne Hogben (Woodbridge, Suffolk, The Merlin Press, 1998).
2 L.T. Hogben, Alfred Russel Wallace: the story of a great discoverer, p. 64 (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918).
3 H.G. Wells, The outline of history (London, George Newnes, 1919).
4 L.T. Hogben, Mathematics for the million: a popular self-educator (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1st edn 1936, 4th edn 1967).
5 L.T. Hogben. Science for the citizen: a self-educator based on the social background of scientific discovery (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1938).
6 F. Bodmer, The Loom of Language—a guide to foreign languages for the home student (ed. L. Hogben). Primers for the Age of Plenty, no. 3 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1944).
7 H. Hamilton, History of the Homeland. The story of the British background (ed. L. Hogben). Primers for the Age of Plenty, no. 4 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1947).
8 L.T. Hogben, Interglossa—a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order (Harmondsworth and New York, Penguin Books, 1943).
9 L.T. Hogben, Exiles of the snow, and other poems (London, A.C. Fifield, 1918).
10 Kenneth Calvin Page (pseudonym for L.T. Hogben), A journey to Nineveh, and other verses (London, Noel Douglas, 1932).
11 Virginia Woolf, Entry for 11 March 1918, in The diary of Virginia Woolf (ed. A. O. Bell) vol. 1, 1915-19, p. 127 (London, The Hogarth Press, 1977).
12 J.S. Huxley and L.T. Hogben, ‘Experiments on amphibian metamorphosis and pigment responses in relation to internal secretions’, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B93, 36-53 (1922).
13 Leonard Darwin to R.A. Fisher, 29 November 1929, in Natural selection, heredity, and eugenics (ed. J. H. Bennett), pp. 112-113 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983). The Eugenics Education Society changed its name to the Eugenics Society in 1926.
14 L.T. Hogben, ‘Inaugural Lecture: the foundations of social biology. With introductory remarks by H. G. Wells’, Economica February, 1-24 (1931).
15 L.T. Hogben, Genetic principles in medicine and social science (London, Williams & Norgate, 1931).
16 J.B.S. Haldane, ‘Review of Gen etic principles in medicine and social science’, Nature 129, 345-361 (1932).
17 R.A. Fisher to Leonard Darwin, 7 March 1932, in Natural selection, heredity, and eugenics, op. cit. note 13, p. 152.
18 L.T. Hogben Nature and nurture (London, Williams & Norgate, 1933).
19 C.P. Blacker, Eugenics—Galton and after, p. 145 (London, Gerald Duckworth, 1952).
20 L.T. Hogben, ‘Croonian Lecture. Chromatic behaviour’, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 131, 111-136 (1942).
21 L.T. Hogben, Statistical theory: an examination of the contemporary crisis in statistical theory
from a behaviourist viewpoint (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1957).22 D.C. Watt, ‘Lionel Penrose, F.R.S. (1898-1972)’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 52,137-151, 339—354 (1998).
23 D.J. Kevles, In the name of eugenics—genetics and the uses of human heredity, pp. 122-124 (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986), quoted with permission; J. Huxley, Evolution—the modern synthesis (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1942).
24 C.P. Blacker (1895-1975) was psychiatrist to the Maudsley Hospital, and General Secretary (1931-52) and Honorary Secretary (1952-61) of the Eugenics Society. He turned the Society from propaganda promising universal social redemption to educational efforts and research. He reduced the influence of lay eugenicists, and worked for respectable academic support from geneticists, physicians, psychologists and demographers, so that the Eugenics Society developed into a body that could engage in purely scientific debate about the empirical and theoretical basis of eugenic thought away from any doctrinal movement.
Reprinted with permission from Notes and Records of the Royal Society, London, 1999; vol. 53: pp. 361-369.