Joseph Henry Woodger (2 May 1894 – 8 March 1981) was a Britishtheoretical biologist andphilosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century.Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, claimed "Woodger... influenced and stimulated the evolution of the philosophy of science in Britain and in the United States as hardly anybody else".[1]
Joseph Woodger was born atGreat Yarmouth inNorfolk, and studied atUniversity College London from 1911 until 1922, except for a period serving in theFirst World War. He then became areader at theUniversity of LondonMiddlesex Hospital Medical School. He became aprofessor there in 1947, and eventually retired in 1959 asemeritus professor ofbiology. He was a member of theTheoretical Biology Club along withJoseph Needham,Conrad Hal Waddington,John Desmond Bernal, andDorothy Wrinch.[2][3][4][5]Karl Popper described the club as "one of the most interesting study circles in the field of the philosophy of science".[1]
Woodger was known to friends and family as "Socrates", and with his wife Eden (born Buckle) he lived atEpsom inSurrey, where they had four children. His eldest child wasMike Woodger (born 1923), a computer pioneer who worked withAlan Turing at theNational Physical Laboratory, leading to the earlyPilot ACE computer.[6] He died in 1981.[1]
Woodger led the introduction ofpositivist philosophy of science into biology with his 1929 bookBiological Principles,[7] for which he has been roundly if unfairly criticised.[8] He saw a maturescience as being characterised by a framework ofhypotheses which could be verified by facts established byexperiments. He criticised the traditionalnatural history style ofbiology, including the study ofevolution, as immature science, since it relied onnarrative.[7]
For example, he wrote "Admittedly, some hypotheses have become so well established that no one doubts them. But this does not mean that they are known to be true. We cannot determine the truth of a hypothesis by counting the number of people who believe it, and a hypothesis does not cease to be a hypothesis when a lot of people believe it."[9]
Woodger set out to play for biology the role ofRobert Boyle'sSceptical Chymist, intending to convert the subject into a formal, unified science, and ultimately, following theVienna Circle of logical positivists likeOtto Neurath andRudolf Carnap,to reduce biology to physics and chemistry. His efforts stimulated the biologistJ. B. S. Haldane to push for the axiomatisation of biology, and helped to bring about themodern synthesis of evolutionary biology, combininggenetics,evolution,ecology and other disciplines.[7]
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