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Lancelot Hogben

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Lancelot Thomas Hogben (9 December1895- 22 August 1975) was a versatile English zoologist and geneticist. He is now best known for his popularising books on science, mathematics and language. He was an active member of the Independent Labour Party and Marxist, and a constructed language author (Interglossa). He married in 1917 the mathematician, statistician and feminist Enid Charles. He was a founder of the Journal of Experimental Biology, along with Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane.

He was born in Portsmouth and brought up in Southsea, Hampshire. His parents were Plymouth Brethren; he broke young from the family religion. He attended Tottenham County School in London, where his family had moved, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge. He took his degree in 1915. He had acquired socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society.

During World War I he was a pacifist and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in 1916; this was after six months working with the Red Cross in France, and his deliberate return to Cambridge. His health collapsed after maltreatment and he was released in 1917.

After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities, moving in 1922 to the University of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department. He then went to McGill University, and in 1927 to a zoology chair at the University of Cape Town. He worked on endocrinology and used the Xenopus frog. This had direct application to pregnancy testing. While the job in South Africa was attractive Hogben's antipathy to the contry's racial policies drove him to leave.

In 1930 he moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology. In 1932 he with Haldane, Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886-1973) founded a Society for Experimental Biology. Accoding to Gary Werskey, Hogben was the only one of the four not holding some eugenicist ideas. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1936. The citation read

Distinguished for his work in Experimental Zoology, especially in respect of the mechanism of colour change in Amphibia and Reptilia. He has published a series of important papers on the effect of hormones on the pigmentary effector system and on the reproductive cycle of vertebrates, and has worked on many branches of comparative physiology. More recently he has made substantial contributions to genetics, especially with regard to man.

The social biology position at the LSE was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and when it withdrew funding Hogben moved, becoming Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen in 1937. Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938). These were big ambitious books. While at Aberdeen Hogben developed an interest in language. Besides editing The Loom of Language by his friend Frederick Bodmer, he created an international language, Interglossa, as ‘a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order’.

During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army's medical statistics. He was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham 1941-1947 and professor of medical statistics there 1947-1961, when he retired. He then took a position at the University of Guyana.

Works

  • Exiles of the Snow, and Other Poems (1918)
  • An Introduction to Recent Advances in Comparative Physiology (1924) with Frank R. Winton
  • The Pigmentary Effector System. A review of the physiology of colour response (1924)
  • Comparative Physiology (1926)
  • Comparative Physiology of Internal Secretion (1927)
  • The Nature of Living Matter (1930)
  • Genetic Principles in Medical and Social Science (1931)
  • Mathematics for the Million (1936)
  • The Retreat from Reason (1936) Conway Memorial Lecture May 20, 1936
  • Science for the Citizen: A Self-Educator Based on the Social Background of Scientific Discovery (1938)
  • Political Arithmetic: A Symposium of Population Studies (1938) editor
  • Dangerous Thoughts (1939)
  • Author in Transit (1940)
  • Principles of Animal Biology (1940
  • Interglossa: A Draft of an Auxiliary for a Democratic world order, Being an Attempt to Apply Semantic Principles to Language Design (1943)
  • The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer (1944) editor
  • An Introduction to Mathematical Genetics (1946)
  • History of the Homeland The Story of the British Background: by Henry Hamilton (1947) editor, No. 4 of Primers for the Age of Plenty
  • From Cave Painting To Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope of Human Communication (1949)
  • Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard (1950)
  • Man Must Measure: The Wonderful World of Mathematics (1955)
  • Statistical theory. The relationship of probability, credibility and error. An examination of the contemporary crisis in statistical theory from a behaviorist viewpoint (1957)
  • The Wonderful World Of Energy (1957)
  • The Signs of Civilisation (1959)
  • The Wonderful World Of Communication (1959)
  • Mathematics In The Making (1961)
  • Essential World English (1963) with Jane Hogben and Maureen Cartwright
  • Science in Authority: Essays (1963)
  • The Mother Tongue (1965)
  • Whales for the Welsh - A Tale of War and Peace with Notes for those who Teach or Preach (1967)
  • Beginnings and Blunders or Before Science Began (1970)
  • The Vocabulary Of Science (1970) with Maureen Cartwright
  • Astronomer Priest and Ancient Mariner (1972)
  • Maps, Mirrors and Mechanics (1973)
  • Columbus, the Cannon Ball and the Common Pump (1974)
  • How The World Was Explored, editor, with Marie Neurath and J. A. Lauwerys
  • Lancelot Hogben: Scientific Humanist (1998) autobiography, edited by Adrian Hogben and Anne Hogben

References

  • Robert Bud, ‘Hogben, Lancelot Thomas (1895–1975)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 31 Dec 2005
  • The Visible College (1978) Gary Werskey

For a tribute to Mathematics for the Million from Fields medallist David Mumford

Some of the correspondence between Hogben and R. A. Fisher is available online

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