How the West Was Lost: Revisiting the Supposed Failure of Anglo-American Theoretical Biology

In the summer of 1929, Raymond Pearl, editor of the Quarterly Review in Biology, responded to English biologist J. H. Woodger with a warning. Woodger had submitted a lengthy, sophisticated essay on theoretical biology to the QRB. Though he recognized it as an important contribution, Pearl thought it would not fly with the journal’s editorial board. “Most working biologists, at any rate in America,” cautioned Pearl, “do not like to think and look with a very fishy eye on anything which savors of philosophy.” This essay begins with Raymond Pearl’s claim. Was it true that theoretical biology foundered in the interwar period in the United States? If so, why? And how unique was the US? Woodger collaborated with Continental biologists but found the inspiration for his own theoretical biology amidst English philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. So, did biologists in the United Kingdom fare any better in fostering theoretical biology than in the US? In order to answer these questions, this essay will weigh claims by historians of the life sciences that, “ideas of science come second in every sense, to the work of science” (Endersby 2007) against the methodological and sociological trends in Anglo-American biology in the mid-twentieth century.