50 years of the Society for the Study of Human Biology

Six degrees of Charles Darwin

It is a common source of amusement at the end of a convivial dinner party in North America and Europe to play a parlor game called “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon”. This game is based on the idea that due to his prolific screen career any Hollywood actor can be “linked” to another in a handful of “steps” based on their associations with Bacon. The number of degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon is known as one's “Bacon number”. The game has been commonly played in the United Kingdom by using the Queen as the target or, depending on the mixture of guests and their nationalities, the target might be George Bush or the Dalai Lama. Amongst biologists the target of association is almost invariably, and not surprisingly, Charles Darwin. In 2008 as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Society for the Study of Human Biology (SSHB) and the 150th anniversary of the reading to the Linnean Society of the Darwin/Wallace paper outlining for the first time the theory of evolution by natural selection, it seems appropriate to highlight our association with this signal moment in the history of biology.

It is to the grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) that we, as Human Biologists, owe our thanks for the diminutive size of our “Darwin number”. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) fathered 14 children, including two illegitimate daughters, through two wives and a mistress. The fourth child of Mary Howard, his first wife, was Robert Waring Darwin who was the father of Charles. The second child of his second wife, Elizabeth Pole, was Frances Ann Violetta Darwin who was to marry Samuel Tertius Galton. In 1822, she gave birth to Francis Galton (1822–1911) who was thus the half cousin of Charles Darwin. Francis Galton grew to be arguably the most famous human scientist and polymath of his day, publishing over 340 papers and books. He created the statistical concepts of standard deviation and correlation and, of fundamental importance to those involved in human growth research, he was the first to recognize the phenomenon of regression to the mean. It is entirely believable that Galton and Darwin were together on any number of family gatherings in which the teenage Darwin would have, I am sure, delighted in discussing natural science with the much younger but highly precocious Galton who was reading by 2 years of age, knew some Latin and Greek by 5 and was quoting Shakespeare for pleasure and poetry by the age of 6 years (Bulmer 2003).

Francis Galton's statistical heir and pupil was Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who was the first incumbent of the Galton Chair of Eugenics (later the Galton Chair of Genetics) at University College London in 1911 and who wrote a three volume biography of Galton published between 1914 and 1930. During the academic year 1905–1906, the American biologist and statistician Raymond Pearl (1879–1940) visited London and held a number of meetings with Pearson. He was so influenced by Pearson, who then occupied the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College London and the Chair of Geometry at Gresham College, that he was to return to the USA as a confirmed biometrician. Indeed by 1919 Pearl was Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics in the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. According to Little (2009) Pearl had broad interests in genetics, fertility, evolution, nutrition, disease, duration of life, senescence, and physical anthropology but Pearl considered himself to be first and foremost a human biologist (Kingsland 1984) totally committed to a human population biology and in 1929 he found and edited the journal “Human Biology”.

After Pearl's death in 1940 the journal went through a difficult time passing through the hands of three editors–all bio-statisticians; Lowell J. Read 1940–1946, Charles P. Windsor 1946–1952, and William G. Cochran, and in 1953 the journal suspended publication. William White Howells (1908–2005), then Professor of Anthropology at Harvard heard of the demise and not wishing to see the failure of what was obviously a potentially important avenue for scientific research asked first Josef Brozek (who declined) and then Gabriel Lasker (1912–2002) to take over the journal (Crawford 2004). Wayne State University Press became the publishers and Lasker became editor of Human Biology in 1953 and continued to edit the journal for 35 years.

Gabriel Lasker was a prolific and iconoclastic human biologist and physical anthropologist, whose involvement in the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the Human Biology Council brought him in to contact with most of the human biologists studying their science during the latter half of the twentieth century. It is through Gabriel Lasker that our link to Charles Darwin is complete and direct. Through Lasker, Howells, Pearl, Pearson, and Galton we have a clear pathway of scientific thought and research spanning almost 200 years that links in six steps modern human biologists to the most important natural scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Society for the Study of Human Biology

The decade following WWII witnessed the emergence in the United Kingdom of a group of scientists who were to fundamentally change the way in which anthropologists approached the study of living man. They were brought together by Joe Weiner (1915–1982) and Derek Roberts to discuss Physical Anthropology at a meeting in the Ciba Foundation, London on 6 November 1957. The title of the symposium is interesting–“The scope of physical anthropology and its place in academic studies”–because it implied two things; first, that physical anthropology had changed or developed so much in its basic structure that there was a need to perhaps redefine it, and second that there was a question mark regarding where it fitted within “academic study”. An emerging interest in the study of human populations was asking to be given a broader canvas on which to paint. It was, to quote James Tanner “crying out for forceps” and it was at this meeting that the need for an assisted birth became clear–from the Physical Anthropology of old to the new Human Biology!

The speakers and their topics give us a flavor of the direction in which this revolutionary group was heading. Two highly respected elder statesmen, Professor Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clarke (1895–1971), and Professor Sir Solly Zuckerman (1904–1993) opened and closed the proceedings.

Wilfred Le Gros Clarke was Professor of Anatomy at Oxford and had the distinction of requiring his new junior lecturer in anatomy in 1946, James Tanner, to give the first series of lectures on human growth and development–a request that turned into a lifetimes work for James Tanner. Le Gros Clarke also worked with Joe Weiner and Kenneth Oakley (1911–1981) in 1953 to prove the Piltdown Man of 1912 to be a hoax.

The South African, Professor Sir Solly Zuckerman (1904–1993), was described by John Peyton, in his 2001 biography, as “the last evangelist of the enlightenment”. He was Professor of Anatomy at Birmingham and also Secretary of the Zoological Society of London.

The papers were clearly designed to review Physical Anthropology in some detail through orientation, the nature of the discipline, the way in which it was being taught to professionals and to students, and the way in which it was presented to the general public. The discussion must have been intense because the report on the proceedings says: “It is unfortunately not possible to reproduce the discussion which followed the papers, though it was a most interesting part of the day's proceedings. Among the multiplicity of points that were raised, however, two deserve special mention. There was general agreement that there was a pressing need for an association of professional workers whose interests lie primarily in the field of human population biology, and that symposia should be held at regular intervals to facilitate contact between them. Both these ideas have been followed up.”

A couple of months later, in the spring of 1958, seven academics met one afternoon in the Child Study Centre of the Institute of Child Health in London to discuss the formation of a new society that would (to quote Tanner) “recognize that the old Physical Anthropology was moribund, and that the biology of human populations was crying out for forceps”; Joe Weiner, James Tanner, Derek Roberts, Geoffrey Harrison, Arthur Mourant (1904–1994), Nigel Barnicot (1914–1975), Kenneth Oakley. Thus the society was conceived and held its first meeting on 7 May 1958 in the Natural History section of the British Museum, Chaired by J. Z. Young (1907–1997).

By June 1959 the issue of a journal for the society was being discussed, but fears of too small an audience of both contributors and readers meant that the project was shelved. However, Tanner had been impressed by the journal Human Biology that had recently accepted one of his papers. Indeed he recounts in a recent E-mail:

“The journal certainly had a profound effect on me. I subscribed as soon as I discovered its existence, probably in 1946 while developing the course on growth in Le Gros Clarke's department at Oxford–and that was certainly the only copy available in Oxford and I suspect in the United Kingdom for some years. I particularly liked it, because it accepted to publish in full my first substantial paper on growth (Some notes on the reporting of growth data. Human Biology 23, 93–159. 1951) after various pediatric and other journals had rejected it on the grounds of being too long (it was) and containing too many algebraic expressions (it did not).”

Gabriel Lasker was contacted and on 1 January 1963 when Human Biology became the official journal of the SSHB. Tanner was appointed as co-editor and editor for the society with Lasker as Editor-in-Chief. During the next 10 years all went well and the journal “put on weight” but a unilateral increase in subscriptions of 65% by the publishers forced the SSHB, now with 373 members, to open discussions with Taylor & Francis, the publishers of the symposia series regarding a new journal. The SSHB appointed a troika of editors (James Tanner, Otto Edholm, and Geoffrey Harrison) and Janet Baines-Preece as Editorial Assistant, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since 1958 the SSHB has held two meetings per year; proffered papers and symposium. The 50 symposia volumes and their titles bear witness to the development of human biology during this time.

Any new society needs to spend some time discussing its scope and what areas of science it can fairly claim to be core areas as opposed to peripheral areas. The first few volumes of symposia, therefore, between 1958 and the early 1970s concentrated on the five areas of research that were recognized as being central to human biology at that time; human evolution, genetics, human growth and development, structural morphology and physiology, and human ecology. Because human biology was about population biology, it is not surprising to see that “variation” was a common theme throughout these volumes. The term “demography” appeared for the first time in 1975, and “migration” in 1979. “Human ageing”, and “nutrition” began to appear in the early 1980s and “health”, now one of the most important areas of human biological research, appeared for the first time in 1988 and has been a core area of applied research for the last 20 years.

The annual proffered papers meetings have always been an arena in which “work in progress” can be discussed without the fear of ridicule. They have therefore formed an important testing ground and training pitch for students and young academics alike to test their ideas and projects on their more venerable peers. The audiences are usually small, but knowledgeable and interested, and the well-worn circuit of London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham has been both comfortable and convenient.

In tracing the history of the society, I have not dwelt on the names of the great and the good who have graced the SSHB with their time and wisdom during these 50 years. Their names are evident in the editorships of the symposia volumes, the various chairs, secretaries and committee members of the SSHB, and the editors of the Annals of Human Biology. Their legacy is evident in the richness of the science that we are fortunate to count as our science and in its immediate relevance to the constantly changing world in which we live.

The Nobel Prize winning physiologist Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987) brilliantly described Human Biology in his Foreword to the first reference work bearing that title. “Human biology”, he wrote

“is not so much a discipline as a certain attitude of mind towards the most interesting and important of animals. Human Biology portrays mankind on the canvas that serves also for other living things. It is about men rather than man: about their origin, evolution, and geographical deployment; about the growth of human populations and their structure in space and time; about human development and all that it entails of change in size and shape. Human Biology deals with human heredity, the human genetical system, and the nature and import of the inborn differences between individuals; with human ecology and physiology, and with the devices by which men have met the challenges of enemies and of hostile environments. Human Biology deals also with human behaviour–not with its wayward variations from one individual to another, but rather with the history and significance of, for example, family life; of love, play, showing off, and real or sham aggression. Finally, and most important–because most distinctively human–it must expound and explain the nature, origin and development of communication between human beings and the non-genetical system of heredity founded upon it.” (Harrison et al. 1964)

We believe that the Society for the Study of Human Biology reflects this attitude, and in so doing will continue to lead to an increase in understanding of man's place in Nature and nature's place in Man.

Noël Cameron

Department of Human Sciences

Centre for Human Development and Ageing

Loughborough University

Loughborough

LE11 4BU, UK

E-mail: [email protected]