G.D. Hale Carpenter MBE (26 October 1882 in Eton, Berkshire – 30 January 1953 in Oxford) was a British entomologist and medical doctor.
He worked first at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in Uganda, on tse-tse flies and sleeping sickness.
His main work in zoology was on mimicry in butterflies, an interest he developed in Uganda and Tanganyika.
In 1910 he joined the Colonial Medical Service, where he worked in Uganda on the north shore of Lake Victoria.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Carpenter was called to service in the British Army Medical Corps.
[2] From May 1916 to January 1918, he worked in Tanganyika (former German E. Africa), 200 miles south to south-east of Lake Victoria.
The question at stake was whether the observations, which dated from work by naturalists in the 19th century, could be accounted for by natural selection.
The gradual coming-together of field observations and experimental genetics is part of the evolutionary synthesis which took place in the middle of the twentieth century.