John Randal Baker FRS (23 October 1900 – 8 June 1984)[1] was an English biologist, zoologist, and microscopist, and a professor at the University of Oxford, where he was Emeritus Reader in Cytology.
Among the small staff of the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy was Dr. (later Sir) Julian Huxley, of whom Baker would write a biographical memoir many years later.
Other students in the department during Baker's time included Charles Elton, E. B. Ford, Alister Hardy and Carlos Blacker.
An anthropological and zoological mission headed by Professor T. T. Barnard in 1922 provided the first of three visits to the New Hebrides Islands, where Baker turned his attention to the influence of a relatively non-seasonal climate on the breeding seasons and sexual activity of animals.
His research in this area would eleven years later issue in the development of the contraceptive spermicide Volpar[3] and, for this work, he would in 1958 receive the Oliver Bird Medal from the Family Planning Association.
The company included his wife Inezita and sister Geraldine - who had collaborated with him on previous research, ornithologist Tom Harrisson, zoologist and surveyor Terence Bird, and naturalist A. J. Marshall.
Uncharacteristically for the time, Baker used the traditional categories of physical anthropology and classified human populations in terms of race.
Baker rejected the methodological relativism that had characterized anthropology since the days of Franz Boas, instead going back to earlier ideas of hereditarianism and cultural evolution.