Joseph Henry Woodger

[1] Joseph Woodger was born at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, and studied at University College London from 1911 until 1922, except for a period serving in the First World War.

He was a member of the Theoretical Biology Club along with Joseph Needham, Conrad Hal Waddington, John Desmond Bernal, and Dorothy Wrinch.

[1] Woodger was known to friends and family as "Socrates", and with his wife Eden (born Buckle) he lived at Epsom in Surrey, where they had four children.

He criticised the traditional natural history style of biology, including the study of evolution, as immature science, since it relied on narrative.

"[9] Woodger set out to play for biology the role of Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist, intending to convert the subject into a formal, unified science, and ultimately, following the Vienna Circle of logical positivists like Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, to reduce biology to physics and chemistry.