Frederic Wood Jones. Acerbic anatomist and those who came after him

Frederic Wood Jones
from
Biographical Memoir

In my article on Chapman Pincher and the evolution of the giraffe (1 December 2019) I wrote:

Frederic Wood Jones FRS (1879-1954), a classical anatomist, who had worked on all sorts of biological problems and phenomena from the formation of coral reefs to the lesions caused by judicial hanging, with very strange views on evolution and the value of genetics, wrote to the editor in reply to Pincher. Wood Jones pointed out that he and Robert Broom FRS (1866-1951)—the famous primate palaeontologist and anatomist also possessed of very strange views on evolution by ‘spiritual agencies’—had come up with the same idea as Pincher.

The job of writing Wood Jones’s biographical memoir for the Royal Society fell to Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark (1895-1971). Wood Jones had along with Arthur Keith FRS (1866-1955) and Grafton Elliot Smith FRS (1871-1937) inspired Le Gros Clark’s interest in primates and physical anthropology. However, none of the three escaped criticism by their pupil. Lord Solly Zuckerman (1904-1993) noted in his biographical memoir on Le Gros Clark that, in the biographical memoir on Wood Jones, Le Gros Clark had written:

Wood Jones he described as a man who ‘carried his arguments too far and sometimes rather seriously overstated the evidence on which he relied . . .’, as a man who was guilty of ‘needlessly caustic dis­paragement of some of the great biologists of past days’, and as one who was astute in controversy and intolerant of those who disagreed with him. 

But Le Gros Clark had gone much further than in Zuckerman’s examples. Thus:

He was obviously impressed with the precision and. detail of functional adaptations in the animal world, as pre­sumably all zoologists are. But, unlike zoologists in general, he allowed him­self to be so overwhelmed with this outstanding characteristic of living organisms that he was content to ascribe all adaptations to an obscure and undefined kind of directive force, and simply to leave it at that. There was, indeed, a distinct element of mysticism in his attitude to some of the fundamental problems of organic life and, as a result, his more popular writings aroused considerable response from the class of general reader to whom the methods and philosophy of science make little appeal. 

He ended:

A man of restless curiosity and of strong opinions, he sometimes gave an appearance of intolerance towards those who disagreed with him. He was also very critical of the development of new technical methods in anatomical research, even going so far as to imply that any method but that of scalpel and forceps (and perhaps the low power of the microscope) was beyond the proper domain of the science of anatomy. It is little wonder, therefore, that he was out of sympathy with the younger generation of anatomists; so much so, indeed, that he occasionaly [sic] allowed himself to be almost too brusque in his attitude towards them and their work. But although he was possessed of a certain natural acerbity of temperament which impelled him to express his views in somewhat unaccommodating terms, Wood Jones certainly contributed his full share (and more) to the store of comparative anatomical knowledge, and the stimulus which he gave to his students and contemporaries by his lectures and writings can hardly be exaggerated. 

I think it is worth pointing out that Wood Jones, Keith, Elliot Smith and Zuckerman (who, in turn, was critical of Le Gros Clark) came into the biological sciences through medicine. They were all professors of anatomy and clearly ill-equipped in that intellectual tradition, like, sadly, many biomedical scientists of today, to have much worth saying on the mechanisms of evolution or of the importance of the role of evolution in shaping biological systems. The zoologists and geneticists did that. Wood Jones was a man of his tradition and his time.

Le Gros Clark W. 1955. Frederic Wood Jones 1879-1954. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1, 119-134.

Zuckerman S. 1973. Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark 1895-1971. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 19, 217-233.