London, 1931

In late June 1931 W. E. Ritter, professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Scripps Marine Association, arrived in London in order to chair the third session of the Second International Congress of the History of Science. The London meeting is mainly remembered as a gathering of radical scientists discussing how science could shape capitalism and how scientific rationality could revolutionize Western societies. However, the congress also included a small group of scientists with less ambitious goals: they aimed to rethink biological sciences on new theoretical bases. The title of Ritter's session was ‘Historical and Contemporary Relationships of Physical and Biological Science’, and participants included the physiologist J. S. Haldane, the zoologist E. S. Russell, the biochemist J. Needham, the engineer L. L. Whyte, the botanist B. Becking, the zoologist L. Hogben, the theoretical biologist J. H. Woodger, the zoologist D'Arcy W. Thompson and the physicist A. Yoffe. In general, as Ritter remarked in his critical summary of the papers, the discussion touched on diverse issues, including: the supposed difference between inorganic and organic natures; the possibility of a scientific synthesis of the whole of natural knowledge; the importance of Aristotle and his tradition for renewed life science; the importance of observation and experiment in the biosciences; and the new emerging physics exemplified by quantum theory, which, as Whyte put it, would transform ‘certain aspects of the traditional antithesis between physical and biological theory’.