Woodger, Joseph Henry (1894–1981)

English biologist who attempted to provide biology with a systematic and logical foundation on which observations, theories, and methods could be based.

Woodger was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and studied at London. He taught at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School from 1924 and became professor there 1947.

Woodger developed the idea that one of the characteristics of a living system is the organization of its substance, and that this order is of a hierarchical nature. Thus the components of an organism can be classified on a scale of increasing size and complexity: molecular, macromolecular, cell components, cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. Each class exhibits specifically new modes of behaviour, which cannot be interpreted as being merely additive phenomena from the previous class. Living matter shows not only spatial hierarchical order but also divisional hierarchies (each cell or group of cells has a parent cell), and he showed that many difficulties in biological theory arose originally through viewing an organism as a series of components ordered in space but not in time.

Woodger's works include the textbook Elementary Morphology and Physiology 1924, Biological Principles: a critical study 1929, and The Technique of Theory Construction 1939.