Baker participated in several overseas research expeditions following his undergraduate work. 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. He also became interested in the hermaphroditic pigs bred by the native people for use in rituals of initiation and, later, in comparing them with the intersex pigs of Britain. Examination of the anatomical and histological characteristics of these animals, in conjunction with research into factors of sex determination and development of sexual organs, led to his book Sex in man and animals. In 1927, Baker returned to the New Hebrides for a year. On this trip, his study of the native population and interest in reproduction became focused on questions of human population control, about the growth of which he and many others had become concerned. His research in this area would eleven years later issue in the development of the contraceptive spermicide Volpar and, for this work, he would in 1958 receive the Oliver Bird Medal from the Family Planning Association. Interestingly, Baker's great-grandfather, Sir Archibald Alison, had in 1840 published a book titled The principles of population. In 1933, under the auspices of the Oxford University Exploration Club founded by his schoolmate Charles Elton, Baker organized and led the Oxford Expedition to the New Hebrides, the primary focus of which was to investigate the influence of environmental factors on the breeding seasons of rainforest fauna. Additional purposes included specimen collection and surveying. The company included his wife Inezita and sister Geraldine - who had collaborated with him on previous research, ornithologist Thom Harrisson, zoologist and surveyor Terence Bird, and naturalist A. J. Marshall. One of the expedition's accomplishments was the first ascent and mapping of Mount Tabwemasana, the highest peak in the New Hebrides. The resultant map was used by the U.S. Army during their World War IIoccupation of the islands.
Work
The most widely received of his works was Race. 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. The book received mixed reviews. In Race, Baker used a restrictive sense of the term "civilization", giving 23 criteria by which civilizations might be identified. Based on these criteria, Baker declared that Mesoamerican societies such as those of the Aztecs and Maya were not civilizations, and that no indigenous civilizations ever arose in Africa. He enumerated five civilizations sensu stricto and explored the relationship between the biological traits and the cultures of these five civilizations. In this book, Baker speculated that different human races evolved from different subspecies of apes. Baker claimed that "negrids" were less evolved, and also inferior, to races Baker described as civilized. Baker also claims that all black people have a "fetid smell". According to a 1974 review by A. O. Ladimeji in Race & Class, Baker misrepresents or misunderstands the history of the study of race. Per Ladimeji, "Most of Baker's biological data comes from the nineteenth century with no corroboration from recent research." Ladimeji wrote that most of Baker's more outlandish claims had already been refuted by available studies at the time of publication. Together with Michael Polanyi, Baker founded the Society for Freedom in Science in 1940. In March, 1958 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
