Background
MacBride was born on December 12, 1866, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the eldest son of Samuel MacBride and Mary Jane Browne.
College Square E, Belfast BT1 6DL, United Kingdom
MacBride was educated at the Academical Institute in Belfast.
University Rd, Belfast BT7 1NN, United Kingdom
MacBride spent a year in Neuwied on the Rhine before returning to continue his education at Queen's College, Belfast, and as an external student at London University.
St John's College, St John's Street, Cambridge CB2 1TP, United Kingdom
MacBride studied at St John's College, Cambridge as an exhibitioner, where he became a Foundation Scholar in 1891 and Fellow in 1893.
MacBride was born on December 12, 1866, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the eldest son of Samuel MacBride and Mary Jane Browne.
MacBride was educated at the Academical Institute in Belfast. He then spent a year in Neuwied on the Rhine before returning to continue his education at Queen's College, Belfast, as an external student at London University and at St John's College, Cambridge as an exhibitioner, where he became a Foundation Scholar in 1891 and Fellow in 1893.
In 1891 MacBride worked for a year under Anton Dohrn at the Marine Biological Station in Naples before returning to Cambridge. In 1897 he became the first professor of zoology at McGill University, Montreal, where he built up a strong school before returning in 1909 to the Imperial College of Science and Technology, remaining there until his retirement in 1934. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1905, vice-president of the Zoological Society of London in 1913, and was active on several committees concerned with marine biology and fisheries.
MacBride’s Textbook of Embryology was the standard work for many years and reflects his wide knowledge and interest in comparative embryology. His particular interest, the development of echinoids, began in Naples and continued throughout his professional life. He studied the problem of metamorphosis from the bilateral larva to the radial adult and used it to elucidate phylogenetic affinities. He found that metamorphosis occurs in Asterina during a previously unnoticed fixed stage, which discovery enabled him to postulate a fixed stage in the phylogeny of this group. There had already been some suggestion by Bateson of affinities between the echinoderms and chordates, for which hypothesis MacBride provided support from embryological evidence, mainly in the origin of the nervous system and coelom, in echinoderms and in amphioxus. His Textbook includes the Protochordata and analyzes relationships.
From his earliest years, MacBride was increasingly a supporter of some form of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. As he expressed it, "… habit is response to environment and inherited structure is nothing but the crystallisation of the habits of past generations."
MacBride held racialist ideas. Science historian Peter J. Bowler has written that MacBride was "convinced that the races could be ranked in a hierarchy with whites at the top, MacBride adopted an environmentalist explanation of how the racial differences were produced." He rejected the concept of the gene and the mutation theory of evolution.
In 1902 MacBride married Constance Harvey; they had two sons.