Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin

by Nicolaas A. Rupke

In the mid-1850s, no scientist in the British Empire was more visible than Richard Owen. Mentioned in the same breath as Isaac Newton and championed as Britain’s answer to France’s Georges Cuvier and Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt, Owen was, as the Times declared in 1856, the most “distinguished man of science in the country.” But, a century and a half later, Owen remains largely obscured by the shadow of the most famous Victorian naturalist of all, Charles Darwin. Publicly marginalized by his contemporaries for his critique of natural selection, Owen suffered personal attacks that undermined his credibility long after his name faded from history. With this innovative biography, Nicolaas A. Rupke resuscitates Owen’s reputation. Arguing that Owen should no longer be judged by the evolution dispute that figured in  only a minor part of his work, Rupke stresses context, emphasizing the importance of places and practices in the production and reception of scientific knowledge. Dovetailing with the recent resurgence of interest in Owen’s life and work, Rupke’s book brings the forgotten naturalist back into the canon of the history of science and demonstrates how much biology existed with, and without, Darwin

Genres: Biography

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke is a Dutch historian of science, who began his academic career as a marine geologist.

Reviews

[Piers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rupke provides us with a rigorous, scholarly and detailed revision of the 19th century comparative anatomist Richard Owen. Owen has long played the bad-guy in the history of the Darwinian revolution. No deed, we are told, was too black to be ascribed to this difficult and ungenerous man. Deeply religious, he was long been painted as one of the chief anti-Darwinians.
Rupke argues that this is a dreadful misconception of Owen's place in the history of British biology. In fact, up until the publication of Darwin's 'Origin', questions of the relationship between form and function dominated biological discussion, and not evolution at all, which was far to radical, controversial and speculative. Owen dedicated his career to seeing a national museum of natural history established, - an endeavour that was opposed by the Darwinians. In his own biological work, he was deeply indebted to transcendental morphology - the Germanic argument that functionalism alone could not explain the diversity of life. Indeed, although Owen was a deeply religious man, it was rather his ties to Oxbridge religious and conservative patrons that led him to obfuscate the evolutionary aspects of his own work. Thus is was Darwin who was seen as bringing together the schools of form and function, rather than Owen himself. Owen did engage the Darwinians, but largely because he disagreed with the gradualist mechanism that Darwin proposed, - Rupke shows that, far from being a creationist, Owen held to a much more stochastic and mutationist understanding of species development. Owen did a lot to oppose Darwin and his leading followers, but was out-manouvered in public debate. They managed to cast him as refusing to incorporate published evidence into his own arguments, and of putting religious belief before truth in science. Owen's own work was overlooked, and the Darwinians effectively pressed their picture of this much maligned man into the history books.
Rupke's Owen gives us a compelling revision of Owen, and of biology in Britain before Darwin.

[Brian Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fair appraisal of Owen’s contributions and beliefs. I appreciate reading this, especially after being more familiar with the Darwinian viewpoint on him from Huxley and others. It’s refreshing to see how complex things have always been, even if the distilled history we are typically presented resembles a much more simplified, Kuhnian extreme.