Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen British Museum of Natural History | |
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Awards | Wollaston Medal (1838) Royal Medal (1846) Copley Medal (1851) Baly Medal (1869) Clarke Medal (1878) Linnean Medal (1888) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Comparative anatomy Paleontology Zoology[1] Biology[1] |
Sir Richard Owen
Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word
Owen was the first president of the
While he made several contributions to science and public learning, Owen was a controversial figure among his contemporaries, both for his disagreements on matters of common descent and for accusations that he took credit for other people's work.
Biography
Owen became a surgeon's apprentice in 1820 and was appointed to the
Owen always tended to support orthodox men of science and the status quo. The royal family presented him with the cottage in Richmond Park and
He died at home on 15 December 1892 and is buried in the churchyard at
Work on invertebrates
While occupied with the cataloguing of the Hunterian collection, Owen did not confine his attention to the preparations before him but also seized every opportunity to dissect fresh subjects. He was allowed to examine all animals that died in
Fish, reptiles, birds, and naming of dinosaurs
Most of his work on
With
Work on mammals
Owen was granted right of first refusal on any freshly dead animal at the London Zoo. His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.[8]
At the same time, Sir Thomas Mitchell's discovery of fossil bones, in New South Wales, provided material for the first of Owen's long series of papers on the extinct mammals of Australia, which were eventually reprinted in book-form in 1877. He described Diprotodon (1838) and Thylacoleo (1859), and extinct species kangaroos and wombats of gigantic size. Most fossil material found in Australia and New Zealand was initially sent to England for expert examination, and with the assistance of the local collectors Owen became the first authority on the palaeontology of the region.[18] While occupied with so much material from abroad, Owen was also busily collecting facts for an exhaustive work on similar fossils from the British Isles and, in 1844–1846, he published his History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds, which was followed by many later memoirs, notably his Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (Palaeont. Soc., 1871). One of his latest publications was a little work entitled Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (London, 1884).
Owen, Darwin, and the theory of evolution
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2019) |
Sometime during the 1840s Owen came to the conclusion that species arise as the result of some sort of evolutionary process.[7] He believed that there were a total of six possible mechanisms: Parthenogenesis, prolonged development, premature birth, congenital malformations, Lamarckian atrophy, Lamarckian hypertrophy and transmutation,[7] of which he thought transmutation was the least likely.[7]
Science historian Evelleen Richards has argued that Owen was likely sympathetic to developmental theories of evolution, but backed away from publicly proclaiming them after the critical reaction that had greeted the anonymously published evolutionary book
During the
Working-class militants were trumpeting man's monkey origins.[citation needed] To crush these ideas, Owen, as President-elect of the Royal Association,[clarification needed] announced his authoritative anatomical studies of primate brains, claiming that the human brain had structures that ape brains did not and that therefore humans were a separate sub-class, starting a dispute which was subsequently satirised as the Great Hippocampus Question. Owen's main argument was that humans have much larger brains for their body size than other mammals including the great apes.[4]
During the
In 1862 (and later occasions) Huxley took the opportunity to arrange demonstrations of ape brain anatomy (e.g. at the
Huxley's campaign ran over two years and was devastatingly successful at persuading the overall scientific community, with each "slaying" being followed by a recruiting drive for the Darwinian cause. The spite lingered. While Owen had argued that humans were distinct from apes by virtue of having large brains, Huxley claimed that racial diversity blurred any such distinction. In his paper criticizing Owen, Huxley directly states:
- ... "if we place A, the European brain, B, the Bosjesman brain, and C, the orang brain, in a series, the differences between A and B, so far as they have been ascertained, are of the same nature as the chief of those between B and C".[21]
Owen countered Huxley by saying the brains of all human races were really of similar size and intellectual ability, and that the fact that humans had brains that were twice the size of large apes like male gorillas, even though humans had much smaller bodies, made humans distinguishable.[4]
Legacy
He was the first director in Natural History Museum in London and his statue was in the main hall there until 2009, when it was replaced with a statue of Darwin. A bust of Owen by Alfred Gilbert (1896) is held in the Hunterian Museum, London.
A species of Central American lizard, Diploglossus owenii, was named in his honour by French herpetologists André Marie Constant Duméril and Gabriel Bibron in 1839.[22]
The Sir Richard Owen pub in central Lancaster is named in his honour,[23] and there is a blue plaque in his honour at Lancaster Royal Grammar School.
Conflicts with his peers
Owen has been described by some as a malicious, dishonest and hateful individual. He has been described in one biography as being a "social experimenter with a penchant for sadism. Addicted to controversy and driven by arrogance and jealousy".
Owen famously credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the Iguanodon, completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer of the dinosaur, Gideon Mantell. This was not the first or last time Owen would falsely claim a discovery as his own. It has also been suggested by some authors[27] that Owen even used his influence in the Royal Society to ensure that many of Mantell's research papers were never published. Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society's Zoological Council for plagiarism.[27]
Another reason for his criticism of the Origin, some historians claim, was that Owen felt upstaged by Darwin and supporters such as Huxley, and his judgment was clouded by jealousy. Owen in Darwin's opinion was
- "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about".[28]
- "It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me".[citation needed]
Owen also resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell, writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860.[29] In the article, Owen was critical of Darwin for not offering many new observations, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon himself, while being careful not to associate any particular comment with his own name.[30] Owen did praise, however, the Origin's description of Darwin's work on insect behaviour and pigeon breeding as "real gems".[29]
Owen was also a party to the threat to end government funding of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew botanical collection (see Attacks on Hooker and Kew), orchestrated by Acton Smee Ayrton:
- "There is no doubt that rivalry resulted between the British Museum, where there was the very important Herbarium of the Department of Botany, and Kew. The rivalry at times became extremely personal, especially between Hooker and Owen ... At the root was Owen's feeling that Kew should be subordinate to the British Museum (and to Owen) and should not be allowed to develop as an independent scientific institution with the advantage of a great botanic garden."[31]
It has been suggested by some authors that the portrayal of Owen as a vindictive and treacherous man was fostered and encouraged by his rivals (particularly Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley) and may be somewhat undeserved. In the first part of his career, he was rightly regarded as one of the great scientific figures of the age. In the second part of his career, his reputation fell.
Owen's lost scientific standing was not due solely to his underhanded dealings with colleagues; it was also due to serious errors of scientific judgement that were discovered and publicized. A fine example was his decision to classify man in a separate subclass of the Mammalia (see
Bibliography
- Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (1832)
- Odontography (1840–1845)
- Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth (1842)
- On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848)
- History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols., 1849–1884)
- On the Nature of Limbs (1849)
- Palæontology or a Systematic Summary of Extinct Animals and Their Geological Relations (1860)
- Archaeopteryx (1863)
- Anatomy of Vertebrates (1866) Image from
- Available at Google Books:
- Volume I, Fishes and Reptiles
- Volume II, Birds and Mammals
- Volume III, Mammals
- Memoir of the Dodo (1866) Full book on Wiki commons
- Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (1871)
- Catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa (1876)
- Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (1884)
References
- ^ a b Shindler, Karolyn (7 December 2010). "Richard Owen: the greatest scientist you've never heard of". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 10 December 2010. Retrieved 19 February 2017.
- ^ a b Owen, Richard (1841). "Report on British fossil reptiles. Part II". Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Plymouth in July 1841. Report of the ... Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1833): 60–204.; see p. 103. From p. 103: "The combination of such characters ... will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria*. (*Gr. δεινός, fearfully great; σαύρος, a lizard. ... )"
- ^ a b c "Sir Richard Owen: The man who invented the dinosaur". BBC. 18 February 2017.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-253-22051-6.
- ISBN 978-0521806992.
- .
- ^ ISBN 978-0300058208.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7679-0817-7.
- ^ Eiland, Murray (2004). "London's Dinosaurs". Rock and Gem. 34 (11): 60–63 – via academia.edu.
- ^ "Sir Richard Owen 1804–1892 Obituary Notice, Monday, December 19, 1892". Eminent persons: Biographies reprinted from the Times. Vol. V, 1891–1892. Macmillan & Co. 1896. pp. 291–299.
- ^ "Richard Owen (1804 - 1892)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 11 June 2019.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 12 April 2021.
- ISBN 0-902-198-84-X.
- ^ S2CID 130712914.
- S2CID 130064618.
- S2CID 129234373.
- OCLC 8415138.
- ISBN 0730103153.
- S2CID 170268846.
- ^ LCCN 2007009519.
A Discourse, with a preface by Brian Hall, and essays by Ron Amundson, Kevin Padian, Mary Winsor, and Jennifer Coggon.
- ^ Huxley, Thomas H. (1861). "On the zoological relations of man with the lower animals". Natural History Review. 2. Vol. 1, no. 1. pp. 67–84 – via Wikisource.
- ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5.
- ^ "The Sir Richard Owen Lancaster". jdwetherspoon.com. J.D. Wetherspoon. Retrieved 14 June 2021.
- ^ "Rocky road: Sir Richard Owen". Strangescience.net. 28 May 2011. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
- Freeman, R.B. (2007). Charles Darwin: A companion. Darwin Online.
- ISBN 9781465549129.
- ^ ISBN 9781784161859.
- ^ Darwin, Charles (1 July 2001). Darwin, Francis; Seward, Albert Charles (eds.). More Letters of Charles Darwin. Vol. 1 – via Project Gutenberg.
A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters.
- ^ a b Owen, Richard (published anonymously) (April 1860). "Darwin on the Origin of Species". Edinburgh Review. 111: 487–532.
- ^ "Darwin on the Origin of Species". Darwin.gruts.com. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
- ^ Turrill, W.B. (1963). Joseph Dalton Hooker. London, UK: Nelson. p. 90.
- ^ Desmond, A. (1982). Archetypes and Ancestors: Paleontology in Victorian London 1850–1875. London, UK: Muller.
- ^ "Sir Richard Owen: The archetypal villain". Darwin.gruts.com. 2001. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
Further reading
- Anonymous (1873). "Professor Owen". Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day. Illustrated by Frederick Waddy. London: Tinsley Brothers. pp. 36–37. Retrieved 6 January 2011.
- Anonymous (1896). "SIR RICHARD OWEN (1804-1892) (Obituary Notice, Monday, December 19, 1892)". Eminent Persons: Biographies reprinted from The Times. Vol. V (1891-1892). London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. pp. 291–299. Retrieved 7 March 2019 – via Internet Archive.
- Amundson, Ron, (2007), The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo. New York: Cambridge University of Press.
- ISBN 978-0-7679-0817-7.
- ISBN 978-0-8050-7087-3.
- Collette, Joseph H., Gass, Kenneth C. & Hagadorn, James W. (2012). "Protichnites eremita unshelled? Experimental model-based neoichnology and new evidence for a euthycarcinoid affinity for this ichnospecies". Journal of Paleontology. 86 (3): 442–454. S2CID 129234373.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - Collette, Joseph H. & Hagadorn, James W. (2010). "Three-dimensionally preserved arthropods from Cambrian Lagerstatten of Quebec and Wisconsin". Journal of Paleontology. 84 (4): 646–667. S2CID 130064618.
- Cosans, Christopher, (2009), Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- ISBN 0-7181-3430-3.
- Darwin, Francis, editor (1887). The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter (7th Edition). London: John Murray.
- Darwin, Francis & Seward, A. C., editors (1903). More letters of Charles Darwin: A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters. London: John Murray.
- Huxley, Thomas H. (1861). "On the zoological relations of man with the lower animals". Natural History Review. 2. Vol. 1, no. 1. pp. 67–84 – via Wikisource.
- Owen, Richard (1852). "Description of the impressions and footprints of the Protichnites from the Potsdam sandstone of Canada". Geological Society of London Quarterly Journal. 8 (1–2): 214–225. S2CID 130712914.
- Owen, Richard (published anonymously) (April 1860). "Darwin on the Origin of Species". Edinburgh Review. 111: 487–532. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
- Owen, Richard (January 2007) [1849]. Amundson, Ron (ed.). On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse, with a preface by Brian Hall, and essays by Ron Amundson, Kevin Padian, Mary Winsor, and Jennifer Coggon. Chicago: LCCN 2007009519.[1]
- Owen, Richard (Owen's grandson) (1894). The Life of Richard Owen. Vol. 1. London: LCCN 03026819.
- Owen, Richard (Owen's grandson) (1894). The Life of Richard Owen. Vol. 2. London: LCCN 03026819.
- Richards, Evellen, (1987), "A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed", British Journal for the History of Science, 20: 129–171.
- Rupke, Nicolaas, (1994), Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Shindler, Karolyn. Richard Owen: the greatest scientist you've never heard of, The Telegraph, 16 December 2010. (accessed 16 December 2010)
External links
- Media related to Richard Owen at Wikimedia Commons
- Quotations related to Richard Owen at Wikiquote
- Works by or about Richard Owen at Wikisource
- Data related to Richard Owen at Wikispecies
- Portraits of Richard Owen at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Works by or about Richard Owen at Internet Archive
- ^ Cosans, 2009, pp. 108–111