OWEN, RICHARD

(b. Lancaster, England, 20 July 1804; d. London, England, 18 December 1892)

comparative anatomy, vertebrate paleontology, evolutionary biology. For the original article on Owen see DSB, vol. 10.

Since the early 1980s, a major repositioning of Owen has taken place, as historians of evolutionary biology began tracing the roots of Darwinism to scientific traditions that previously had been considered inimical to the theory of evolution, such as natural theology and idealist morphology. Owen, who conventionally was marginalized and cast in the role of Charles Darwin’s main creationist opponent, has been reappraised as a major representative of those traditions and, beyond that, as a proponent of evolution theory himself, albeit evolution of a non-Darwinian kind.

Moreover, the emergence within historical scholarship of attempts to understand the growth of science in terms of its institutions and the recognition that museums of natural history were significant sites of scientific practice has led to a more fundamental reevaluation of Owen yet. Rather than being seen in the first instance as a participant in the nineteenth-century debate about the origin of species, he has been appraised as a leader of the Victorian museum movement. Placed in the context of his museum career ambitions and attainments, Owen has received a more differentiated understanding of his contributions to comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology.

Museum Curator at Hub of Empire . Owen made his living as a museum curator, being employed during the 1827–1856 period at the Hunterian Museum and during 1856–1883 at the British Museum. From early on in his professional career he pursued the ideal of a separate national museum of natural history, one that would exhibit nature according to his museological rules. He later addressed the issue in a rare treatise of its kind, On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History (1862). Initially, he transformed the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum into a major center for the study of comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology, in a conscious effort to keep up with Georges Cuvier’s Parisian Muséum d’Anatomie Comparée.

To this end, Owen led the Hunterian Museum away from the narrow purpose of surgical training. When he was blocked in carrying this through to the full, Owen left the employment of the Royal College of Surgeons to accept an appointment at the British Museum (BM), where he became the first superintendent of the natural history collections. However, his marginal position at the BM, especially in relation to its librarian Anthony Panizzi (1797–1879), and the inadequacy of the accommodation for the collections in his care were among further reasons for Owen to seek the establishment of a separate museum of natural history. In this he succeeded by securing the creation of the British Museum (National History), or BM(NH), in South Kensington, which was inaugurated in 1881. It was Owen who created the Natural History Museum as it is known in the early twenty-first century, one of the greatest “cathedrals of science” to be built anywhere and the crowning achievement of his career.

Like Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), Owen was not a field naturalist but a museum man who never undertook a major journey of exploration but who, at the vantage point of his institutional position, orchestrated the collecting of natural history specimens, obtaining many rare and precious ones, early on from London’s Zoological Gardens, but increasingly also from around the British Isles and indeed from around the world. He succeeded in turning the Hunterian Museum and the BM(NH) into centers for the cataloging, exhibiting, and storing of trophy treasures from Britain’s colonial empire. The enormous range as well as the novelty of his numerous research papers reflect Owen’s position at this metropolitan hub of empire.

Functionalist Studies . For the purchase of specimens, the expansion of exhibition and storage space, and his museum plans in general, Owen needed the approval and cooperation of his employers and patrons, and to a significant extent his science took on the qualities of the factions from which he sought support. Among Owen’s early and most effective patrons was the Oxford geologist William Buckland (1784–1856), who gave Owen access to the liberal Tory prime minister Robert Peel (1788–1850). Following Peel’s death by accident, his political mantle fell on William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), the founder of the Liberal Party and thrice prime minister. Owen’s museum endeavors were by and large a Peel-ite-Gladstonian enterprise, and much of what Owen attained in terms of institutional and career advancement, including various national honors, such as a civil list pension (1842) and a knighthood (Knight Commander; 1884), came to him from a circle of mainly Oxonian liberal Anglicans.

These men regarded natural history as a form of natural theology, and the Paleyan proclivities of the network of Owen’s museum patrons were ably and, at times sensationally, accommodated by him. From his early monograph on the pearly nautilus to his reconstruction of the leonine marsupial Thylacoleo carnifex, Owen interpreted organic diversity in terms of Cuvierian functionalism, explaining organic form in terms of its function and providing instances of perfect adaptation.

Idealist Morphology and Vertebrate Archetype . A majority of Owen’s metropolitan colleagues were not Oxbridge educated but, like Owen himself, had received their education outside England, in Edinburgh or additionally on the Continent. From there they brought with them a different epistemology than Cuvierian-Paleyan functionalism, namely the idealism of Romantic nature philosophy, which explained physical reality—especially organic diversity—in terms of the transcendental logic of form rather than functional adaptation.

In London, German idealism was articulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle as well as by Coleridge’s disciple, the surgeon Joseph Henry Green, to whose influence Owen was exposed at the Royal College of Surgeons, where Green delivered Hunterian Lectures on a rotating scheme before Owen himself in 1837 began delivering the lectures as the sole Hunterian professor. Moreover, Owen was intellectually indebted to William Whewell, one of the rare Oxbridge thinkers to communicate idealist thought. In this largely metropolitan subculture, Owen developed a research program of transcendental morphology, bringing the prior accomplishments of Lorenz Oken, Carl Gustav Carus, and other Continental anatomists to an internationally admired level of perfection. It was Owen’s declared ambition to unify the functionalist and transcendentalist approaches, but in this he did not succeed.

Owen began working systematically on problems of transcendental anatomy in 1841, as part of his curatorial task of cataloging the extensive osteological collections of the Hunterian Museum. From this work he extracted the materials for his comprehensive account of transcendental osteology, which he presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1846 in the form of a major report, subsequently published under the title On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1849). In this and earlier reports to the BAAS (1839, 1841, 1842, 1843), he made major improvements in classification and terminology, adding several significant taxonomic categories, most famously the Dinosauria(1841), from which Owen, ever since dinosaurs first entered the wider sphere of public interest at the Great Exhibition of 1851, has derived considerable vicarious renown.

To demonstrate the inadequacy of the functionalist method, Owen cited the development of the skull, because it had been the skull with which transcendental morphology in Germany had been most notably associated. Functional adaptation could not explain that in all classes of vertebrates, as a rule, the foetal skull is composed of the same number of uncoalesced pieces, arranged in the same general way. In marsupials or birds, for example, it does not play the role it has in placental mammals of making birth safer. A more comprehensive view had to be taken, which Owen did by adopting the vertebrate theory of the skull, that is, the notion that the skull is to be understood as a series of metamorphosed vertebrae, just as, at the other end of the vertebral column, the sacrum represents several fused vertebrae. The basic building block of the skeleton was the vertebra, and the uncoalesced skull bones in backboned foetuses can be explained as parts of separate cephalic vertebrae.

Thus the skeleton could be seen as a series of ideal vertebrae, most closely represented in real life by the bony framework of fishes. Owen called the fish-like concatenation of virtually undifferentiated vertebrae the vertebrate archetype. It represented the skeleton in its most elementary form, with only a hint of the modifications that are to be found in real vertebrates, and to which all skeletal forms, including those of humans, could be traced back by a careful study of their homological relationships.

Owen gave a precise definition to the concepts—at that time fuzzily defined—of analogy and homology: he defined an analogue as “A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal”; he defined a homologue, by contrast, as “The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function” (1848, p. 7).

Origin of Species by Natural Means . With his notion of an archetype—which Owen soon after its initial enunciation in terms of an expression of an immanent force redefined as a Platonic blueprint of design in the mind of the

Creator—he shifted the evidence for the existence of a supreme designer from concrete adaptations to an abstract plan—from special to general teleology. Divine contrivance was to be recognized not so much in the characteristics of individual species but in their common ground-plan. In other words, species could have originated by natural means, not by miraculous creation. To this belief Owen gave cautious, some would say cryptic, expression in a variety of publications, for example in his On the Nature of Limbs (1849). Strong criticism from his Paleyite patrons turned Owen privately into a evolutionist, but he enormously resented it when later he was portrayed by Darwin as a creationist. And indeed, over a period of some four decades, from the mid-1840s to the mid-1880s, he explicitly and repeatedly expressed—in articles, monographs, a textbook, and letters—his belief in a natural origin of species. He belatedly formulated his mature theory of saltatory descent in the concluding chapter of his On the Anatomy of Vertebrates (3 volumes, 1866–1868), separately published as the Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species (1868).

The question remained, however, what the “natural means” were. With respect to this issue Owen and Darwin parted company. To Owen, natural selection could only explain the extinction of species, not their diverging origins. Moreover, like many of his German colleagues, Owen conflated the questions of the origin of species with that of the origin of life, and natural selection seemed ineffectual at the primordial level of abiogenesis. Owen was a pivotal figure in the emergence of the evolutionary view of life forms as indicated by fossils. He was a strong advocate of the notion that the paleontological record is progressive, arguing in an anonymous Quarterly Review(1851) critique of Charles Lyell’s steady-state view of the geological past that the succession of fossils through time shows a distinct development from lower to higher. For Owen, this progressive change was a process guided by divine purpose. He believed in an orthogenetic-saltational process of organic unfolding, driven by an inherent tendency to change, not by contingent, gradualist, and external forces such as natural selection.

The phenomenon of metagenesis provided Owen with a visualizing aid for his notion of evolution. In the booklet On Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single Ovum (1849), he described the phenomenon of alternating generations in the reproductive cycles of, for example, aphids, jellyfish, or flukeworms. Characteristic of such metagenetic cycles is that the individual generations can differ in form from each other as much as different species or even genera, families, and orders do. One could imagine that under particular circumstances the cycle might be broken, and the separate stages go on reproducing. In this way wholly new species might originate.

The Hippocampus Controversy . Owen applied his saltational theory of the origin of species also to humans and, in the Christian antislavery tradition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and James Cowles Prichard, stressed the unity of mankind and the gap that exists between humans and the higher apes. Based on a series of comparative studies of the anthropoid apes, he placed humans in a subclass of their own, the Archencephala, pointing to a number of specific cerebral features, in particular the hippocampus minor. This led to a prolonged controversy with Thomas Henry Huxley who, in an effort to prove a Darwinian origin of Homo sapiens, argued that apes also possess a hippocampus minor and that the lowest races of mankind are closer to these apes than to Englishmen. The controversy was fought out highly publicly at successive annual meetings of the BAAS, at Oxford (1860), Manchester (1861), and Cambridge (1862). Huxley outclassed Owen as a controversialist and tactician, and has been regarded as both the victor and the person who got it right. Detailed reexamination has disclosed the complexity of the case, however, and shows that on both sides issues of personality and politics structured the scientific debate.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY OWEN

On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton. London: J. van Voorst, 1848.

On the Nature of Limbs. London: J. van Voorst, 1849.

On Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single Ovum. London: J. van Voorst, 1849.

“Lyell: On Life and Successive Development.” Quarterly Review 89 (1851): 412–451.

On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History. London: Saunders, Otley, 1862.

On the Anatomy of Vertebrates. 3 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1866–1868.

Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species. London: Longmans, Green, 1868.

The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy May–June, 1837. Edited by Phillip R. Sloan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

OTHER SOURCES

Amundson, Ron. “Typology Reconsidered: Two Doctrines on the History of Evolutionary Biology.” Biology and Philosophy13 (1998): 153–177.

Branagan, David. “Richard Owen in the Antipodean Context.” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales125 (1992): 95–102.

Camardi, Giovanni. “Richard Owen, Morphology, and Evolution.” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 481–515.

Cosans, Christopher. “Anatomy, Metaphysics, and Values: The Ape Brain Debate Reconsidered.” Biology and Philosophy 9 (1994): 129–165.

Desmond, Adrian. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. London: Blond & Briggs, 1982.

_____. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gross, Charles G. “Hippocampus Minor and Man’s Place in Nature: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Neuroanatomy.” Hippocampus 3 (1993): 403–415.

Gruber, Jacob W. “Owen, Richard.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

_____, and John C. Thackray. Richard Owen Commemoration: Three Studies. London: Natural History Museum, 1992.

Ospovat, Dov. The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Padian, Kevin. “A Missing Hunterian Lecture on Vertebrae by Richard Owen, 1837.” Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1995): 333–368.

_____. “The Rehabilitation of Sir Richard Owen.” BioScience 47 (1997): 446–453.

Panchen, Alec L. “Richard Owen and the Concept of Homology.” In Homology: The Hierarchical Basis ofComparative Biology,edited by Brian K. Hall. San Diego: Academic, 1994.

Richards, Evelleen. “A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen’s Evolutionism Reassessed.” British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987): 129–171.

_____. “A Political Anatomy of Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise: Teratogeny, Transcendentalism, and Evolutionary Theorizing.” Isis 85 (1994): 377–411.

Richards, Robert J. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Rupke, Nicolaas A. “Richard Owen’s Hunterian Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, 1837–55.” Medical History 29 (1985): 237–258.

_____. “Richard Owen’s Vertebrate Archetype.” Isis 84 (1993), 231–251.

_____. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Sloan, Phillip R. “Whewell’s Philosophy of Discovery and the Archetype of the Vertebrate Skeleton: The Role of German Philosophy of Science in Richard Owen’s Biology.” Annals of Science 60 (2003): 39–61.

Smith, C. U. M. “Worlds in Collision: Owen and Huxley on the Brain.” Science in Context 10 (1997): 343–365.

Wilson, Leonard G. “The Gorilla and the Question of Human Origins: The Brain Controversy.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 51 (1996): 184–207.

Nicolaas A. Rupke