Richard Owen

Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Born
July 20, 1804 Lancaster, England, UK
Died
December 18, 1892 Richmond Park, London, England, UK

Sir Richard Owen KCB (July 20, 1804–December 18, 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist, and paleontologist.

Owen is renowned as the person who coined the term dinosaur, but he had numerous scientific accomplishments, particularly in the area of vertebrate anatomy and paleontology, where he was the preeminent authority following Georges Cuvier. Owen also did epoch-making work on the pearly nautilus and archaeopteryx, and was the first to recognize the two natural groups of ungulates, the odd-toed ungulates and the even-toed ungulates.

However, Owen also is well-known as a person who stood in opposition to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and is famous for his long-standing feud with Darwin's "bulldog," Thomas Huxley. While Owen epitomized some of the virtues of a good scientist—namely hardwork, passion, curiosity, and willingness to share his results—he also exhibited some ethical shortcomings that have damaged his reputation to this day. Both in his time and now, Owen has been depicted as a person who often took credit for others' work and who strived to damage the reputation of competing scientists. Thus, despite his accomplishments, which were extraordinary, accounts of Owen's life often present a less than lauditory picture of the man.

Life and career: Synopsis

Owen was born in Lancaster, England and attended the Lancaster Royal Grammar School as a youth. His initial life course was toward the field of medicine, beginning in 1820, at around 16 years of age, when he began an apprenticeship with a local surgeon. Among his activities at that time was performing post mortems in a local prison. In 1824, Owen began medical studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he studied anatomy. Owen completed his medical studies the following year at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

Over time, Owen moved away from the field of medicine into more scientific research. In 1827, upon the advice of surgeon John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Owen took the position of Associate Curator at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. He did extensive work on the catalogues of the Hunterian Museum and his reputation grew rapidly. Within a few short years, Owen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1834), appointed Hunterian Professor (1836) then Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, and became Fullerian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal Institution (FCD 2007). His becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society followed upon his acclaimed anatomical work on the pearly nautilus, as well as his work on monotremes and marsupials. In 1849, Owen was appointed the Curator of the Hunterian Museum.

In 1856, Owen took a new post with the British Museum, when he became Superintendent of the Department of Natural History. He was to hold this position for the next 27 years. Owen held the latter office until 1856, when he became superintendent of the natural history department of the British Museum, a position he was to serve in until 1883. He devoted much of his energies to a great scheme for a National Museum of Natural History, which eventually resulted in the removal of the natural history collections of the British Museum to a new building at South Kensington. Owen retained office until the completion of this work in 1884, when he received the distinction of Order of the Bath (K.C.B.). In 1878, he also was awarded the inaugural Clarke Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales. After his retirementin 1884, owen lived quietly in retirement at Sheen Lodge, Richmond Park, until his death in 1892, at the age of 88.

The Natural History Museum at South Kensngton, London. Richard Owen devoted much of his energies to the scheme for its construction. It opened in 1881.

Owen's career was tainted by numerous accusations of failing to give credit to the work of others and even trying to appropriate it in his own name. His career was also noted for an intense rivalry with Thomas Huxley.

Owen tended to support orthodox men of science and the status quo, and he tended to attract elite, conservative patrons. The royal family presented him with the cottage in Richmond Park and Robert Peel put him on the Civil List (a list of individuals to whom money is paid by the government).

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, and in particular investigated the animals that died in the Zoological Society's gardens. When the society began to publish scientific proceedings in 1831, Owen was the most voluminous contributor of anatomical papers.

Owen's first notable publication was his Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (1832), which was soon recognized as a classic. For over 50 years, Owen made important contributions to the various areas of comparative anatomy and zoology. Among the sponges, Owen was the first to describe the now well-known Venus's flower basket or Euplectella (1841, 1857). Among Entozoa, his most noteworthy discovery was that of Trichina spiralis (1835), the parasite infesting the muscles of humans in the disease now known as trichinosis. With respect to the brachiopods, Owen reatly advanced the knowledge of this taxa and developed the classificiation that has long been adopted. Among, mollusks, Owen not only described the pearly nautilus, but also Spirula (1850) and other cephalopods, both living and extinct, and it was he who proposed the universally-accepted subdivision of this class into the two orders of Dibranchiata and Tetrabranchiata (1832). The problematical arthropod Limulus was also the subject of a special memoir by Owen in 1873.

Work on fish, reptiles, and birds

Owen's technical descriptions of the Vertebrata were more numerous and extensive than those of the invertebrate animals. His three-volume work Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates (1866-1868) was the result of more personal research than any similar work since Georges Cuvier's Leçons d'anatomie comparée. He not only studied existing forms, but also devoted great attention to the remains of extinct groups and immediately followed Cuvier, as a pioneer in vertebrate paleontology.

Early in Owen's career, he made exhaustive studies of teeth, both of existing and extinct animals and published a profusely illustrated work on Odontography (1840-1845). He discovered and described the remarkably complex structure of the teeth of the extinct animals that he named Labyrinthodonts. Among his writings on fishes, his memoir on the African lungfish, which he named Protopterus, laid the foundations for the recognition of the Dipnoi by Johannes Muller. He also later pointed out the serial connection between the teleostean and ganoid fishes, grouping them in one sub-class, the Teleostomi.

Most of Owen's work on reptiles related to the skeletons of extinct forms and his chief memoirs, on British specimens, were reprinted in a connected series in his History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols., 1849-1884). Owen published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land reptiles, to which he gave the now familiar name of Dinosauria. He also first recognized the curious early Mesozoic land reptiles, with affinities both to amphibians and mammals, which he termed Anomodontia. Most of these were obtained from South Africa, beginning in 1845 (Dicynodon) and eventually furnished materials for his Catalogue of the Fossil Reptilia of South Africa, issued by the British Museum, in 1876. Among his writings on birds, his classical memoir on the kiwi (1840-1846), a long series of papers on the extinct dinornithidae of New Zealand, other memoirs on aptornis, the takahe, the dodo and the Great Auk, are especially notworthy. Owen's monograph on Archaeopteryx (1863), from the Bavarian lithographic stone, is also an epoch-making work.

With Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen helped create the first life-size sculptures depicting dinosaurs as they may have appeared. Some models were initially created for the Great Exhibition of 1851 but 33 were eventually produced, when the Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham, in south London. Owen famously hosted a dinner for 21 prominent men of science inside the hollow concrete Iguanodon on New Year's Eve, 1853.

Work on mammals

With regard to living mammals, the more striking of Owen's contributions relate to the monotremes, marsupials, and the apes. He was also the first to recognize and name the two natural groups of typical Ungulate, the odd-toed (Perissodactyla) and the even-toed (Artiodactyla), while describing some fossil remains, in 1848. Most of his writings on mammals, however, deal with extinct forms, to which his attention seems to have been first directed by the remarkable fossils collected by Charles Darwin in South America. Toxodon, from the pampas, was then described and gave the earliest clear evidence of an extinct generalized hoof animal, a pachyderm with affinities to the Rodentia, Edentata, and herbivorous Cetacea. Owen's interest in South American extinct mammals then led to the recognition of the giant armadillo, which he named Glyptodon (1839) and to classic memoirs on the giant ground-sloths, Mylodon (1842) and Megatherium (1860), besides other important contributions.

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 discovered Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, besides extinct kangaroos and wombats, of gigantic size. 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. This was followed by many later memoirs, notably his Monograph of the Fossil Mammalia of the Mesozoic Formations (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 (1884).

Owen and Darwin's theory of evolution

Sir Richard Owen and Dinornis bird skeleton

Following the Voyage of the Beagle, 1831-1836, Darwin had at his disposal a considerable collection of specimens. On October 29, 1836, he was introduced by Charles Lyell to Owen, who agreed to work on fossil bones collected in South America. Owen's subsequent revelations, that extinct giant creatures were rodents and sloths, showed that they were related to current species in the same locality, rather than being relatives of similarly sized creatures in Africa, as Darwin had originally thought. This was one of the many influences that lead Darwin to later formulate his own ideas on the concept of natural selection.

At this time, Owen talked of his theories, influenced by Johannes Peter Müller, that living matter had an "organising energy", a life-force that directed the growth of tissues and also determined the lifespan of the individual and of the species. Darwin was reticent about his own thoughts, understandably, when, on December 19, 1838, as secretary of the Geological Society of London, he saw Owen and his allies ridicule the Lamarckian "heresy" of Darwin's old tutor, Robert Edmund Grant. In 1841, when the recently married Darwin was ill, Owen was one of the few scientific friends to visit; however, Owen's opposition to any hint of transmutation of species was a factor in Darwin keeping quiet about his hypothesis.

Today, Owen has a reputation as someone that opposed the idea that species evolved. Indeed, Darwin himself makes this point in the first edition of Origin of Species, where Owen is described as firmly convinced of the immutability of species. And early in Owen's career, he did not believe in the trasmutation of species and believed that each species had been uniquely designed and created by God (FCD 2007). However, by the mid-1840s, Owen's views had changed, largely because of his work on vertebrates (FCD 2007). He believed that all vertebrates were based on the same archetype or blueprint, but each was a unique extension of it, a result of various secondary laws; that is, this was divinely influenced evolution (FCD 2007). In later edition of Origin of Species, Darwin described his comments regarding Owen in the first edition as a preposterous error, although he did note the difficulty of understanding Owen's writings on the topic.

During the development of Darwin's theory, prior to the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin's investigation of barnacles showed, in 1849, how their segmentation related to other crustaceans, reflecting an apparent descent with modification from their relatives. To Owen, such "homologies" in comparative anatomy revealed archetypes in the Divine mind, but to Darwin this was evidence of common descent. Owen demonstrated fossil evidence of an evolutionary sequence of horses, as supporting his idea of development from archetypes in "ordained continuous becoming" and, in 1854, gave a British Association for the Advancement of Science talk on the impossibility of bestial apes, such as the recently discovered gorilla, standing erect and being transmuted into men.

Owen, as President-elect of the Royal Association, announced his authoritative anatomical studies of primate brains, showing that humans were not just a separate species but a separate sub-class. Darwin wrote that "Owen's is a grand Paper; but I cannot swallow Man making a division as distinct from a Chimpanzee, as an ornithorhynchus from a Horse" (Darwin 1857)." The combative Thomas Huxley used his March 1858 Royal Institution lecture to claim that, structurally, gorillas are as close to humans as they are to baboons and added that he believed that the "mental & moral faculties are essentially... the same kind in animals & ourselves". This was a clear challenge to Owen's lecture, claiming human uniqueness, given at the same venue.

On the publication of Darwin's theory in 1859 in the Origin of Species, Darwin sent a complimentary copy to Owen, saying "it will seem 'an abomination'." Owen was the first to respond, courteously claiming that he had long believed that "existing influences" were responsible for the "ordained" birth of species. Darwin now had long talks with him and Owen said that the book offered the best explanation "ever published of the manner of formation of species," although he still had the gravest doubts that transmutation would bestialize people. It appears that Darwin had assured Owen that he was looking at everything as resulting from designed laws, which Owen interpreted as showing a shared belief in "Creative Power."

In his lofty position at the head of Science, Owen received numerous complaints about the book. His own position remained unknown: when emphasizing to a Parliamentary committee the need for a new Natural History museum, he pointed out that "The whole intellectual world this year has been excited by a book on the origin of species; and what is the consequence? Visitors come to the British Museum, and they say, 'Let us see all these varieties of pigeons: where is the tumbler, where is the pouter?' and I am obliged with shame to say, I can show you none of them".... As to showing you the varieties of those species, or of any of those phenomena that would aid one in getting at that mystery of mysteries, the origin of species, our space does not permit; but surely there ought to be a space somewhere, and, if not in the British Museum, where is it to be obtained?"

Instead, he resorted to subterfuge, by writing an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. In the article, Owen criticised Darwin's reasoning, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon his own work, while being careful not to associate any particular mechanism for evolution with his own name.

When Owen did respond, in April 1860 in the Edinburgh Review, it was in the form of an anonymous article, where Darwin was criticized while praise was offered (in the third person) of Owen's work (FCD 2007). Owen showed his anger at what he saw as Darwin's caricature of the creationist position and his ignoring Owen's "axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things". To him, new species appeared at birth, not through natural selection. As well as attacking Darwin's "disciples", Hooker and Huxley, for their "short-sighted adherence", he thought that the book symbolized the sort of "abuse of science... to which a neighboring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation" in a reference to the French Revolution. That it was the word of Owen was recognized by Darwin and others in Darwin's camp. Darwin thought it "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever, and... damaging" and later commented that "The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about. It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me." In a May 8, 1860 letter to J. S. Henslow, Darwin further stated (FCD 2007), "What a strange man to be envious of a naturalist like myself, immeasurably his inferior!"

While Owen is renowned as an individual opposing Darwin's theory of evolution, he did accept some level of evolution. However, his reputation as not supporting Darwin's theory is likely exacerbated as a result of Owen's long-standing feud with Darwin's stauchist supporter, Thomas Henry Huxley (FCD 2007). It has been noted of Darwin's Bulldog that "throughout his distinguished career, despite being helped early on in that career by Owen, Huxley never missed an opportunity to savage Owen's reputation" (FCD 2007).

On his own part, Owen tried to smear Huxley, by portraying him as an "advocate of man's origins from a transmuted ape" and one of his contributions to the Athenaeum was titled "Ape-Origin of Man as Tested by the Brain". This backfired, as Huxley had already delighted Darwin by speculating on "pithecoid man"– ape-like man. He took the opportunity to publicly turn the anatomy of brain structure into a question of human ancestry and was determined to indict Owen for perjury. The campaign ran over two years and was devastatingly successful, with each "slaying" being followed by a recruiting drive for the Darwinian cause. The spite lingered. When Huxley joined the Zoological Society Council, in 1861, Owen left and, in the following year, Huxley moved to stop Owen from being elected to the Royal Society Council, accusing him "of wilful & deliberate falsehood".

In January 1863, Owen bought the archaeopteryx fossil for the British Museum. It fulfilled Darwin's prediction, that a proto-bird with unfused wing fingers would be found, although Owen described it unequivocally as a bird.

The feuding between Owen and Darwin's supporters continued. In 1871, Owen was found to be involved in a threat to end government funding of Joseph Dalton Hooker's botanical collection, at Kew, possibly trying to bring it under his British Museum. Darwin commented that "I used to be ashamed of hating him so much, but now I will carefully cherish my hatred & contempt to the last days of my life".

Legacy

Owen made major contributions in anatomy. However, his detailed memoirs and descriptions require laborious attention in reading, as a result of the complext terminology used and the ambiguous modes of expression. The fact that very little of his terminology has found universal favor causes them to be more generally neglected than they otherwise would be. At the same time, it must be remembered that he was a pioneer in concise anatomical nomenclature.

Furthermore, at least with respect to the vertebrate skeleton, Owen's terms were based on a carefully-reasoned philosophical scheme, one which first clearly distinguished between the now-familiar phenomena of analogy and homology. Owen's theory of the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848), subsequently illustrated also by his short work On the Nature of Limbs (1849), regarded the vertebrate frame as consisting of a series of fundamentally identical segments, each modified according to its position and functions. Much of it was fanciful and failed when tested by the facts of embryology, which Owen systematically ignored throughout his work. However, it possessed a distinct value at the time of its conception.

with respect to the deeper problems of biological philosophy, Owen made scarcely any direct and definite contributions. His generalities rarely extended beyond strict comparative anatomy, the phenomena of adaptation to function, and the facts of geographical or geological distribution. However, his lecture on "virgin reproduction," or parthenogenesis, published in 1849, contained the essence of the germ plasm theory, elaborated later by August Weismann. In addition, Owen made several vague statements concerning the geological succession of genera and species of animals and their possible derivation from one another. He referred, especially, to the changes exhibited by the successive forerunners of the crocodiles (1884) and horses (1868) but it has never become clear how much of the modern doctrines of organic evolution he admitted. He contented himself with the bare remark that "the inductive demonstration of the nature and mode of operation of the laws governing life would henceforth be the great aim of the philosophical naturalist."

While Owen's anatomical contributions were enormous and he is famous for having named the dinosaur, descriptions of his personality have not been so lauditory. Owen has been described by some as a malicious, dishonest, and hateful individual. He has been called a person driven by jealousy and arrogance, and Deborah Cadbury stated that Owen possessed an "almost fanatical egoism with a callous delight in savaging his critics." Indeed, an Oxford University professor once described Owen as "a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice" (Scott 2006).

Gideon Mantell, who had found and described many of the first dinosaurs, including the Iguanodon, but was often a target of Owen, claimed it was "a pity a man so talented should be so dastardly and envious." Indeed, Owen famously credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the Iguanodon, completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer Gideon Mantell. This was not the first or last time Owen would deliberately claim a discovery as his own, when in fact it was not. It has been suggested by some authors, including Bill Bryson, that Owen even used his influence in the Royal Society to ensure that many of Mantell’s research papers were never published.

When Mantell suffered an accident that left him permanently crippled, Owen exploited the opportunity by renaming several dinosaurs that had already been named by Mantell, even having the audacity to claim credit for their discovery himself. When Mantell finally died in 1852, an obituary carrying no byline derided Mantell as little more than a mediocre scientist, who brought forth few notable contributions. The obituary’s authorship was universally attributed to Owen, by every local geologist. The president of the Geological society claimed that it "Bespeaks of the lamentable coldness of the heart of the writer." He was subsequently denied the presidency of the society for his repeated and pointed antagonism towards Gideon Mantell.

Despite originally starting out on good terms with Darwin, he turned on him savagely at the first opportunity, despite knowing enough anatomy to understand the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory. The reason for this, some historians claim, was that Owen felt upstaged by Darwin and supporters such as Huxley, and his judgment was clouded by jealousy. That’s what Darwin himself believed: Owen in his opinion was "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever" ; "The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about" (Darwin 1887). "It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me" (Darwin and Seward 1903).

Owen also was involved in a threat to end government funding of Joseph Dalton Hooker's botanical collection, at Kew, out of what appears to be a mixture of wanting it under his control at the British Museum and pure spite.

Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society's Zoological Council for plagiarism.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

http://darwin.gruts.com/articles/2001/owen/ The friends of Charles Darwin (FCD) Sir Richard Owen: the archetypal villain 2007

Fourth Estate; New Ed edition (2 Jul 2001) Language English ISBN-10: 1857029631 The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World (Paperback) by Deborah Cadbury

[1] (Darwin 1887, p.149); [2] (Darwin & Seward 1903, p.300).

2006 Michon Scott http://www.strangescience.net/owen.htm

• The Life of Richard Owen, by his grandson, Rev. Richard Owen (2 vols., London, 1894). (A. S. Wo.)
• Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, the Penguin Group, 1991). ISBN 0-7181-3430-3
• Francis Darwin, editor, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter (3 vols., London: John Murray, 1887) (7th Edition).
• Francis Darwin & A. C. Seward, editors, More letters of Charles Darwin: A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters (2 vols., London: John Murray, 1903).

Darwin, C. 1857. Letter number 2117: To J. D. Hooker   5 July [1857] http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/perl/nav?pclass=letter&pkey=2117 The Darwin Correspondence Online Database. [[credit|117378156}}