Portrait of Richard Owen (Smithsonian Institution's photostream).

I feel a lot of sympathy for Richard Owen. The more I read his work the more so. He is a fascinating dark character, both for the peculiar quality of his scientific oeuvre as well as for his eccentric persona. A true representative of Natural History in the Victorian Era.

History has certainly not be kind to him, foremost because it seems almost impossible to talk about him without reference to Darwin (as I am doing right  now). This is quite understandable given the impact that the publication of On the Origin of Species had on defining the period. Problem is that, with a few notable exceptions¹, he is wrongly portrayed as the leading antievolutionist of the time, his contribution to science thus construed as coming from a figure on the loser side of the debate and reduced to opponent of the Darwinians, in a type example of whig history.

I have previously wrote about Owen’s archetype and his clarification of the terms homology and analogy, concepts that form the cornerstone of comparative biology. He was indeed against the Darwinians, not because he rejected species evolution but because he thought natural selection, as an external force, was not a viable mechanism that could account for the pattern of shared structures make evident by comparative anatomy, the Unity of Type². Rather, he was searching for the internal forces capable of molding the generalized structural plan, his archetype, into the diverse array of forms displayed by organisms. In hindsight, Owen’s evolutionary ideas seem more akin to the type of questions and explanations sought currently within evolutionary developmental biology rather than vanilla neo-darwinian evolutionary biology (more on this some other day).

Owen and Huxley examine a water baby (Illustration from the children's novel The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, by Charles Kingsley. Source: Wikimedia commons)

Owen’s ambitious personality and vicious temperament has certainly helped in his portrayal as the villain in the evolutionary drama. He wanted to be the most important scientist of his time (and he was for a period during his long career). Once overshadowed by Darwin, he grew bitter. Thomas Huxley, the self-proclaimed Darwin’s bulldog, never missed an opportunity to pick on Owen who represented, after all, the establishment. The scientific debates between these two men became widely popular– celebrity gossip of the day.

In his Generalizations of Comparative Anatomy, published in 1853³, Owen describes how, by substituting the name of equivalent bones in different animals by “simple numerals” one creates an universal language that is clear, parsimonious, and serves as a “powerful instrument of thought, instruction, and discovery”, an instrument analogous to the one “from which the chemist, the astronomer, and the mathematician have obtained such important results”(page 82).  At the end of this work, Owen wrote:

But the generation who listened with applause to M. Cuvier’s vague declamation against a mode of investigating the laws of organic structure which bears the closest analogy to the precise methods of geometry, is fast passing away, and all the active cultivators of physical study seem to be impressed with the conviction that Homology can alone elevate Anatomy, and with it Zoology, to the high position of the exact sciences. Such aspirations were once encouraged by Cuvier himself, whose subsequent hostile attitude was less against investigations into the Law of Unity of Organization that against those who, in his time, abused the name of Philosophical Anatomy by their extravagant modes of illustrating it. Cuvier, indeed, with an instinctive prescient, ask, ‘Why should not Natural History one day also have its Newton?’– and the best proof of the reasonableness of that question we hold to be the success which has attended the last researchers of Cuvier’s English successor– justly styled by Humboldt ‘le plus grand Anatomiste de son Siècle.’ [pags. 82-83; emphasis added]

By “Cuvier’s English successor” Owen refers to himself, the “Cuvier of England” as he was popularly known. Note also that here Homology, with capital H, refers not to the character concept but to a formal science, that of identifying the true affinity of the parts of organisms.

The passage above is reveling of the scale of Owen’s ambition. He wanted to be remembered as the Newton of Natural History, figuratively and almost literally. In the same way as Newton’s calculus provided an exact language unifying physics and astronomy, Owen thought that his homological program had the capacity to unify and mature Natural History (i.e., biology), so as to elevate it “to the high position of the exact sciences.”

Poor Owen, then, that such title, The Newton of Natural History, was to be reserved for his contemporary, Charles Darwin, and his unifying theory of biology, Evolution.

Notes and references