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

Caricature of Richard Owen. "Old Bones" Vanity Fair, March 1st, 1873.

I named this blog after the concept of the archetype as articulated by the Victorian naturalist Richard Owen (1804-1892). For Owen, the archetype was a representation that summed the most basic, most generalized structural arrangement common to all the members of a given group of organisms. Owen’s well-known and most important contribution to modern biological thought is, however, not his archetype concept but the clear distinction he provided between the concepts of analogy and homology. On his words:

Analogue.- A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal.
Homologue.- The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function. (Owen, 1843: 374, 379)¹

Homology is a concept that expresses the relationship between parts of organisms. It reflects the observation that we can identify a commonality of structure across the diversity of life. Homology thus forms the cornerstone of comparative biology.

Although the archetype is a forgotten concept, this abstract blueprint was central to Owen’s views on homology. During his lectures and in his publications, Owen distinguish between three kinds of relations of homology: special homology, serial homology and general homology. Special homology refers to the correspondence of body parts between species. Serial homology identifies the repeated elements within the body of an organism. General homology represents the correspondence of an element between a species and the archetype.

Both special homology and serial homology are in common use today, the former is particularly applied in systematics where it is translated into characters for phylogenetic reconstruction and is understood as similarity due to common ancestry. General homology, in contrast, together with the archetype are seldom mentioned today, if only when discussing the ideas of nineteen-century naturalists mostly in an historical context.

A crucial event in the history of these concepts is Charles Darwin’s famous transformation of Owen’s archetype into an ancestor:

If we suppose that the ancient progenitor, the archetype as it may be called, of all mammals, had its limbs constructed on the existing general pattern, for whatever purpose they serve, we can at once perceive the plain signification of the homologous construction of the limbs throughout the whole class. (Darwin, 1859: 435)²

This move allowed Darwin to align the greatest achievement of morphology, the Unity of Type, under the umbrella of evolution as the most important evidence of species common decent: “On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of decent.” ³ The switch from abstract archetype to material ancestor effectively relegated the archetype and the associated concept of general homology to proto-evolutionary historical curiosities.

Two contrasting readings of the historical development of the theory of evolution are important for us to understand the significance (or lack of) of the archetype. The received or classical view, reflected in the works of Mayr⁴, Ghiselin⁵ and Hull⁶ for example, equates the typological notions of pre-Darwinian authors (like the archetype) with a sort of essentialism that is antagonistic to evolutionary thinking: essentialism implies stasis, as opposed to change, and implies adherence to a type, as opposed to the realization that species are composed of variable populations (i.e., Mayr’s “population thinking”). Under this view, the commitment to essentialism through typological thinking displayed by authors like Richard Owen prevented them for thinking in evolutionary terms and accepting naturalistic origins of species. Under this view, the archetype is a vacuous concept, a dead-end.

The alternative view, articulated recently in the works of Winsor⁷, Amundson⁸ and Rupke⁹ for example, argues that while it is true that typological views are pervasive in the work of naturalists before and contemporaneous to Darwin, those views by no means equate to the sort of essentialism caricatured by proponents of the classical view. Instead, it is exactly this typological thinking, with its notions of shared morphological architectures and hierarchical arrangement of types, that allowed Darwin to recruit the findings of comparative anatomists and taxonomists as evidence for his evolutionary theory. Under this view, the archetype is not a dead-end but the result of valid inductive generalizations about reconstructed patterns of similarities between species, patterns that cry for explanation ¹⁰. Typology, they argue, is not antagonistic to evolutionary thinking but it is an important part of it.

I am more sympathetic with the second, alternative view. Though it is still not a popular one. But one thing is for sure. Whether the archetype is a vacuous concept or an important evolutionary precursor, it is the most elegant concept that came out of comparative anatomy from Victorian times.

References