Talk:Richard Owen

message: See Huxley in his displays and recruitment was a preacher and evolution a religious belief.   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.98.152.20 (talk) 16:24, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Wouldn't it be informative to know what working class militants are being mentioned? After learning who they were, it would be even more instructive to be able to follow a citation and read their very words as they loudly and widely proclaimed that humans originated from apes.Lestrade (talk) 14:07, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

text: I have added one source: Marx --Straw Cat (talk) 12:09, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Political motives

message: "...also gave some extracts from a correspondence between Professor Owen and the editor of the "London Review", from which it appeared manifest to the editor as well as to myself, that Professor Owen claimed to have promulgated the theory of natural selection before I had done so; and I expressed my surprise and satisfaction at this announcement..."
This was the first usage of Theory of natural selection in OoS but Darwin never gave an actual theory, nowhere did he define a formal theoryTongueSpeaker (talk) 16:12, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Eh? Darwin's "theory of natural selection" appears in the first edition of 1859, this quote appears in the 5th edition of 1869. You seem to be rather mistaken. . . dave souza, talk 18:31, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The passage from OoS I quoted is the first occurrence of the term ToNS - but Darwin never anywhere formally defined what the ToE is.Even on wikipedia ToNS redirects to NS. Would you Dave please provide me with the formally established ToNS.TongueSpeaker (talk) 14:33, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Natural Selection, which sets out his theory, and the phrase "theory of natural selection" is specifically used in some places such as here. If Darwin isn't being formal enough for you, that's your problem and not his. . . dave souza, talk 16:21, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

text: Both Darwin and the editor of the London Review appear to have found Owen's shifting position confusing, and further clarification of the various phases of Owen's views would be useful in this article. Darwin's understanding expressed in the fourth edition of the Origin was that Owen had expressed belief "that he promulgated the theory of natural selection in a passage read before the Zoological Society in February, 1850 ('Transact.' vol. iv. p. 15)" in a letter to the 'London Review' (May 5, 1866, p. 516), but Owen seems to have responded with a statement in Anatomy of Vertebrata, III., pages 798, 799. indicating that he had not given credence to natural selection having any effect. Did Owen go beyond "ordained continuous becoming" as an explanation? . . dave souza, talk 21:26, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Darwin credits Owen with natural selection 

message: A temporary subpage at User:Polbot/fjc/Richard Owen was automatically created by a perl script, based on this article at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges. The subpage should either be merged into this article, or moved and disambiguated. Polbot (talk) 21:38, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Bot-created subpage

message: I wonder if more of the scholarship on Richard Owen could be brought into his Richard Owen.  Although Owen made great efforts to expand the anatomical understanding of living and extinct vertebrates and was the driving force behind the British Museum of Natural History, his arguments with Darwin and Huxley over how evolution occurs decreased the amount of attention his work got beginning in the 1860s.  With the rise of evo-devo, which seeks to explore many the same aspects of evolution that most interested Owen, he has been getting more attention lately, however, from historians and philosophers of science.  Several books and articles have been published about him during the last three decades.
I believe it would greatly improve the quality of the Wikipedia accounts of him if people interested in him would read some of the works about him that have been published and brought some of those facts into the communities’ articles.  
From our perspective, Richard Owen’s approach to evolution is exotic.  Owen was fluent in both French and German, was very aware of the intellectual movements on the Continent, and tried to conduct a version of Naturphilosophie in English.  Michael Ruse calls him the British Naturphilosoph at one point.  Owen saw evolution as involving laws of form, rapid changes, developmental shifts, and spontaneous generation.  
The Rupke book offers a comprehensive study of his life and ideas, and would be a good place anyone who wants to get an overview of Owen to start.
A good text of Owen’s to start with is his concluding remarks of Anatomy of the Vertebrates, (pp. 786-826) which can be found online at:  http://books.google.com/books?id=swgAAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPA792,M2. (this is on the Wikipedia web page)
The Evellen Richards article explores at length how and when Owen developed the theories of evolution that he defends there.
Ron Amundson has just come out with a paper back edition of Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs. which would give someone a snap shot of his anatomical work….
There is an interesting difference in how Owen is portrayed politically as well:  Desmond portrays him as a conservative gentleman, while Rupke tells a story of how he built alliances against the Tories with liberal Politians to get lots of government funding for a big British Museum and how he was a friend of the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley.
Here is some of the main work that has been done on Owen’s thought:
Amundson, R., 2005, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Camardi, G. 2001,  "Richard Owen, Morphology and Evolution"  Journal of History of Biology, 34: 481 -515
Cosans, C., 2009,  Owen’s Ape & Darwin’s Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Desmond, A.,  1982, Archetypes and Ancestors,  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Owen, Richard, Ronald Amundson, Mary P. Winsor, and Kevin Padian, 2008, One the Nature of the Limbs: A Discourse, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Owen and Phillip Reid Sloan, 1992, The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy, May and June 1837  Chicago:  University Of Chicago Press.
Richards, E.,  1987,  "A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed", British Journal of the History of Science,  20: 129-171.
Rupke, N., 1994, Richard Owen Victorian Naturalist , New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smith, C., 1997, "Worlds in Collision: Owen and Huxley on the Brain", Science in Context, 
10: 343 - 365.
Strick, J., 2000, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates Over Spontaneous
Generation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  —Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures Cosans (talk) 04:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bringing in more of the scholarship on Owen 

message: I have had some concerns about the adequacy of the page on Richard Owen and made a few additions and a couple revisions.
I have read and studied all of Owen’s papers on apes, done some dissections on ape brains to see his perspective, read much of Owen's other work on anatomy, and read almost all of the secondary scholarship on him.  
Below are the some of the changes that I made and comments on what I see the issues as involved.
SUGGESTED ADDITION
He agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred, but thought it was more complex than outlined in the Origin.Cosans (2009) pp. 97-103. Owen's approach to evolution can be seen as having anticipated the issues that have gained greater attention with the recent emergence of evo-devo theory.Amundson, 2005, pp. 76-106
ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE ADDITION:
This gives a couple sentences in the introduction describing Owen’s thoughts on evolution.  Since the original version brought up the review of Darwin, it is important spell in more detail just what approach Owen took.
ORIGIONAL VERSION
Owen and Darwin's theory of evolution
SUGGESTED REVISION
Owen, Darwin, and the theory of evolution
ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE REVISION:
The scholarship suggests that other people including Owen believed in different theories of evolution.  The revision opens the section for considering other theories of evolution besides Darwin’s, and since the article is about Richard Owen that would seem to be appropriate.
SUGGESTED ADDITION
Sometime during the 1840s Owen came to the conclusion that species arise as the result of some sort of evolutionary process.Rupke, 1994, p. 220, p. 223 He believed that there was a total of six possible mechanisms: parthenogenesis, prolonged development, premature birth, congenital malformations, Lamarckian atrophy, Lamarckian hypertrophy and transmutation,Rupke, 1994, p. 226 of which he thought transmutation was the least likely.Rupke, 1994, p. 226 The historian of science Evelleen Richards has argued the Owen was likely sympathetic to developmental theories of evolution, but backed away from publicly proclaiming them after the criticism Robert Chambers got for his evolutionary book in 1844, and that that Owen got for his evolutionary remarks in his Nature of the Limbs in 1849.Richards, 1987 At the end of On the Nature of Limbs Owen had suggested that humans ultimately evolved from fish as the result of natural laws,Owen, 2007, p. 86 which resulted in him getting criticized in the Manchester Spectator for denying species like humans were created by God.Rupke, 1994, p.232
ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE ADDITION:
This summarizes the key points that have been made in the history of science scholarship over Owen’s beliefs about evolution.   I don’t know about any referred paper that was published after Richards’ 1987 article that does not treat him as believing in some kind of evolution.  
SUGGESTED ADDITION
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".Huxley, 1861, p. 83 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.Cosans, 2009, pp. 109-111
ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE ADDITION:
This gives specific details about Owen’s debate with Huxley.
SUGGESTED ADDITION
Owen was highly critical of the Origin in large part because Darwin did not refer much to the previous scientific theories of evolution that had been proposed by people like Chambers and Owen, and instead compared his theory of evolution by natural selection with the unscientific theory in the Bible.Owen, 1860, pp. 251-275 Owen found it especially ironic that while Darwin criticizes fundamentalists for believing God created each individual species, Darwin himself argues in the Origin's concluding chapter that God created the first one to twelve living things upon which natural selection acted.Owen, 1860, p. 263-264
ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE ADDITION:
This gives the gist of what Owen argues about in his review.  It gives the reader the big picture and then they can look it up and read it for themselves.  —Preceding Cosans (talk) 04:14, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additions and a couple revisions of the Owen article 

message: This article is one of a  number (about 100) selected for the early stage of the trial of the Wikipedia:Pending Changes system on the English language Wikipedia. All the articles listed at Wikipedia:Pending changes/Queue   are being considered for level 1 pending changes protection.
The following request appears on that page:
Comments on the suitability of theis page for "Penfding changes"  would be appreciated.
Please update the Queue page as appropriate.
Note that I am not involved in this project any much more than any other editor, just posting these notes since it is quite a big change, potentially
Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 23:44, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Pending changes

message: The article claims Owen was president of the Royal Association. I am not familiar with such a group. Do you mean British Association? Do you mean Royal Institution? (Both of these groups were venues for the controversy.) Please clarify.
Also I am looking for a reference to Owen's 1857 publication on placing Homo sapiens in a monotypic subclass. A link to a downloadable PDF would be even better. Thanks.
Solo Owl (talk) 11:10, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: the "RA" was the short form that the larger body was referred to, back in the day. Read the whole article and it will become clear. 72.141.106.240 (talk) 17:55, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not at all clear what Royal Association refers to. DuncanHill (talk) 18:40, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: "Royal Association"

message: The following quote from a basic level science book written by a travel author is misplaced/irrelevant and should not be so prominently featured in the introductory section for a great biologist.
"Bill Bryson argues that, "by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for".[6]"
Bill Bryson who?
Please remove.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:247:4000:4D9:5B7:5BD6:DFCD:8F0E (talk) 17:27, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you should reconsider. In hindsight, (which we live in), one of Owens' great contributions was to popularize museums, which hardly existed back then. Science was only available to wealthy collectors. Finding this summary in print, so we can quote it, is lucky. We need people like Bill Bryson to make these connections. One might ask - who are you? 72.141.106.240 (talk) 17:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bill Bryson 

message: talk about maybe who inspired him. his teachers e.c.t MusicX40 (talk) 19:23, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk) 19:27, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 5 July 2017 

message: This article has a few problem spots that read a bit more like an editorial or hedge away from NPOV. It could use a bit of cleaning up. Specific examples that pop out immediately:
His contributions to science and public learning notwithstanding, Owen's driving ambition, occasionally vicious temperament, and determination to succeed meant that he was not always popular with his fellow scientists. Owen was feared and even hated by some contemporaries such as Thomas Henry Huxley.
Aside from the fact that this is not cited, was his "determination to succeed" really a reason why he was "not always popular" with his fellow scientists? Was he really "feared" and "hated"? It would sound more neutral if it was written something like this:
While he made several contributions to science and public learning, Owen was a controversial figure among his contemporaries, such as Thomas Henry Huxley.
Another problem spot:
Upon completing his education, he contemplated the usual professional career, but his bent was evidently in the direction of anatomical research. He was induced by Abernethy to accept the position of assistant to William Clift, conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. This congenial occupation soon led him to abandon his intention of medical practice and his life thenceforth was devoted to purely scientific labours. He prepared an important series of catalogues of the Hunterian Collection, in the Royal College of Surgeons and, in the course of this work, he acquired the unrivalled knowledge of comparative anatomy that enabled him to enrich all departments of the science and especially facilitated his researches on the remains of extinct animals.
Once again, this is not cited, and it reads like something out of an editorial. Suggested improvement:
Upon completing his education, he accepted the position of assistant to William Clift, conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the suggestion of Abernethy. This occupation led him to abandon medical practice in favor of scientific research. He prepared a series of catalogues of the Hunterian Collection, in the Royal College of Surgeons and, in the course of this work, he acquired a knowledge of comparative anatomy that facilitated his researches on the remains of extinct animals.
BigStalex (talk) 22:00, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Done NiciVampireHeart 08:55, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request: This article veers into editorializing/non-NPOV territory. 

message: The article makes reference to "herbivorous cetacea". The article on Cetacea notes that they are exclusively carnivorous. A google search indicates that "herbivorous cetacea" is an antiquated name for the Sirenians. Does anyone know if this is what the article is indeed referring to?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.112.199.2 (talk) 02:57, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Herbivorous Cetacea 

message: I am moving the following uncited material here until it can be properly supported with inline citations of reliable, secondary sources, per WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:CS, WP:NOR, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, et al. This diff shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 14:36, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Uncited material in need of citations