Richard+Owen

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__Richard Owen (July 20th 1804---December 18th 1892)__
Richard Owen

Life
Richard Owen (1804--1892) was born in Lancaster in 1804, just one of six children of merchant Richard Owen (1754--1809) and Catherine Parrin. He was educated the Lancaster Royal Grammar School. Throughout his life, Owen had been interested in medicine, and in 1820 he was appointed to a local surgeon and apothecary before becoming a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1824. In July of 1835, Owen married his wife Caroline Amelia Clift, and together they had one son. After completing his education, Owen abandoned his desire to practice medicine, and used his surgical and medical experience to catalog the remains of extinct animals. In 1836, he was appointed Hunterian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, a position which he held until 1849, when he acquired the job of conservator (a position he held until 1856.) He later became the superintendent of the Natural History department of the British Museum (known now as the Natural History Museum of London.) He continued his work in anatomy, biology, and paleontology, and kept his job there until 1883 when he retired. From then on, he lived quietly in a retirement lodge until his death in 1892.

The Natural History Museum (London)

Contributions to science
Owen is known for his work as a biologist, comparative anatomist, and paleontologist. In particular, he is renowned for the coining of the word //Dinosauria// ("terrible reptile"), as well as the naming of dozens of other extinct animals and dinosaurs. He did extensive work on invertebrate anatomy as well: he was the first person to describe the Venus' Flower Basket, he discovered the parasite //Trichina spiralis// (which was later discovered to cause the disease //Trichinosis//), described the pearly nautilus and many other cephalopods (both living and extinct), and first proposed the division of the class Cephalopoda into two distinct subdivisions. Owen is also known for his work in vertebrate paleontology. He is accredited with naming many living and extinct animals, such as Labyrinthodonts, the American Lungfish (Protopterus), the naming of species subdivisions Anomodontia and Therapsida (amphibian and mammalian Mesozoic land-reptiles, respectively), and also for his studies on the Kiwi, the extinct Dinorthinidae, the aptornis, takahe, dodo, Archaeopteryx, and the Great Auk. Among his work on mammals, Owen was one of the first people to extensively study monotremes and marsupials, and was the first to recognize and name the two major Ungulate groups (which differentiates hoofed animals based on the number of "toes" they have.) The majority of his work on mammals, however, involved extinct creatures such as the giant sloths Mylodont and Megatherium, the giant armadillo Glyptodon, and giant extinct wombats and kangaroos.

Influence on evolutionary theory
Richard Owen is frequently cited as influencing Darwin's later theory of evolution, despite the animosity between the two. Owen is widely known, although less for his scientific contributions than for his incredibly hypocrisy--his beliefs, although often radical and unprecedented, were often contradictory to one another--in some instances he believed that evolution was a purely scientific, biological process, while other times he would ascribe a certain sense of divinity to the concept. His indecision regarding evolution would earn him significant criticism and humiliation later on in his scientific career. While Owen and Darwin were in agreement about the presence of evolution, they disagreed in their opinions of it's complexity: Darwin believed that evolution, although complicated, could ultimately be reduced to a simple set of mechanisms that drive the evolutionary process (the most famous of these is "natural selection"), whereas Owen believed evolution to be vastly more complex. Although he criticized Darwin for supposedly subscribing to the "Biblical" explanation of science, he himself believed that there was an organizing "energy" or "life force" that directed and controlled tissue growth, and that determined the lifespan of a species and it's individuals. Owen also, in keeping with many of the popular and newly emerging ideas of his day, believed that species arose as a direct result of an evolutionary process, but fiercely disputed Darwin's theory of natural selection. Instead, he proposed six possibilities for evolutionary mechanisms: parthenogenesis, prolonged development, premature birth, congenital malformation, Lamarckian atrophy, Lamarckian hypertrophy, and transmutation (a concept which he, along with many other scientists, doubted strongly.)

In 1849, Owen published "On The Nature of Limbs", in which he suggested that humans ultimately descended from fish as the result of natural laws, and it was in this publication that he first proposed the now familiar evolutionary concept of homology. Following this publication, he also wrote of the concept that would eventually become known as divergent evolution. He was severely criticized by both the general public and the scientific community because he implied that humans were not created by God (a belief which many people, scientists included, still held strongly.) In continuing with his dissent, he suggested that humans, although not divinely created, were fundamentally different from other primates (such as the gorilla, which had only just been discovered) due to the presence of specific brain structures. Specifically, Owen believed that humans were distinct from other animals due to the presence of a brain structure he called the "hippocampus major." Many scientists and anatomists were skeptical of this belief, and Owen was humiliated when the hippocampus major was later dismissed as being its own structure, and was instead termed simply the "hippocampus."

Although he did not make significant contributions to biological philosophy (as did many of his peers and competitors), Richard Owen did make many significant contributions to the fields of biology, comparative anatomy, and vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology. However, throughout his career, he was bested by jealousy and succumbed to the vice frequently. On numerous occasions, he directly plagiarized, stole, and claimed many important discoveries as his own, and many of these crimes have still yet to be recognized by the general public.