Britain's leading evolutionary biologists are preparing to celebrate the 200th birthday of one of Charles Darwin's most ferocious opponents.
Richard Owen went to his grave believing Darwin was wrong to argue that life evolved by natural selection operating on random mutation -- but he also discovered the gorilla for science, identified the dodo, coined the word "dinosaur" and founded London's famous Natural History Museum in 1881. A special exhibition and a Richard Owen trail open at the museum today.
"This is not to say he was a nice character, because we know he wasn't," said Angela Milner, a palaeontologist at the museum and one of the organizers of the exhibition.
"Owen was an extraordinarily clever scientist, he was the leading comparative anatomist of his day, there is absolutely no doubt about that. He was a brilliant man, but he was also very competitive, very arrogant and he didn't want anybody taking his crown away from him," she said.
Richard Owen was born in Lancaster in northern England on July 20, 1804. He trained at Edinburgh, went to the Royal College of Surgeons and then moved to superintend the natural history collections of the British Museum in Bloomsbury. This priceless assortment of gems, minerals, dried plants, pickled fish and reptiles, fossils, skeletons, skins and stuffed mammals gathered by Captain Cook, Joseph Banks, Hans Sloane and other 18th century explorers was growing and deteriorating at the same time. Owen promptly began a 25-year campaign that climaxed in the present "cathedral of nature" in South Kensington.
He had originally enjoyed a working relationship with the younger Charles Darwin, but having been a devout Christian from the beginning, Owen saw creation as a series of experiments by a Creator, and he was outraged by Darwin's masterwork On the Origin of Species.
Owen was a tall, imposing figure with a charismatic public presence and a mission to educate: people flocked to his lectures. He hobnobbed with royalty and cultivated relations with the powerful.
"I suppose one could use the word snob, by today's standards," Milner said. "Darwin was a very shy, introvert, reclusive figure who didn't want any of this, whereas Owen was quite the reverse."
Owen also identified New Zealand's giant flightless bird, the moa or dinornis, from a piece of shin just 15cm long.
"It was a small fragment of tibia, but there was enough anatomy there for Owen to know that it was a bird bone, and there was just enough of the muscle scars on part of it for him to be able to place which bone it was. He deduced it must have been flightless," Milner said.
"And two or three years later when complete moa skeletons were discovered, he was proved to be spot on," he said.
PRECARIOUS RELATIONS: Commentators in Saudi Arabia accuse the UAE of growing too bold, backing forces at odds with Saudi interests in various conflicts A Saudi Arabian media campaign targeting the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deepened the Gulf’s worst row in years, stoking fears of a damaging fall-out in the financial heart of the Middle East. Fiery accusations of rights abuses and betrayal have circulated for weeks in state-run and social media after a brief conflict in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes quelled an offensive by UAE-backed separatists. The United Arab Emirates is “investing in chaos and supporting secessionists” from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa, Saudi Arabia’s al-Ekhbariya TV charged in a report this week. Such invective has been unheard of
US President Donald Trump on Saturday warned Canada that if it concludes a trade deal with China, he would impose a 100 percent tariff on all goods coming over the border. Relations between the US and its northern neighbor have been rocky since Trump returned to the White House a year ago, with spats over trade and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney decrying a “rupture” in the US-led global order. During a visit to Beijing earlier this month, Carney hailed a “new strategic partnership” with China that resulted in a “preliminary, but landmark trade agreement” to reduce tariffs — but
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) purge of his most senior general is driven by his effort to both secure “total control” of his military and root out corruption, US Ambassador to China David Perdue said told Bloomberg Television yesterday. The probe into Zhang Youxia (張又俠), Xi’s second-in-command, announced over the weekend, is a “major development,” Perdue said, citing the family connections the vice chair of China’s apex military commission has with Xi. Chinese authorities said Zhang was being investigated for suspected serious discipline and law violations, without disclosing further details. “I take him at his word that there’s a corruption effort under
China executed 11 people linked to Myanmar criminal gangs, including “key members” of telecom scam operations, state media reported yesterday, as Beijing toughens its response to the sprawling, transnational industry. Fraud compounds where scammers lure Internet users into fake romantic relationships and cryptocurrency investments have flourished across Southeast Asia, including in Myanmar. Initially largely targeting Chinese speakers, the criminal groups behind the compounds have expanded operations into multiple languages to steal from victims around the world. Those conducting the scams are sometimes willing con artists, and other times trafficked foreign nationals forced to work. In the past few years, Beijing has stepped up cooperation
RSS