On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse. Richard Owen. Edited by Ron Amundson, with Preface by Brian K. Hall, and Introductory Essays by Ron Amundson, Kevin Padian, Mary P. Winsor, and Jennifer Coggon.
Phillip R. Sloan · Integrative and Comparative Biology · 2008
In his personal copy of Owen's On the Nature of the Limbs, Darwin entered two interesting comments at different times inside the rear cover: I look at Owens Archetypus as more than ideal, as a real representation as far as the most consummate skill & loftiest generalization can represent the parent [present?] form of the Vertebrata. I follow him that there is a created archetype, the parent of its class (Darwin, 1990) Darwin had evidently first heard Owen present the theory of the archetype at the Southhampton meeting of the British Association in September, 1846 at a session he, along with Louis Agassiz and others, attended. This was exactly at the time Darwin was turning his attention to a revision of the barnacles, work which eventually incorporated Owen's ideas on analogy and homology into his analysis of the affinities and historical relationships of the Cirrhipedia. Darwin then discussed the archetype concept in person with Owen in January of 1847. In March of that year, he also read the full text of Owen's 171-page discourse, “Report on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton” in the original British Association Reports publication, later issued as a monograph in 1848 (Darwin 1988, 127). Darwin was prevented by illness from attending the February, 1849 evening lecture of the Royal Institution where Owen gave the more popular presentation of his general theory, published shortly afterward as Limbs, but his comments on this text (noted above) indicate that he was fully aware of its significance for his own theorizing and he immediately ordered a copy of Owen's monograph (Darwin 1988, 127). The text is a sustained discourse illustrated with diagrams from the Archetype monograph; these diagrams were likely presented at the lecture itself. Owen positioned his discussion against the history of comparative anatomy, and occupied the first portion with a detailed analysis of what he would term “special” homologies—the homologies holding between comparable parts on different vertebrates. The more theoretical and speculative issues related to “general” homology occupy the latter part of the essay, including comments on the historical divergence of forms from the original archetypal form (49, 56), the role of the archetypal law in possibly producing forms in other worlds (83), and reflections on the significance for the most extreme departure from the archetype represented in the human upright posture (69). The text closes with an extensive appendix, possibly developed in response to Darwin's complaint about the original version in the 1847 Archetype “Report” (Darwin 1988, 127), which explains each homological structure, using the remarkable illustrations reproduced from the 1848 Archetype monograph. Republication of this relatively rare monograph (32 copies are listed in WorldCat in the United States) allows a wider audience to read Owen's exposition of the archetype theory in its most accessible form, accompanied by valuable scholarly commentaries. Ron Amundson's substantial essay is intended to develop a new historiographical approach to Owen's work, and reposition its significance even for contemporary discussion. This requires rethinking the tired view of Owen as the dark force of the Darwinian revolution, trapped in Platonic typology, and obscure Germanic metaphysics. The vision of Owen as Darwin's vindictive, irascible, and scientifically outmoded critic, simply can no longer stand. Nicolaas Rupke's landmark biography served in some respects to begin a reconstruction of Owen's role in the history of nineteenth-century science, but more needs to be done (Rupke 1994). Amundson rightly questions the factual grounds for the received image of Owen, and more importantly, he shows how Owen had rejected, in many places in his writings including in the Nature of the Limbs itself (p. 41), the excesses of the German transcendental anatomists such as Lorenz Oken, while still utilizing some of their creative developments. The most valuable insight I gained from the Amundson chapter is the positioning he makes of Owen in the Structuralist-Functionalist debates of the 1830s and 1840s. This supplies some new vocabulary for analyzing Owen's positions with reference to the historic debate generated at the Paris Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and in the Académie des sciences between George Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire that reached a climax in Paris in 1830. Owen resolved to overcome this conflict after his own visit to Paris in 1831 where he met the main protagonists. Amundson brings out very well how Owen's structuralist positions led him to develop a critique of the strong adaptationism exemplified by Cuvier and his British disciples, and also led him eventually to seek the solution of the conflict in the conception of the ideal archetype of the vertebrate skeleton. Amundson cleanly refutes the common tendency to read Owen as an advocate of the design-contrivance natural theology of William Paley and his successors. Paleontologist Kevin Padian then follows with an important essay on Owen's concept of the archetype and supplies detail on Owen's vertebral theory of structure, and his distinction of three forms of homology (special, serial, and general) in relation to the archetype theory. In commenting on Owen's intellectual positions, Padian also moves into some tricky interpretive territory. Here, I would take some exception. Utilizing the concept of “quadrophenia” drawn from rock star Peter Townshend's opera Tommy, to denote a state of mind that is being pulled, without reconciliation, in four opposing directions, Padian depicts Owen as stretched intellectually between the opposing forces of Geoffroy and Cuvier, Paley and the German transcendentalists, with the result being a somewhat incoherent mix of ideas and concepts that is never worked through. Padian's debt is evident to the interpretations of Owen by Adrian Desmond (1989), who positions Owen amidst a conflict of Germano-Coleridgean Torys and Lamarckian-materialist radicals, and that of Nicolaas Rupke (1993), who more subtly locates Owen as cautiously playing the field between an Oxbridge natural-theology community and a London scientific network. While I would be the first to admit that Owen is far from a systematic philosophical thinker, I have argued elsewhere (Sloan 2003) that one way to understand Owen more coherently is to penetrate more fully the “antithetical” philosophy of discovery put forth in the 1840s by Owen's close friend, the philosopher William Whewell. Positioning Owen against this framework, rather than that of competing political factions, enables us to see Owen's consistency in his arguments on one side against the German transcendental anatomists, who pursued anatomy in an “abstract” speculative framework, and on the other side his adherence to empiricism and the conception of the archetype as both a transcendental ideal and also as an immanent causal law, conceived on the analogy of a Newtonian universal force law. This law, rather than divine creation, organizes the generation of form, and its workings are manifested empirically in the concrete skeletal anatomy of fossil and contemporaneous forms. This latter notion—the archetype as causal law—distances Owen from the speculative anatomical idealism of Oken, Carus, Spix and Bojanus, and from the creationism of the Paleyites. It also supplies a way of understanding Owen's important move toward historical developmentalism that envisioned this as a divergence of forms from a more primitive archetype. It is this notion that underlies Darwin's later use of Owen's archetypal concept to ground his analysis of group relation through the positing of a real, material common ancestor, a point developed in most detail in chapter thirteen of the Origin. The prefatory material closes with an entertaining example of Holmesian sleuthing by Mary P. Winsor and student Jennifer Coggan on the origins of the odd diagram of what appears to be an angel preparing to sacrifice a bull that is given without explanation on the frontispiece of Limbs. The authors detail their search for the source of this diagram, finally locating its original as a small Roman statue contained in the donations of eighteenth-century art collector Charles Townley to the British Museum. Republication of Owen's classic treatise by Amundson again displays the interest of contemporary theorists of evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) biology in uncovering the world of anatomy, morphology and transformism that existed prior to Darwin, and more proximately, to the dominance of the Modern Synthesis and its emphasis on population dynamics and gene selectionism. Preceded by the publication, also by the University of Chicago, of the relevant writings of George Cuvier by Martin Rudwick (Rudwick 1997), the essays of Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire by Hervé le Guyader (Le Guyader 2004), and now this text by Owen, these textual sources allow those interested in exploring the texture and the issues of the pre-Darwinian anatomical debates to do so with the original texts. This is a fine volume and I recommend it to anyone interested in these issues.