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Owen's Parthian shot

Nature volume 412, pages 123–124 (2001)Cite this article

Charles Darwin may have had the science, but Richard Owen could write a lethal letter.

The cascade of tribute and sentiment that followed Darwin's death in 1882 was effusive and even triumphal. Owen and his transcendentalist supporters had been vanquished on the issue of evolution, and were leaving no intellectual heirs. As Owen notes, Darwin had not convinced everyone of the importance of the mechanism of natural selection to evolution, but he had made it philosophically respectable to accept that the emergence of new species — transmutation — occurs by natural means (Owen's secondary law). Serious investigators would no longer be able to presume divine creation (Owen's primary law) or the direct intervention of an 'intelligent designer'. Darwin's ideas changed the world, and he had been buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey, an irony not lost on either his friends or his enemies.

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Figure 1

REPRODUCED WITH THE KIND PERMISSION OF QUENTIN KEYNES, GREAT GRANDSON OF CHARLES DARWIN

References

  1. Rupke, N. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1995).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

    Kevin Padian

Author notes

  1. The author wishes to thank J. David Archibald and Angela Milner.

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    Padian, K. Owen's Parthian shot. Nature 412, 123–124 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35084289

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