From Athens to Jerusalem: Platonism, Richard Owen, and the Road Not Taken in Biology

Abstract

Tertullian provocatively asked (circa 200 AD), “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” The relationship between formal philosophy and religion has been a contentious battleground ever since. It has historically come into sharpest focus in biology generally, and evolutionary theory specifically. Charles Darwin clearly won the day in the short-term. His evolutionary functionalism looked like an inglorious abandonment of time-honored metaphysical realism for positivist empirical reductionism with a concomitant horizontalization of perspective that has secularized and flattened the intellectual landscape. But more recently the rise of evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) and epigenetic factors have forced a reevaluation of his archrival, Richard Owen. This paper argues that the key to understanding Owen is rooted in his devout Anglicanism through his broad church theology which put Plato into the service of evolutionary theory only now beginning to receive our belated attention. The road to Owen’s evolutionary theory weaved its way from Athens through Jerusalem, finding itself in the contentious intersection of 19th-century Victorian science and religion. Inaccurately mapped by William Paley, Owen’s evolutionary structuralism offered an alternative through science, philosophy, and religion that is only now beginning to be appreciated.

1. Introduction

The title, alluding to Tertullian’s question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”, was intended by the questioner as a rhetorical invitation to a negative conclusion, but the more historically accurate answer is, everything! This essay will explain why.

Whatever his intent, Tertullian’s question is a long and thorny one and requires considerable unpacking. The “long” question—the relationship of the Greek world upon the early Christianized Roman world in what Augustine called the “city of God”—cannot be ignored, but its more recent “thorny” representation at the intersection of science and religion is the main focus. It begins with biology—the science of life—and an internecine battle of titanic proportions in Victorian England between Charles Darwin and Richard Owen.

Adrian Desmond and Nicholaas Rupke have served as devoted war correspondents (of which there are many) in the Darwin/Owen dispute, but their accounts differ in important respects. These differences will be summarized and explained with the historiographical issues delineated in biology’s internecine conflict that continues to this day. As such, this essay touches on historical and contemporary themes in the life sciences. What emerges from that discussion is the central thesis of this paper, namely, that Owen’s scientific dispute with Darwin and his allies stemmed from his commitment to broad church Anglicanism that was inextricably woven into his theory of species development vis-à-vis the Platonic Archetype (duly capitalized to denote its ontological significance).

Far from being an inconsequential, erroneous, or simply confused embellishment as some historians have claimed, Plato’s influence on Owen was real and substantial; neither misguided nor confused, it served as the centerpiece of his science and his faith. The point of contention was (and still is) the role of teleology in nature. For Darwin, teleology was at best hidden behind chance-based laws of nature, for which there seemed “to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows” (Darwin [1893] 2000, p. 63). For him, chance and necessity were paramount, leading to a private but well-practiced commitment to positivism that, in turn, led toward an overarching scientism. Rising to unparalleled prominence in Victorian society, Darwin came to stand for science itself, a prince among positivists. Owen, on the other hand, opposed positivism and its reductionist tendencies. He declared, “Of all the manifestations of Creative Power, those afforded by living things affect our finite apprehension soonest and strongest with a sense of the directness of the Maker’s operations” (Owen 1864, p. 5). The battle lines were clear enough, but the details draw our attention to the great metaphysical divide underlying empirical evidence on both sides. Far from being a variation on the theme of the Draper-White warfare thesis,1 this investigation into the well-known Owen versus Darwin debate over evolution will demonstrate that religious and metaphysical positions formed the foundational premises of the contention from the beginning. Science and religion are not in tension, they are entangled.

All of this will be laid out in due course. First, however, the issues underlying biology’s civil war will be presented, including not just the main combatants but some of their allies. It will be seen that structuralism—form over function—lay at the heart of the conflict with victory at least in the short term going to the functionalists—function over form. Beneath this ostensible battle deeper metaphysical matters were on the line, the significant roles of Platonism and neo-Platonism in particular and Owen’s attraction to it. Here Owen assumed the role of “philosophic Naturalist” that Sameul Taylor Coleridge called “the high priest of the Logos.”

2. The Prince of Positivism vs. The High Priest of the Logos

In highlighting the two sides of this war, the religious and philosophical attitudes animating the contending theories of Charles Darwin and Richard Owen will be emphasized because it is their respective theological perspectives that this essay seeks to primarily examine. Since Darwin’s evolutionary theory launched the combat, we will begin with him.

By family background, there was little to inspire young Charles to a devout orthodoxy. His father Robert, a second-generation physician, has been described as a “closet freethinker” and his mother Susannah’s Unitarianism was, as her irreverent father in-law Erasmus called it, “a featherbed to catch a falling Christian” (Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 5, 12). In fact, there was little to break the famed evolutionist’s inevitable slide into what effectively became “an undogmatic form of atheism” (Mandelbaum 1958, p. 376). As a youth he was an attention-getter, not above telling tall tales as “a boy’s way of manipulating the world” (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 13).

This penchant for manipulation never quite left him, and he was always, especially in his Autobiography, effective at creating a smokescreen of obfuscation in which his careful selection and omission of anecdotes constructed a self-portrait by which he wished to be viewed and known (Browne 1995, pp. x–xi; 2002, p. 417). Darwin always painted himself as a convert to natural selection and evolution based solely on a scientific-based preponderance of evidence from nature, the sheer weight of which compelled no other conclusion. In order to prove the point, he showed how he came to evolution reluctantly, in spite of himself. Having studied theology at Cambridge, he always claimed to have been convinced of William Paley’s teleological natural theology with its “watchmaker” analogy to divine design through the “contrivances” of nature. He even claimed to be something of a Christian proselytizer on board the HMS Beagle, the ship that would come to establish his evolutionary theory. Darwin described himself as a frequent expositor of scripture, sometimes even given to impromptu homiletics, which the crew members found more humorous than persuasive. The actual record does not support this self-serving portrait, however. Darwin’s autobiographical account notwithstanding, one historian writes, “It is difficult… to find compelling evidence from Darwin’s early writings that warrants this reading. It is also difficult to find evidence from this documentary base that he ever adhered strongly to the ‘watchmaker-designer’ model of a creator-nature relationship integral to the tradition of British natural theology” (Sloan 2001, p. 257).

It is in the years before his studies at Cambridge that a clearer picture emerges; this is from his brief and abortive but life-changing period studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. There he became a member of the Plinian Society, a group of irreligious students who tested out their heterodox views on each other in evening meetings. Darwin joined in November of 1826 and attended all but one of its next nineteen meetings (Ashworth 1935). Here young Darwin was exposed to what was considered at the time the dangerous, disreputable, and atheistic heresies of “freethinking” materialistic scientism. But more importantly, it was through the Plinian Society that Darwin met and formed a close relationship with Robert Edmond Grant. An expert on aquatic invertebrates and sixteen years his senior, Grant became an authority figure that Darwin looked up to. But exactly what he was looking up to is more interesting. According to Desmond and Moore, “Nothing was sacred for Grant. As a freethinker, he saw no spiritual power behind nature’s throne. The origin and evolution of life were due simply to physical and chemical forces, all obeying natural laws” (1991, p. 34).

Not only was Darwin influenced by his college confidante Grant, as he developed his theory, he was also favorably—sometimes enthusiastically—impressed with the skeptic David Hume and the positivist Auguste Comte, for which his private notebooks as well as subsequent scholarship give ample evidence.2 Of course, we hear none of this in his Autobiography or his other public writing. It might well be appreciated that Cyril Darlington, an otherwise sympathetic Darwinian, called him a “slippery” character whose veracity and intellectual integrity was not to be trusted (Darlington 1959, p. 60). Given these early influences, it is no wonder that Darwin’s chief biographer is forced to conclude that “Darwin was profoundly conditioned to become author of a doctrine inimical to religion” (Browne 2002, p. 35).

Darwin’s evolutionary theory was not that novel; it was as oriented towards functionalism as Paley’s, only the clergyman’s contrivances guided by a divine Architect had been replaced by a blind process of natural selection. When he unveiled Origin of Species in November 1859, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog defender, noted approvingly, “That which struck the present writer most forcibly on his first perusal… was the conviction that Teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin’s hands” (Darwin [1893] 2000, p. 82).

Darwin quietly jotted down in his private notes that Comte’s “theological state of science” was a “grand idea” and he eschewed all theological and/or metaphysical approaches in favor of “tracing facts to laws” (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 260). Like Laplace before him, he echoed the Frenchman’s alleged declaration to Napoleon, “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là” (I had no need of that hypothesis), explaining to the Emperor why God was not mentioned in his Traité de mécanique céleste (5 vols. 1798–1825). Darwin had now done for life what Laplace had done for the celestial universe.3 It might be said that in so doing he ennobled himself as the prince of positivism. But never an outright denier of deity like Comte or Laplace, Darwin’s meeting on 28 September 1881, with the generation’s leading atheists Ludwig Büchner and Edward Aveling revealed his real feelings in the matter: Darwin considered atheism too strong for the masses and preferred agnostic as less severe and more likely to gain acceptance. Though they disagreed on terms, their differences were largely strategic rather than substantive. Büchner and Aveling left overjoyed “that our Master had cast off the old bonds, and was walking in the large freedom that he has given [through his writings on evolution] to so many of his brothers and sisters” (Aveling 1883, p. 8). Calling Darwin’s work “majestic,” Aveling bestowed upon his Down House hero a one-word encomium fit for a prince. Their “Master” would die seven months later. Whatever else might be said of Darwin’s theism, it is most accurate to say that at most “his God was an absentee landlord, and nature self-sufficient” (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 479).

Richard Owen presents a dramatically different picture. Unlike Darwin, Owen’s whole life from beginning to end was thoroughly Anglican. We have no explicit record of his baptism, but his mother, Catherine (née Parrin), was the daughter of the St. Mary’s Church organist, the parish church of Lancaster; his father, also an Anglican, was a reasonably prosperous West Indies merchant (Owen 1894, vol. 1, pp. 1–3). Owen’s life was always tied to the church. He married Caroline Clift at St. Pancras Church in London in 1837, and he is buried near his home in the churchyard at St. Andrew’s Church in Ham, located in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England.

Also unlike Darwin, Owen was not independently wealthy. He had to make his own way in life, and that he did, rising to become the most prominent scientist of his day, regarded today as “one of the ablest and most multi-talented British scientists of the high Victorian period” (Armstrong 2023, p. 7). As a young man in Edinburgh, Owen attended John Barclay’s lectures on anatomy and learned transcendental science, the idea that observational science does not always provide all the answers, from the most noteworthy vitalist of the city. Owen then launched his anatomical career as assistant curator of the Hunterian Collection purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons in 1799, where he identified, labeled, and catalogued over 13,000 specimens, a singular achievement that won him a lectureship in comparative anatomy at St. Bartholemew’s Hospital in 1828 (Armstrong 2023, pp. 17–19). His access to specimens and his strategic positions at St. Bartholemew’s Hospital and the Zoological Gardens allowed him to author many articles in the Transactions & Proceedings of the Zoological Society (Armstrong 2023, pp. 23–24).

In this way Owen rose to prominence in intellectual circles, and he carefully cultivated strong relationships with the wealthiest and most influential Tory elites. Thus, Owen came to represent the establishment. And although today Owen is known chiefly for his vehement opposition to Darwin and his cadre of X Club followers, it has been correctly and most importantly pointed out that Owen’s leading target was actually Darwin’s old Edinburgh companion Robert Edmond Grant and his Godless transmutation (Desmond 1982, p. 33). Owen considered Robert Edmond Grant’s transmutation an abomination and countered it with “an anglicized version Naturphilosophie, which left him holding progressionist views” (Desmond 1982, pp. 91–92).

His means of doing so came out most fully and completely in On the Nature of Limbs, a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution on 9 February 1849. From the outset Owen declared, “On the idea of limbs might be understood only by those who knew that the word was used in the sense it bears in the Platonic philosophy,” and an alternative title to Owen’s lecture was given by him as “On the Serial Homologies of the Locomotive Extremities.” He explains the crux of his theory of biological progression:

The ‘Bedeutung,’ or signification of a part in an animal body, may be explained as the essential nature of such part—as being that essentiality which it retains under every modification of size and form, and for whatever office such modifications may adopt it. I have used therefore the word ‘Nature’ in the sense of the German ‘Bedeutung,’ as signifying that essential character of a part which belongs to it in its relation to a predetermined pattern, answering to the ‘idea’ of the Archetypal World in the Platonic cosmogony, which archetype or primal pattern is the basis supporting all the modifications of such part for specific powers and actions in all animals possessing it, and to which archetypal forms we come, in the course of our comparison of those modifications, finally to reduce their subject.

(Owen [1849] 2007, pp. 2–3)

Although Owen’s adoption of Plato’s ideal form as the archetype seems clear enough in laying the foundation for his morphological progression, it has been the source of considerable debate. Adrian Desmond accepts it on its face value. For him, Owen’s alternative to what he saw as a destructive reductionist materialism was a transcendent morphology based upon a Platonist “Archetype,” a “primal pattern” of nature’s “creative blueprint” that Plato regarded as “the Divine Idea” (Desmond 1982, p. 43). Stephen Jay Gould agrees, calling On the Nature of Limbs “the best expression of Owen’s archetypal theory, the most interesting document ever written in the English language to defend this strongest version of formalist [i.e., structuralist] theory in biology” (Gould 2002, p. 324).4 Adrian Desmond, a skilled and perceptive social constructivist historian, sees Owen’s structuralist morphology as an earnest attempt to stave off the radical materialism of Grant and the scientistic positivism of the Darwinians (Desmond 1985, 1982). Indeed, he points out that his “archetypal theology” was designed to not just to contribute to science but also—and perhaps most imperatively—to bolster and preserve established Christian standards (Desmond 1982, p. 115).

Nicholaas Rupke agrees that Owen’s had religious intent. In his hands Paley’s mechanical watchmaker became the Supreme Architect with species coming into “existence by a preordained process of natural, or secondary, laws” (Rupke 2009, p. 141). But he disagrees that Owen was in any sense true Platonist; he was, in point of fact, an Aristotelian (Rupke 2009, pp. 125–34). It has also been argued along these lines that Owen’s Platonism was incongruous and/or simply confused (Ruse 1999, pp. 122–23; Camardi 2001).

Ron Amundson is dismissive of not only of Owen’s Platonism but of his whole morphological formalist proposal. He insists that Owen’s religious allusions vis-à-vis Platonism “were only intended to express piety, not a scriptural grounding for scientific results” (Amundson 2007, p. xxxiii). In other words, Owen was just playing to his base, telling them what he thought they wanted to hear. He writes, “Even in the midst of his rotund piety, Owen leaves ample room for natural species origins” (Amundson 2007, p. xxxiv). But why need we assume that piety (rotund or otherwise) is somehow at odds with natural species origins? If the Archetypes are, ontologically speaking, a plan originating in the mind of God (as any serious Platonist would assume of any Form), piety is not at odds with nature because piety is intrinsic to nature via the Form. Ignoring this, Amundson claims that Owen’s Platonism is “a complete red herring,” calling it “inconsequential” and of little metaphysical significance (Amundson 2007, p. xxxv).

Amundson does not seem to appreciate the significance of the issues involved. This was about much more than a developing scientific theory (good or bad), it was about the nature of the prevailing cultural ethos of Victorian society with the emerging new class of professionals: on one side was Darwin, championed by Huxley and his X Club warriors, claiming science as their own; on the other side stood a diverse group of church-based conservatives insisting that science was on their side too with Owen as their representative. Before thinking that this is proof for the Draper-White warfare thesis, it should be recalled that English clergyman Charles Kingsley was a vocal supporter of Origin, and Asa Gray, a devout Presbyterian, did more than anyone to promote Darwin’s theory in America. The battle lines were obvious but complicated. The division was so marked that Coleridge’s ordination of “the high priest of the Logos” as the epitome of the “philosophic Naturalist” fit Owen to a tee (Desmond 1989, p. 363).5 It was also a volatile mix bound to explode.

3. The Prince and the Priest Go to War

Nothing explains the intensity and sheer magnitude of the war itself more than three battles fought in the very heart of Victorian society. The first is Owen’s anonymous review of Origin in the April 1860 issue of the Edinburgh Review. Darwin and Owen had enjoyed cordial relations up until the publication of Darwin’s magnum opus the previous fall, but now Owen used his review to issue his war cry. It has been described as a meticulous dissection, as if Owen had the book’s author on the table himself (Browne 2002, p. 111). It was “a blend of damning with faint praise, sarcasm, the use of ‘weasel words’ and personal invective” (Armstrong 2023, p. 72). He not only ridiculed Darwin but took shots at his allies, Huxley and Hooker; he doubted Darwin’s competence, his terms, his writing style, everything. But the nature of the review rests in the eye of the reader. It has also been regarded as far from vicious, characterized as “reasoned, not exactly hostile, and certainly not malicious. The worst he ever said of Darwin was (to Charles Kingsley): ‘Darwin is just as good a soul as his grandfather [alluding to Erasmus’s Zoonomia]—and just as great a goose’” (Johnson 2012, p. 92). Whichever reading you take, Owen became “the only man that Darwin ever hated” (Padian 1997, p. 447). If Origin left Owen miffed, he had good reason. Nothing in that first edition took Owen seriously. His ideas were either ignored or, most infamously, mischaracterized as when he associated Owen with Paley’s special creationism (Darwin [1859] 2009, p. 381). Although Darwin later realized his error and corrected the mistake in later editions, the damage had been done and to this day there are those who regard Owen as a special creationist.

Viewed at a historical distance, Owen’s rejection of Origin has merit. After all, Owen’s most salient objection to Origin was that his argument in favor of the morphogenic form was more demonstrable and less speculative. It was more firmly exhibited in the “homologous parts shared by different species” all of which “have a common underlying form because the organism follows natural laws discernable by anatomists. Darwin, however, used a less empirically verifiable strategy” (Cosans 2009, p. 100). No hint is ever given as to what Darwin’s prototype was supposed to be, only that it once existed. So while Owen’s Platonism could not reveal the precise mechanism by which species evolved, Darwin could not present a prototype of the original ancestor. For Owen, mechanism was less important than the general plan by which all organisms developed in time. It might be said that Darwin’s success rested not in the argument itself, and certainly not in the equivocal data presented, but in the careful rhetorical strategy employed (Himmelfarb 1962, p. 350; Campbell 1989; Moore 1997).

The second battle occurred almost at the same time—the famous Huxley–Wilberforce debate on 30 June 1860, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History during the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The intellectual pugilists were Samuel Wilberforce for the conservative Tories and Thomas Henry Huxley for the convention-smashing Darwinians. It was a much anticipated faceoff: “Soapy Sam” (so designated by his detractors for his slippery and dodging debate style beneath a veneer of cultured charm) against the pugnacious bulldog defender of an author whose new book was already a sensation causing every tongue to wag at every social function across the country. Even though no one could quite remember exactly what was said during the exchange, it was generally agreed that the climax came when Wilberforce expressed “disquietude” at his ancestry being found at the zoo, to which Huxley replied something on the order of—again no one was exactly sure—that he would rather be a monkey than a bishop. It seems startlingly clever, but even Huxley’s biographer admits that there is “no totally reliable version of what transpired at Oxford exists (Lyons 1999, p. 228). What is reliable is that the bishop was coached by Owen. The interesting thing is both sides claimed victory, with Wilberforce convinced he had blackened Huxley’s eye and Huxley sure he had given the prelate his comeuppance (Browne 2002, pp. 120–25). Others, who were less partisan, declared the encounter an “entertaining draw” (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 497). But in the collective memory, the Wilberforce—Darwin debate has enlarged itself into Victorian England’s greatest urban legend, the creationists’ Waterloo. While that clearly goes too far, Owen, who had unmistakably coached the bishop, marked an unbridgeable rift between two men who had (like Owen and Darwin) started out as friendly colleagues. Owen, the “British Cuvier” so crowned by William Buckland, and Huxley, spokesman for the new order, were now enemies.

In some ways it was inevitable. Although Owen has come down to us as an unsympathetic caricature of truculence and even deception, one insightful historian admits that it was “Huxley’s lack of civility that Owen finally found intolerable” (Desmond 1982, p. 38). But it took several years to sink in on Owen after Huxley’s persistent nasty and meanspirited axing of every scientific proposal he ever made. With the coolness of temper now more than a century and a half later, it is easy to understand Owen’s disgust at Huxley’s strident prose as those of an impudent upstart. Owen, never one to suffer fools gladly, became Huxley’s arch rival as senior naturalist, and England’s greatest anatomist and paleontologist, prickly and imperious to a fault, locked horns with his junior colleague, an opinionated wisenheimer, in what has been described as a tumbling descent “into a petty world of tit-for-tat” (Desmond 1982, p. 38). The Wilberforce-Huxley debate signaled that the bulldog was out for blood and Owen was his target.

The third great battle was the argument between Owen and Huxley on the hippocampus, two elevations (major and minor), middle and posterior respectively, located in the horn of the ventricles of the brain. In a way, the stage had been set for this confrontation even before the publication of Origin and the Huxley-Wilberforce debate. Owen announced in 1857 that the hippocampus minor and exceptionally large cerebral hemispheres made humans taxonomically unique, deserving of classification as a sub-class he called Archencephala, “ruler of the brain” (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 453). Owen’s dissections coincided with his Christian perspective on human exceptionalism. Man and beast were different and brain anatomy proved it. Interestingly enough, Alfred Russel Wallace concurred, “We can thus understand how it is that, judging from the head and brain, Professor Owen places man in a distinct subclass of mammalia, while, as regards the rest of his body, there is the closest anatomical resemblance to that of the anthropoid apes” (Flannery 2018, p. 16). By 1864 Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, was tip-toeing towards teleology. Five years later he ended up as a “heretic in Darwin’s court” (Slotten 2004). Seven years later, Darwin would publish his retort in Descent of Man, proclaiming that however great the apparent difference between man and primate, it is “certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin [1871] 2004, p. 105).

At the very meeting where Wilberforce and Huxley were arguing about humanity’s simian ancestry, Huxley had risen to doubt Owen’s claims about the special features of the hippocampus. By January 1861 Huxley formalized his objections in the pages of the Natural History Review with “On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals.” Specifically, Huxley argued, in direct contradiction to Owen, “That the Hippocampus minor is neither peculiar to, nor characteristic of man, as it is found in certain of the higher Quadrumana” (Huxley 1861, p. 71). Huxley was obviously anticipating Darwin’s own argument reiterated with force in Descent of Man. Although Huxley ignored Owen’s more nuanced claim that the comparative anatomical details of the hippocampus related to their relative development as opposed to their absolute existence, underlying the sparring over these anatomical details was human exceptionalism and the nature of the mind. For Owen, mind was an expression of a deeper spiritual reality separating and distinguishing him uniquely in the animal kingdom, indeed made in God’s own image; for Huxley, this was a rank superstition in which those under the spell of metaphysics wrought “from a gnostic Trinity,… an endless procession of other logical shadows and all the Fata Morgana [illusions] of philosophical dreamland” (Huxley 1894, p. 87). In short, the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain. Nothing “proved” the point better than Huxley’s insistence of human/simian brain continuity.

Two years after Huxley’s initial volley in the Natural History Review, he gave a full-blown exposition of man-ape continuity with Man’s Place in Nature.6 It is generally considered a resounding victory for Huxley and his Darwinian allies. During the ebullient emergence of the neo-Darwinian synthesis7 the hippocampus debate was remembered thus:

The reference to the notorious “hippocampus” dispute brings into prominence Huxley’s outstanding contribution to the elucidation of human biology. For his memoir on the brain of Ateles (Proc. Zool. Society, 1861), with which he gave the coup de grace to Sir Richard Owen’s preposterous claim that the human brain lacked a hippocampus minor, cleared the field by abolishing that term and stabilizing the distinctive labels “calcar” and “calcarine “ for the parts of the brain which really lodge the secret of man’s intellectual claims to outstanding powers of vision, which confer upon him his most distinctive attributes.

It is strange that Owen should have lit upon this peculiarity and, by totally misunderstanding its meaning, should have lost the opportunity of interpreting the really fundamental fact of human structure. There is the less excuse for Owen’s blundering in the fact that in 1835 Serres had already demonstrated the fallacy of making the particular claim for the hippocampus minor.

(G. E. Smith 1935, p. 201)

This blinkered view of the affair is wrong on several counts. First, despite Huxley’s portrayal as mentioned above, Owen never claimed the hippocampus was absent in the ape; he argued it was anatomically different and enough so to make a real taxonomic distinction. Second, the special capacities of humans cannot be attributed to one or two regions (for example the “calcar” or hippocampus minor). The human intellect is more generalized in the brain, the product of parietal-frontal integration across several regions of the brain. Furthermore, the human brain is three times larger than the chimpanzee brain along with significantly different gene expression. As one neuroscientist put it, “our bigger brains did not merely give us more of the same but helped to facilitate something qualitatively different; why we are not just very bright chimps” (Tallis 2016, pp. 225–26). Third, the reference to Étienne Serres actually makes Owen’s case, not Huxley’s. Serres followed Georffrey Saint-Hilaire in seeing all animals united under one common type with forms repeated in the higher animals. While early on Owen was a staunch opponent of Geoffrey, over time “Owen was now heralded by the medical pundits not as Cuvier’s successor, but Geoffrey’s” (Desmond 1989, pp. 361–62). Even St. George Mivart, searching for his own teleological answers to the Darwinian assault on humanity as a divine creation, defended Owen, saying, “for much as G. St.-Hilaire and Cuvier contended together in France, so in England two schools have sought for the separate and exclusive establishment of views really capable of a fruitful and harmonious coexistence” (Desmond 1982, p. 139). Smith simply accepted Huxley’s version of Owen’s position; had he actually read the 1857 essay as well as On the Nature of Limbs, he would have understood what later scholarship revealed, namely, that “Owen was not interested in the hippocampus as some ‘seat of the soul,’ but as a marker for developmental processes which underlie the nature of the human [that has a soul]. From Owen’s perspective, parts cannot be defined by their mechanical shapes, but must be understood in terms of how they fit into the rest of the organism” Cosans 2009, p. 131). From a gross anatomical perspective, Owen was clearly correct (Cosans 2009, pp. 118–19). Of course, Smith could not have known about parietal-frontal integration at his writing, but he should have gleaned the more basic points in Owen’s argument by reading him for himself instead of simply relying on Huxley’s version. As for Smith reference to Serres, that appears to be a case of historical superficiality and misunderstanding. And yet even today historians, unable to shake the ghost of Huxley, refer to Owen’s “completely untenable position regarding the structure of the human brain” (Lyons 1999, p. 203).

The controversy had other impacts and helped to reveal Owen’s developing position more fully. Owen’s Exeter Hall talk, for example, “Instances of the Power of God as Manifested in His Animal Creation” (presented in November 1863) sounds orthodox, but it was a call to think anew about scripture and approach religion non-dogmatically. It shocked some with its abandonment of biblical literalism, but aside from philistine creationists and flummoxed Darwinians, others, like the editors of Geological Magazine, praised it, as did Charles Carter Blake at the Anthropological Society, who found Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (among other things) based upon unfounded extrapolations from a Neanderthal skull, causing Darwin’s bulldog to resign in a huff (Desmond 1982, pp. 80–81).

But there are other problems. Owen’s focus on the hippocampus minor was his marker for the more backward growth of the brain, but as Cosans points out, his opponent was disingenuous because he “would use simplifications of the anatomy of the hippocampus to take public attention away from the extent to which Owen’s general claims about brain development and size were correct” (Cosans 2009, p. 21). Owen believed that the most important anatomical fact about humans is that they have such large cerebral hemispheres (Cosans 2009, p. 109). Huxley’s reply was designed to “factor out size by normalizing some structures to the same length” (Cosans 2009, p. 113). Modern anatomical analysis from Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann and American zoologist John F. Eisenberg at the University of Maryland support Owen’s anatomical distinctions between human brains and those of orangutans, chimps, and other apes (Cosans 2009, pp. 122–23). And it was not just a matter of anatomy, Owen’s point ran deeper; his Platonist version of evolution was ubiquitous in the world of life and was the expression of the deepest primal pattern that culminated in the pinnacle of creation, human beings; for Christians like Owen, we were made in the image of God (Cosans 2009, p. 45; Owen [1849] 2007, p. 86). In the end, the fundamental point in the Owen-Huxley exchange on brain anatomy is this: “Owen’s strategic withdrawal of conceding to Huxley that the non-rudimentary posterior lobes and hippocampus minors exist in apes yielded no high ground to Huxley. It did not even hinder Owen from using these structures to support his more central claim of 1857; the human brain expresses a unique developmental pattern” (Cosans 2009, pp. 109–10).

Each of these pitched battles underscores the real underlying issue, an issue that had ostensibly to do with science, but at a more fundamental level had to do with the cultural and religious mores of Victorian society. Adrian Desmond emphasizes the political aspects rooted in a class-based power struggle over who would lay claim to scientific authority. This leads him to sometimes regard Owen and his allies as engaging in “pious prostitution” that plays to their Tory constituents, a cynical charge against Owen that is ultimately unsupportable (Desmond 1982, p. 47). More fairly, Rupke notes that Owen had a much broader constituency than Darwin that generally was very distrustful of evolutionary theory of any kind. Nonetheless, he points out that “It is a measure of Owen’s basic sincerity that, in spite of this, he walked a course that led away from creationism and toward the establishment of the fact of an evolutionary origin of species” (Rupke 2009, p. 180). Overall, the debate was over scientific facts as they relate to religious values. That is why Amundson’s claim that Owen’s Platonism is a “complete red herring” stands as an egregious error, misconstruing the whole conflict as one over competing scientific theories. In fact, Christianity was the core issue for Owen and Platonism was its forceful expression in his archetypal theology; for Darwin and Huxley, religion was at best a check on social anarchy and more likely an impediment to scientific progress.

4. Back to Plato, on to Faith

While Owen was a devout Christian and a staunch member of the Anglican Church, he was also convinced that “the clergy had to remove some of its intellectual furniture to make room for that of the scientist” (Rupke 2009, p. 252). Some of that “furniture” had been placed there over the years by a particular adherence to a distinctly reductionist perspective on Christian theology. It harkens to the question that opened this essay, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” It was intended by Tertullian to suggest a sola scriptura approach to the Christian religion divorced of its Hellenistic influences. By Owen’s day the special creationists (the functionalist Paleyites) all assumed—explicitly or more often implicitly—that the answer to these rhetorical questions was a resounding, “Nothing!” Even today, young earth creationists are still tacitly answering those age-old questions the same way. Tertullian, the first church father to write in Latin, signaled by so doing his adherence to a faith divorced from its philosophical antecedents, especially Plato and Aristotle. Oddly enough, Tertullian based this idea from “the porch of Solomon” referencing the Book of Wisdom, a Deuterocanonical text in the Anglican faith that harmonized Athens and Jerusalem more than any other book. The theme of the point/counterpoint in the Book of Wisdom “was not the conjunction of Isaiah and Vergil on the birth of the Child nor the conjunction of David and the Sibyl on the end of the world but the conjunction of Genesis and Timaeus on the beginning of the world. Having almost certainly been composed originally in Greek rather than in Hebrew, the Wisdom of Solomon is not only the most Hellenized but also arguably the most ‘philosophical’ book in the Bible” (Pelikan 1997, p. 3). The historical link between Athens and Rome came in its most passionate emissary, Boethius, “the last Roman—the first scholastic” (Pelikan 1997, p. 112). It was Boethius, in the language of Timaeus, who called upon the “Father of all things” as the fundamental beginning of all inquiry. Here the German Boethius scholar, Helga Scheible, has said, “the blending of the Creator of the world (here, that of the Old Testament) with the supreme idea of Platonism makes it possible for the Christian thinker to find an adequate way of speaking about his God” (Pelikan 1997, pp. 114–15). So Tertullian’s own evidence belies his presumed conclusion.

There is, however, another persistent theme within the Anglican Church that relies upon Plato’s creedal formula in its theology. William Ralph Inge, described as a “sharp-tongued Cambridge University theologian who served from 1910 to 1935 as dean of St. Paul’s… espoused, with flare, a theologically liberal and politically conservative version of neo-Platonist mysticism” (Dorrien 2013, p. 302). It is easy to see how Inge came to this, for Platonism is replete in the Johannine writings of the Bible. For all the Aristotelian precedents packed into Thomistic scholasticism, “Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato’s philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato’s cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ” (Herman 2013, p. 151). And it burst upon Christendom in the Word (Logos) proclaimed in John 1:18. Thus Inge could write:

The continuity of historical Christianity with the religious philosophy of antiquity is unbroken, though the gaps in our educational curriculum have done much to obscure it. A history of Greek philosophy, instead of ending with the Stoics, or even with Aristotle, ought to include St. Paul and St. John, Plotinus and Proclus, and the Alexandrian and Cappadocian Fathers… After Porphyry, we may say without disparaging Proclus, the main stream flows in a Christian channel. The Platonism which thus entered the Catholic Church, furnishing Christianity with its scientific theology, its metaphysics, and its mysticism, was undoubtedly a syncretistic philosophy, enriched from Aristotle, the Stoa, and other sources. And it was half ruined by being ecclesiasticized, as it was even by Augustine himself. But it will probably be for ever impossible to cut Platonism out of Christianity.

(Inge [1926] 2024, pp. 75–76)

The point is, in enlisting the Platonic archetype as part of Owen’s theory of progressive species development, he was calling upon a well-known tradition within the Anglican faith. Hardly a “red herring,” it was integral to the nature and substance of his faith and his science, which was always religious in character. Owen’s structuralist morphology is virtually defined most succinctly when it is said that “The Platonist… loves Nature, because in Nature he perceives Spirit creating after its own likeness” (Inge [1926] 2024, p. 77). Far from resisting science, Owen would have heartily agreed that “Whatever helps us to discern the spiritual values which are undoubtedly to be found in the latest scientific discoveries, is helpful” (Inge [1926] 2024, p. 81).

To understand how Owen blended his faith and his science we need go no further than the Exeter Hall lecture mentioned earlier. Predictably enough, Owen started his lecture to the Young Men’s Christian Association recalling “the principles of our common creed” reciting a canticle from the Anglican liturgy. He started off almost Paley-like referencing the intricacies of the “artificial machines” that magnify the handiwork of their “Divine Author” (Owen 1864, p. 6). His example, in true modern evo-devo fashion started with a detailed examination of a bird’s egg and Great Ant-Eater. Then, in a thinly veiled jibe at Darwin and Huxley, called it “strange” that “any mind capable of tracing and comprehending the relations of these structures and their effects… should ignore the adaptive relations or the purpose of all these correlated structures!” (Owen 1864, p. 9). He thought it was analogous to a congenital defect like color-blindness. After highlighting certain features of the aye-aye (a small primate from Madagascar) and the skull of a snake, he dug into their theological implications referencing their “exquisitely adjusted” form to adapt to their mode of existence. “Biblical commentators in this matter have erred,” he argued, “knowing only, or believing they knew, the Scriptures, and ‘not knowing the Power of God’” (Owen 1864, p. 22). In other words, God’s power, reflected as it was in nature, was superior to their facile scriptural interpretations. Rejecting young earth creationism, Owen declared, “the certainty, at least, that the date of some six thousand years, assigned to it in some theologies, is inadequate to the work that has been performed on it; and… the nature of the Divine operations in the preparation and peopling of the dry land, that date is utterly—nay, absurdly inadequate” (Owen 1864, p. 26). He rejected special creation, adhering to “a concomitant and continuous operation of Creative Power, which has produced a succession of species; and, furthermore, that in this succession there has been ‘an advance and progress in the main’,” citing in good Johannine Platonist fashion John 5:17, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work” (NABRE). In this whole process there has been no intermission or pause, only continuous and progressive development of the living world. He criticized biblical literalists who stick to their interpretations and “look with suspicion, dislike, and dread upon the evidences, reasonings, proofs of Geology, Paleontology, Geographical Zoology” refusing to receive “that later evidences of the Power of God; they think they know the Scriptures, and they do err” (Owen 1864, p. 31). He told his young men to beware of “logically precise and definite theologies” that claim to know too much. Let Christian ethics be the guide and don’t fear science for it is “each new ray of light that dawns upon a field of the Divine Power” and remember that what we know “is very small compared to the knowable” (Owen 1864, p. 35).

So Owen navigated a course ultimately away from the Paleyites and the young earth creationists and toward Platonist evolutionary development in the best Anglican tradition. That some of his conservative Tory base did not always see it that way is only a measure of the internecine strife that had accumulated over eighteen hundred years of church history and still plagues it today.

Historians like Amundson, and to some extent Desmond, dismiss all of this as so much posturing, playing to the crowd. But this seems doubtful. For one thing, to make theological statements like those above—statements he knew would be rejected by some conservatives for their liberal biblical interpretations and evolutionary implications—suggests that he was stating sincere convictions. But he also expressed his religiosity privately. In a letter to his sister Eliza on 6 December 1864, he wrote, “We like our clergyman much; and his curate, who preached his first sermon at our little iron church, I also like, and am glad we are so well provided in spirituals. The vicar has organised evenings for amusing his poorer parishioners by ‘Readings,’ to give which gentlemen volunteer. I have consented for Monday, 19th, and have chosen some quiet chapters from Galt’s ‘Annals of the Parish’ to begin with. I may give a bit of Milton or of Tennyson before I have done with them” (Owen 1894, vol. 2, p. 156). Owen was surely not posturing privately to his sister, and why would he actively volunteer to participate in church activities—to be a genuine participant in the beloved community—if he was not sincere. Owen was a prickly fellow, even at times meanspirited, but he should at least be allowed his own faith. In this light, accusations of schmoozing appear niggardly and cynical.

Before departing this topic, one point that needs to be stressed is that all the squabbling about whether Owen was a true Platonist, an Aristotelian, or something else is wrongheaded. Kevin Padian thinks we ask too much of Owen to expect philosophical consistency because, after all, his “interest was morphology, not metaphysics,” assembling his worldview by taking what he thought good and useful from many sources (Padian [1849] 2007, p. lxxiii). But this makes Owen’s theory a willy-nilly affair; the hodgepodge of a careless thinker cobbling together what he thought might work for expediency rather than accuracy. But if Inge is right, Owen knew what he was about; his Platonism was perfectly aligned with Anglican theology. Additionally, the effort to find pure Aristotelian thought apart from Plato is a fool’s errand. We should instead take a more general view and ask, does Owen’s thought reflect a Platonist worldview? We then find it most emphatically does. In defining Platonism, it has been explained “that it is resolutely and irreducibly top-down rather than bottom-up.” In distinction, it rejects the ever-present compulsion to simplify with its concomitant reductionism. Furthermore, the Platonic worldview sees the universe as a logical and coherent unity, and its efforts at delineating that unity is comparable to formulating a theology based upon scriptures and other canonical sources (the evidence of the biblical testaments serving similar purposes to Plato’s dialogues [especially, the Republic and Timeaus]); the universe must be understood as a hierarchy; the divine is an irreducible category; the soul has a unique explanatory role in that irreducibly vertical hierarchy such that the mind cannot be epiphenomenal or supervenient on nonliving matter; a fundamental principle of Platonism is to “become like God”; moral and aesthetic values are intrinsic to and follow from the hierarchy; and epistemology is included within a larger metaphysical order (Gerson 2005, pp. 32–34). So unlike Darwin’s positivism, Platonism offers not just a stark but a volatile contrast. Like putting sodium or potassium in water, the result is explosive.

Even if Owen was shown to be an Aristotelian, it would not matter much in the long run. “Aristotle follows Plato in holding that form expresses all that is intelligible in nature,” one specialist of the period observed, “while matter, in contrast, is only an object of knowledge by analogy, as bronze is to a statue or wood to a bed” (De Beer 2018, p. 46). Although Aristotle is not a mere Platonist, and their differences cannot be ignored, even here Aristotle’s tendency to apply innovative terminology to express thoughts original to Plato must be recognized. Usually, Aristotle is not refuting his teacher, but rather elucidating and clarify him. Despite all of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato, it would be wrong to conclude that Aristotle was not at bottom a Platonist. Even those critiques show that, in spite of himself, he is led to conclusions drawn from Platonic assumptions. Any attempt to remove these assumptions would leave Aristotle’s thought “indefensible and incoherent.” In effect, a thoroughgoing and scientific anti-Platonic Aristotelianism is oxymoronic (Gerson 2005, p. 290). Viewed in this light, the Plato-or-Aristotle debate over Owen’s archetype is rather moot. But it is also at a more basic level simply a false dichotomy. “Plato is for ever unintelligible till we read him as a prophet and prose-poet,” argues Inge, “and cease to hunt for a system in his writings” (Inge [1926] 2024, p. 67).

Of course, none of this speaks to the validity of Owen’s theory. Whether his ideas reflected sound Christian doctrine is beside the point. It would be a genetic fallacy to judge its worth on the basis of its religious and/or philosophical roots, and it would be an ad hominem fallacy to damn or praise it for its Christian tenets.

The historical fact is Darwinian evolution clearly won the day. With the advent of modern genetics and the neo-Darwinian synthesis evolution came to mean four things: natural selection, random mutation, genetic drift, and the environment, only one of which is not based on sheer chance, and that one—natural selection—cannot build or create anything. One critic of Darwin’s theory pointed out that natural selection “only weeds, and does not plant; it is the drain of Nature carrying off the irregularities, the monstrosities, the abortions; it comes in after and upon the active developments of Nature to prune and thin them; but it does not create a species; it does not possess one productive or generative function” (Anonymous 1869, p. 163). Later analysts agree that Wallace’s understanding of natural selection as “the elimination of the unfit” (Wallace’s phrase) is a wholly negative factor in the evolutionary process (Boodin 1925, p. 83; Sober 1984; C. H. Smith 2011). If, as Darwin insisted, natural selection is analogous to the breeder’s artificial selection, how can the deliberate and purposeful choice of crosses be compared to Darwin’s totally blind process? (Collin 1959, p. 71). French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé caught the import of this question by noting (as Wallace had done before him) that domesticated breeds quickly return to their original type or perish when returned to a state of nature, proving “that artificial and natural selection do not work in the same way” (Grassé 1977, p. 124). Despite these and other lingering anomalies, the majority opinion is that the evidence for Darwinian evolution, now wedded to genetics, “is quite overwhelming” as demonstrated in the fossil record, the branching pattern of common descent, vestigial structures, biogeography, and molecular biology (Mayr 2001, pp. 12–39).

But more and more biologists are beginning to question the reigning paradigm, leaving room for a closer look at Owen’s structural morphology. Researchers are increasingly looking at the road not taken.

5. The Road Not Taken

Forty years ago, physician/geneticist Michael Denton called evolution a theory in crisis because he thought the Darwinian view was insufficient and failed to give a credible explanation for how the patterns of life emerged. It would lead to Denton’s excursion into the theory of forms. Thirty years later he looked again at the theory of evolution and gave a full exposition of structuralist evolution featuring Owen as “the father of Anglo-Saxon structuralism” (Denton 2016, p. 15). For biological functionalists like Darwin and his neo-synthesis progeny, function over form applies. Structuralism, sometimes called formalism, is quite different in proposing that all organisms have built-in constraints based upon primal morphological patterns. Functionalists believe that the basic organizing principle in all of biology is adaptation; structuralists see this as a “mask” grafted onto “underlaying ground plans [forms] or ‘primal patterns’” (Denton 2016, pp. 17–18).

Denton’s path to Owen’s Platonism started with protein folds. “The folds are evidently determined by natural law, not natural selection, and are ‘‘lawful forms’’ in the Platonic and pre-Darwinian sense of the word, which are bound to occur everywhere in the universe where the same 20 amino acids are used for their construction” (Denton et al. 2002). Denton and his research team presented this as a major discovery which had many important implications regarding the origin of proteins, the origin of life and the fundamental nature of organic form. They felt that it would be unlikely that the folds would prove to be a lone case in which a set of complex organic forms is determined by natural law. To them, natural law—not natural selection—must have played a far greater role in the origin and evolution of life than is commonly assumed by Darwinian mechanisms. By viewing cells as whole forms, he continued developing a view toward modern organicism presaged by Owen (Denton et al. 2013). More confirmatory evidence has indeed been found in lipid forms that play a critical role in generating cellular and subcellular order (Denton 2016, p. 267). Altogether Denton argues that three empirically grounded forms of evidence support structuralism: (1) cosmic and chemical fine-tuning; (2) the rise of epigenetic factors in explaining life itself and its evolution; and (3) what he calls “the extraordinary robustness of the homologs” (Denton 2016, p. 276). Harkening to Owen, Denton concludes, “I do concede that such a ‘lawful biology’ might be seen as a first step back to teleology and the notion that the laws of nature are ‘intelligently’ fine-tuned to generate the set of life forms on earth up to and including mankind. Indeed, although the Types and ‘primal patterns’ are embedded in matter, they may be construed as many pre-Darwinian biologists did [most notably Richard Owen]: as reflecting a reality beyond matter, a la Platonic forms” (2016, p. 281).

Even where genes do play a role, their code is not created merely by physics and chemistry; there are no chemical pathways or properties in physics that show how code is actually produced. Therefore, “it is reasonable to conclude that genetic information originates in the activity of the intelligible reason-principle (Greek logoi) indwelling all existing things, so that we might say the genetic code is designed by a transcendent Intelligence and is not due to a Neo-Darwinian chemical accident” (De Beer 2018, p. 166).

Owen’s proposal for a teleologically ordered evolutionary schema presents some important alternatives because it is more ontologically centered and not rooted in a theory driven by the elimination of the unfit, which is the essence of natural selection.9 Its implications when applied to the human condition resulted in tragic consequences, something that became evident in the difference between Huxley’s and Owen’s approach to brain anatomy. Huxley sought to blur the ape-human distinction by an appeal to race.10 Huxley scoffed at the work of German anatomist and physiologist Frederick Tiedemann “as the Negro’s advocate” because he used brain comparisons of black subjects with Europeans to conclude that placing them beneath whites was wholly unwarranted. To Huxley, the black brain was intermediate between the European and the ape. Tiedemann’s research showed nothing of the kind, although Huxley used selective quote mining of Tiedemann to make his racist case (Cosans 2009, pp. 51, 106–8). Owen, on the other hand, utilized the work of German anatomist and physiologist Tiedemann to argue for a unity between African and European brains insisting “that there has been no province of intellectual activity in which individuals of the pure Negro race have not distinguished themselves” (Cosans 2009, p. 111).

The battle of the brains continued on, and although neo-Darwinism has proclaimed Huxley the winner in the hippocampus debate, more recent analysis suggests that Huxley may have won the battle only to lose the war. Nobel laureate and neuroscientist John C. Eccles centers the debate differently. According to him, human brain development was uniquely dependent upon simian ancestry for its neural blueprint, but the shift from ape to man was “a never-to-be repeated world efflorescence” (Eccles 1989, p. 217). In terms of humans’ prodigious cognitive abilities, he concludes: “Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the Self or Soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each Soul is a new Divine creation which is implanted into the growing foetus at some time between conception and birth” (Eccles 1989, p, 237). Owen was never so explicit, he was too interested in the law-like expressions of primal forms, but he would undoubtedly have applauded Eccles’s suggestion because Eccles is calling for an explanation of human exceptionalism not based upon material function but a shift upon the primal pattern of primates defining Homo sapiens.

The alternative of a thoroughly materialistic, racially ordered—perhaps better called ranked—evolutionary theory like Darwin’s had serious implications when applied to social issues. The record of eugenics is the most egregious example. After all, if artificial selection is analogous to natural selection, why not give nature a helping hand? Determining “the fit” and making sure the “unfit” did not reproduce was not a program of reactionary conservatives; it was championed by some of the most progressive elements of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectual elites especially. Concerns about the moral order of the family and the future of Anglo-American integrity increasingly captured the attentions of reformers and political activists on both sides of the Atlantic. “This racial concern was a major plant of progressivism,” writes one historian. “A revolution in biological sciences coming from Charles Darwin’s concepts provided the tap root” (Pickens 1968, p. 18). It has even been suggested that Darwinism lay at the heart of Hitler’s National Socialism and its racial policies (Weikart 2004).

Peter J. Bowler has tried to distance Darwin from all this by countering the claim that “the theory of natural selection inspired various forms of social Darwinism” (Bowler 2013, p. 3). But Bowler can only make this claim by highly selective source mining not accordance with strong evidence linking Darwinian evolution to eugenics and various schemes of racial hygiene. His insistence that eugenics and programs of racial hygiene would have occurred anyway seems more based upon wishful thinking than fact. For example, he claims that social forces were converging with a middle class so increasingly nervous about social degeneracy by the beginning of the 20th century that a eugenics movement would have emerged even without Darwin. Bowler believes that the eugenicists did not rely upon natural selection. According to Bowler, “eugenics drew no analogy between society and natural evolution. It supposed that selection must operate artificially, just as it does in the long-established practice of animal breeding that Darwin himself used to explain how selective processes work” (Bowler 2013, p. 236). Such an interpretation is patently false because, as we have seen, Darwin himself specifically used artificial selection as his preferred analogy to natural selection. Paul Popenoe, leading the way for California’s ambitious sterilization program through the Human Betterment Foundation, and University of Pittsburg Professor Roswell Hill Johnson made clear acknowledgment of their debt to Darwin and his theory of organic or natural evolution:

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin’s work The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequence of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, “Is not man himself subject to those same laws? Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?

(Popenoe and Johnson 1920, pp. 147–48)

Social Darwinism in the context here is used in the sense of a worldview of scientific determinism promoted by Darwin that came to incorporate (among other things) eugenics as one of its prominent “progressive” projects. This view accords with its best historian (Hawkins 1997). Whether this worldview originated with Darwin or not, historian Henrika Kuklick admits that “scholars have wasted their time trying to exonerate Darwin of responsibility for Social Darwinism, for he was a Social Darwinist” (Kuklick 1999).

The world without Darwin—or more accurately Darwinism—is the road not traveled. It cannot be said that the most distasteful aspects of its social applications wouldn’t have happened without it, but it certainly would have happened differently and it would have been deprived of one of its most oft-cited “scientific” supports.

If Owen is any example, evolution might have had a kinder, gentler path. Scientifically, it would have greatly enhanced epigenetics and a more sophisticated approach to morphology. Intellectually, it would have eschewed the dogmatisms of reductionism and scientism in favor of deeper metaphysical investigation and (hopefully) freer inquiry. Science, philosophy, and religion would have benefitted.

In this sense, there is another road not traveled; it is the road mapped centuries before by the ancient forefathers of the West. In following Auguste Comte, the prince of positivism was casting aside the wisdom of the ancients in favor of a narrower and more horizontal vision championed by the Lumières—Montesquieu, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Diderot, and d’Alembert, to name a few. The knowledge was surer and earthlier, but the wisdom imparted was commensurately small.

6. Conclusions

The road has certainly been a long one. But the journey has been well worth it. Owen effected a viable synthesis remarkable in its blending of science, philosophy, and theology, doing so by a route from Athens to Jerusalem. The synthesis of the 1930s and 40s between modern genetics and biology was far more modest. All these synthesizers, their chest-thumping about the “revolution” they had wrought notwithstanding, were secularizing Paley’s functionalism, turning natural theology into an ontological Nature. This “high priest of the Logos” visited Athens through Plato and Jerusalem through St. John, giving rise to an alternative vision of biological structuralism called variously organicism or more mundanely evo-devo. Those who saw and helped explore that terra incognita were more open to teleology, whether it be D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Aristotelian On Growth and Form (1917, revised 1942), Hal Waddington’s mapping of the epigenetic landscape in The Strategy of the Genes (1959) and his organicist manifesto posthumously published as Tools for Thought (1977), or Yale botanist/geneticist Edmund W. Sinnott’s morphogenetically focused Problem of Organic Form (1963). Waddington was especially critical of Darwinian dogmatism, infamously referring to it as COWDUNG (conventional wisdom of the dominant group). Gentler, but fearless in his teleological embrace, Sinnott referred to “protoplasmic craftsmanship” and “living beauty” as things intrinsic to the order of life in The Biology of Spirit (1955). Only recently has the scientific community started to recognize the metaphysical revolution at their doorstep. Wynand de Beer, a historian/philosopher well versed in Hellenic and Patristic thought, has summarized the significance of Owen’s structuralist evolution in modern terms:

Metaphysically speaking, the appearance of a new organic form through mutation, as in macro-evolution, occurs in accordance with a morphological plan or structure which is the formal cause, while its survival through reproduction is the final cause or purpose of phylogenetic development. That is to say, the indwelling presence of the logoi ensures both formal and final causality in the organic realm. In this manner the physical reflects the metaphysical, from which it cannot be divorced without a radical loss of both ontological depth and epistemological scope.

(De Beer 2018, p. 264)

We can see the prince of positivism cringing at such metaphysical musings, while the ghost of Owen smiles approvingly not in heavenly robes or even the academic regalia, of which he was so fond, but in a twenty-first century lab coat.

Nevertheless, Owen still has little to grin about. The recovery of Owen’s reputation has been talked about for nearly thirty years (Padian 1997). One might have confidence in this promised restoration if a later event at the Natural History Museum of London had not occurred with such public fanfare; that event was the removal of Owen’s bronze statue from Hintz Hall, the main entrance to the museum’s gallery area, with a huge marble likeness of the Down House sage seated in august repose. It was placed there in honor of the sesquicentennial of his Origin of Species and his 200th birthday. This was not the first time Owen was demoted. Shortly after Darwin’s death in 1882, the nation honored him by placing his marble figure prominently at the museum’s entrance three years later, and although it must have infuriated Owen, it was a clear sign of how far from grace the museum’s founder had fallen. Fortunately, Owen did get his own bronze statue in 1896, first in the grand staircase, later moved to Hintz Hall in 1927. But the pending 150-year celebration of Darwin’s magnum opus and the bicentennial of his birth prompted an elaborate and expensive three-day swap, placing Darwin back in Hintz Hall where it has remained since 2009. Owen now sits inconspicuously under a window of the first-floor landing (Conniff 2008).

Today the very man who virtually single-handedly founded the museum sits in an obscure corner like a naughty schoolboy. Shakespeare was right: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Keep watch on who looks over Hintz Hall to greet its visitors. The struggle for survival of the fittest is not over and it is taking place not in flesh and blood but in marble and bronze.