This article reviews the recent reissuing of Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs and its three novel, introductory essays. These essays make Owen’s 1849 text very accessible by discussing the historical context of his work and explaining how Owen’s ideas relate to his larger intellectual framework. In addition to the ways in which the essays point to Owen’s relevance for contemporary biology, I discuss how Owen’s unity of type theory and his homology claims about fins and limbs compare with modern views. While the phenomena studied by Owen are nowadays of major interest to evolutionary developmental biology, research in evo-devo has largely shifted from homology (which was Owen’s concern) towards evolutionary novelty, e.g., accounting for fins as a novelty. Still, I argue that questions about homology are important and raise challenges even for explanations of novelty.
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Curtis N. Johnson;
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Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, and Natural Selection: A Question of Priority
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Brigandt, Ingo;
(2006)
A Theory of Conceptual Advance: Explaining Conceptual Change in Evolutionary, Molecular, and Evolutionary Developmental Biology
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Darwinism Then and Now: The Divide Over Form and Function
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Maienschein, Jane;
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Smith, C.U.M.;
Smith, C. U. M.;
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Richard Owen's reaction to transmutation in the 1830's
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(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
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Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin
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(2000)
The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World
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Owen, Richard;
Amundson, Ron;
(2007)
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Article
Scott, Anne;
(2004)
`Visible Incarnations of the Unseen': Henry Drummond and the Practice of Typological Exegesis
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Article
Cosans, Chris;
(2005)
Was Darwin a Creationist?
(/isis/citation/CBB000640653/)
Thesis
Desmond, Adrian J.;
()
Robert E. Grant (1793-1874): The science and social predicament of a pre-Darwinian transmutationist, including a study of Richard Owen's response to the threat posed by Grant's transformism
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Article
Richards, Evelleen;
(1987)
A question of property rights: Richard Owen's evolutionism reassessed
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Article
Elwick, James;
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Styles of Reasoning in Early to Mid-Victorian Life Research: Analysis:Synthesis and Palaetiology
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Sloan, Phillip R.;
(2003)
Whewell's Philosophy of Discovery and the Archetype of the Vertebrate Skeleton: The Role of German Philosophy of Science in Richard Owen's Biology
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Thesis
Devin Susanne Yagel Gouvêa;
(2021)
Essentially Dynamic Concepts and the Case of "Homology"
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Article
Olivier Rieppel;
(2020)
Morphology and Phylogeny
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