Richard Owen

Brilliant, hard-working, immensely productive and influential, the naturalist Richard Owen was a great promoter of science and played a large role in shaping London's Natural History Museum. An often difficult and arrogant individual, he was accused of plagiarism and bullying, and is the only man whom Charles Darwin claimed to hate.

Although strongly opposed to Darwin and Thomas Huxley's theories of evolution through natural selection, there is evidence that a few of Owen's ideas were not so very distant from theirs. This biography gives an account of Owen's life and work, providing possible psychological and social reasons for some of his more controversial characteristics, and his sometimes rather strained relations with his scientific contemporaries.

In this lively and sure-footed biography, distinguished historian of science Patrick Armstrong brilliantly brings a lifetime of scholarship to the task of explicating why Victorian-era palaeontologist and Charles Darwin collaborator and detractor Richard Owen remains worthy of our attention. A fascinating study! - Tom Chaffin, author of Odyssey: Charles Darwin, the Beagle, and the Voyage that Changed the World

Armstrong's biography accomplishes its admirable purpose describing in considerable detail Owen's many accomplishments and contrasting them with his disagreeable nature. - Geoffrey Martin, Southern Connecticut State University