Richard Owen's Hunterian lectures on comparative anatomy and physiology, 1837-55.

In recent years, historians of biology have drawn attention to the fact that during the period 1830-59-the three decades before the publication of Darwin's Origin of species-a major change took place in biological thought in England. Teleological explanations of the Cuvierian and Paleyan kind were amended, if not entirely supplanted, by a mixture of idealist and transcendentalist philosophies. This new approach sought to explain organic diversity as variations on ideal or primitive types. Thus the significance of organic structure was no longer primarily its adaptive function, but the underlying law by which it could be reduced to a general type. In this way, organic diversity assumed a historical meaning which could be discovered by means of the study of comparative anatomy, embryonic development, and fossil succession. Ospovat has argued that, on the basis of this change in biological thought, the naturalists of the middle part of the nineteenth century should not be divided into creationists and evolutionists, but into teleologists, who continued to toe the Paleyan line, and non-teleologists.1 Darwin belonged to the latter group, and Ospovat's division sheds new light on the cognitive side of Darwinism and as such is of philosophical value. Its historical worth, however, is limited by the fact that the two groups had little ifany social reality: they did not constitute actual circles of friends or colleagues. In particular, the non-teleological group, which included such opponents of Darwin as Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen, represented merely a cluster of scientific views, not a group of collaborating naturalists. Like Ospovat, Jacyna has emphasized the importance of idealist thought in English biology of the 1830s and 1840s.2 Both authors single out Martin Barry, William Carpenter, and Owen as the main advocates of the new approach.