Background
Rupke, Nicolaas was born on January 22, 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Son of Christiaan and Pieternella H. (van den Heuvel) Rupke.
( Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the leading n...)
Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the leading naturalist of nineteenth-century Britain. A distinguished anatomist and paleontologist, he was influential in Victorian scientific reform and in the debate over natural selection. Leader of the nineteenth-century museum movement, he founded London's monumental Natural History Museum, wrote and published copiously, and won every professional honor. This first full-fledged biography of Owen presents the complete range of his scientific and intellectual achievements. Nicolaas Rupke discusses Owen's epic power struggles with colleagues, the most notorious of which were with Darwin and Huxley. As a renowned opponent of natural selection, Owen became the bête noire of the Darwinian evolution debate. Rupke argues, however, that Owen should no longer be judged by the evolution dispute that was only a minor part of his work yet has come to dominate his memory. Instead, Rupke emphasizes and throws new light on a wide area of Owen's other activities. In particular, he explains the central division in Owen's scientific oeuvre between the functionalism of Oxbridge natural theology and the transcendentalism of German nature philosophy. Rupke shows that this was a fundamental extension of the intellectual and political maneuvering for control of Victorian cultural institutions and an inextricable part of the rise to public authority of the most articulate proponents of the scientific study of nature.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300058209/?tag=2022091-20
(This book examines the debate over vivisection over the p...)
This book examines the debate over vivisection over the past century in detail, placing it in the context of the wider conflict of the value of modern scientific research. This book should be of interest to social history, history of medicine, history of science and philosophy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415050219/?tag=2022091-20
Rupke, Nicolaas was born on January 22, 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Son of Christiaan and Pieternella H. (van den Heuvel) Rupke.
Bachelor of Science, Groningen University, 1968. Master of Arts, Princeton University, 1970. Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1972.
Early in his studies, Rupke was a Christian and proponent of Flood geology, but later came to reject this position. When in 1977 he was elected to a Wolfson College, Oxford research position in the history of science, Rupke made this subject his full-time occupation. A series of similar international research posts followed, until in 1993 he took up a professorship at Göttingen University to teach the history of science and medicine.
In 2009, Rupke was awarded a Lower Saxony research chairman
In 2012, he took up an endowed professorship at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, United States of America. Rupke is known for his studies of late-modern biology, geology and science & religion. With an interest in the biographical approach, he restored to their contemporary prominence several nineteenth-century scientists, most important among them Richard Owen who well before the appearance of The Origin of Species developed a naturalistic theory of evolution, albeit a non-Darwinian one.
Studies of Alexander von Humboldt came next, in which Rupke developed what he terms the metabiographical approach by exploring how a famous life – in this case Humboldt"s – may be multiply retold and reconstructed as part of different belief systems and memory cultures. Rupke is a fellow of Germany"s National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.
(This book examines the debate over vivisection over the p...)
( Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the leading n...)
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Göttingen Academy of Sciences.