Dov Ospovat

[Stephan Pickering <stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com>]

Those dinosaurologists with good memories will no
doubt recall that it was Dov Ospovat who laid some
interesting groundwork for analyses of pre-1860
conceptualizations of "natural selection"... and  who
did much "eye-opening" work on the excellent
morphological and paleontological descriptive papers
by Richard Owen. Owen, in effect, transformed by the
embryological ideations of von Baer into a paradigm
which, with modifications, eerily iterates the
Gould/Eldredge "punctuated equilibrium" of fossil
successions. And it was Dov Ospovat who demonstrated
-- something Michael Shermer et al. should consider --
that Darwin/Owen/et al. were merely substituting
names: "natural selection" became a "buzz-word" for
"design". And although vilified by Thomas Huxley et
al., Owen, I think, was the better comparative
anatomist and paleontologist than Darwin, who, after
all, feverishly rewrote his own folios in May 1858
when having received Alfred Russel Wallace's
manuscript. (There is not a shred of documentary
evidence that, in 1858, Darwin had reached the level
of insight reflected in ARW's manuscript, and Darwin's
folio pages [published in 1975] show Darwin was
carefully, but quickly paraphrasing Wallace.) Adrian
Desmond, Dov Ospovat's close friend, was working on
his own Archetypes & Ancestors when, on 28 September
1980, at the age of 33, Dov Ospovat died...like
Stephen Gould, too soon when so much remained to be
investigated.
My query for those on the DML who read: does anyone
know the whereabouts of Dov Ospovat's family?

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