Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Ralph Vary Chamberlin
Chamberlin circa 1905
Born	(1879-01-03)January 3, 1879 Salt Lake City, Utah
Died	October 31, 1967(1967-10-31) (aged 88) Salt Lake City, Utah
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Cornell University University of Utah
Known for	Spider and myriapod taxonomy, BYU modernism controversy
Spouses	Daisy Ferguson ​ ​ (m. 1899; div. 1910)​ Edith Simons ​ ​ (m. 1922; died 1965)​
Children	10
Scientific career
Fields	Invertebrate zoology Ethnography History
Institutions	University of Utah Museum of Comparative Zoology Brigham Young University
Thesis	North American Spiders of the Family Lycosidae (1905)
Doctoral advisor	John Henry Comstock
Notable students	Willis J. Gertsch Wilton Ivie Stephen D. Durrant William H. Behle

Ralph Vary Chamberlin^[a] (January 3, 1879 – October 31, 1967) was an American biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a faculty member of the University of Utah for over 25 years, where he helped establish the School of Medicine and served as its first dean, and later became head of the zoology department. He also taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for over a decade at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he described species from around the world.

Chamberlin was a prolific taxonomist who named over 4,000 new animal species in over 400 scientific publications. He specialized in arachnids (spiders, scorpions, and relatives) and myriapods (centipedes, millipedes, and relatives), ranking among the most prolific arachnologists and myriapodologists in history. He described over 1,400 species of spiders, 1,000 species of millipedes, and the majority of North American centipedes, although the quantity of his output was not always matched with quality, leaving a mixed legacy to his successors. He also did pioneering ethnobiological studies with the Goshute and other indigenous people of the Great Basin, cataloging indigenous names and cultural uses of plants and animals. Chamberlin was celebrated by his colleagues at the University of Utah, however he was disliked among some arachnologists, including some of his former students. After retirement he continued to write, publishing on the history of education in his home state, especially that of the University of Utah.

Chamberlin was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In the early twentieth century, Chamberlin was among a quartet of popular Mormon professors at Brigham Young University whose teaching of evolution and biblical criticism resulted in a 1911 controversy among University and Church officials, eventually resulting in the resignation of him and two other professors despite widespread support from the student body, an event described as Mormonism's "first brush with modernism".^[3]

Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).