John William Draper (May 5, 1811 – January 4, 1882) was an English scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer.

[7] Following his father's death in July 1831, John William's mother was urged to move with her children to the US state of Virginia.

[8] In 1832, the family settled in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 7 miles (11 km) east of Christiansville (now Chase City).

His sister Dorothy Catherine Draper provided finances through teaching drawing and painting for his medical education.

[9] In 1837, Draper accepted an appointment to be head of chemistry in a proposed medical school at New York University, but sufficient funds were not available to go ahead with the project.

Once the details of the process arrived in America in late September 1839, Draper, now a professor at New York University, captured landscape photographs.

He collaborated with Samuel Morse and in spring 1840 operated a daguerreotype studio, one of the earliest of its kind, in a building on the roof of the New York University.

[18][19] On Saturday 30 May the 1860 Oxford evolution debate featured Draper's lecture on his paper "On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law."

Draper's presentation was an early example of applying a Darwinian metaphor of adaptation and environment to social and political studies, but was thought to be long and boring.

The hall was crowded to hear Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's views on Charles Darwin's recent publication of On the Origin of Species, and the occasion was a historically significant part of the reaction to Darwin's theory due to reports of Thomas Henry Huxley's response to Wilberforce.

His book examined the relationship between religion and science, dismissing ideas of harmony and presenting the history of science as "not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on the one side, and the compression arising from traditional faith and human interests on the other."

His argument, aimed at his fellow Protestants, employed anti-Catholic rhetoric, but also said that these "two rival divisions of the Christian church" were "in accord on one point: to tolerate no science except such as they considered agreeable to the Scriptures", and both were liable to "theological odium".

[1] Professor Ronald Numbers has pointed to Draper's book as a source of popular misconceptions about historical conflict between science and religion, saying that it was "less of a dispassionate history, which it wasn't, than a screed against Roman Catholics" motivated by personal animus at the behavior of his sister, a Catholic nun, regarding the death of his son.