Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke (born 22 January 1944 in Rotterdam) is a Dutch historian of science and biographer, who began his academic career as a marine geologist.

Early in his studies, Rupke was a Christian and proponent of Flood geology,[2] 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.

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.