Haeckel 2
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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (German: [ɛʁnst ˈhɛkl̩]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919[1]) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology,[2] phylum,[3] phylogeny,[4] and Protista.[5]
Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany[6] and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching[7] to support teaching evolution.
Haeckel was also a promoter of scientific racism[8] and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism.[6][9] He was the first person to characterize the Great War the "first" World War which he did already in 1914.
Life
Christmas of 1860
Ernst Haeckel was born on 16 February 1834, in Potsdam (then part of the Kingdom of Prussia).[10] In 1852 Haeckel completed studies at the Domgymnasium, the cathedral high-school of Merseburg.[11][better ^source needed] He then studied medicine in Berlin and Würzburg, particularly with Albert von Kölliker, Franz Leydig, Rudolf Virchow (with whom he later worked briefly as assistant), and with the anatomist-physiologist Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858).[11] Together with Hermann Steudner he attended botany lectures in Würzburg. In 1857 Haeckel attained a doctorate in medicine, and afterwards he received the license to practice medicine. The occupation of physician appeared less worthwhile to Haeckel after contact with suffering patients.[11]
He studied under Karl Gegenbaur at the University of Jena for three years, earning a habilitation in comparative anatomy in 1861, before becoming a professor of zoology at the University at Jena, where he remained for 47 years, from 1862 to 1909. Between 1859 and 1866 Haeckel worked on many phyla, such as radiolarians, poriferans (sponges) and annelids (segmented worms).[12] During a trip to the Mediterranean, Haeckel named nearly 150 new species of radiolarians.[12]
In 1864, his first wife, Anna Sethe, died. Haeckel dedicated some species of jellyfish that he found beautiful (such as Desmonema annasethe) to her.[13] [14]
From 1866 to 1867 Haeckel made an extended journey to the Canary Islands with Hermann Fol. On 17 October 1866 he arrived in London. Over the next few days he met Charles Lyell, and visited Thomas Huxley and family at their home.
On 21 October he visited Charles Darwin at Down House in Kent.[15] In 1867 he married Agnes Huschke. Their son Walter was born in 1868, their daughters Elizabeth in 1871 and Emma in 1873.[11] In 1869 he traveled as a researcher to Norway, in 1871 to Croatia (where he lived on the island of Hvar in a monastery),[16] and in 1873 to Egypt, Turkey, and Greece.[11] In 1907 he had a museum built in Jena to teach the public about evolution. Haeckel retired from teaching in 1909, and in 1910 he withdrew from the Evangelical Church of Prussia.[11]
In later life
On the occasion of his 80th birthday celebration he was presented with a two-volume work entitled Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken (What We Owe to Ernst Haeckel), edited at the request of the German Monistenbund by Heinrich Schmidt of Jena.[17][18]
Haeckel's wife, Agnes, died in 1915, and he became substantially frailer, breaking his leg and arm.[11] He sold his "Villa Medusa" in Jena in 1918 to the Carl Zeiss foundation, which preserved his library.[11] Haeckel died on 9 August 1919.[19]
Haeckel became the most famous proponent of Monism in Germany.[20]
Politics
Haeckel's affinity for the German Romantic movement, coupled with his acceptance of a form of Lamarckism, influenced his political beliefs. Rather than being a strict Darwinian, Haeckel believed that the characteristics of an organism were acquired through interactions with the environment and that ontogeny reflected phylogeny. He saw the social sciences as instances of "applied biology", and that phrase was picked up and used for Nazi propaganda.[12]
In 1906 Haeckel belonged to the founders of the Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund), which took a stance against philosophical materialism and promote a "natural Weltanschauung".[21] This organization lasted until 1933 and included such notable members as Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg von Arco (1869–1940), Helene Stöcker and Walter Arthur Berendsohn.[22] He was the first person to use the term "first world war" about World War I.[23]
However, Haeckel's books were banned by the Nazi Party, which refused Monism and Haeckel's freedom of thought. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that Haeckel had often overtly recognized the great contribution of educated Jews to the German culture.[24]
Research
Sea anemones from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of Nature) of 1904
Haeckel was a zoologist, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. Although Haeckel's ideas are important to the history of evolutionary theory, and although he was a competent invertebrate anatomist most famous for his work on radiolaria, many speculative concepts that he championed are now considered incorrect. For example, Haeckel described and named hypothetical ancestral microorganisms that have never been found.[25]
He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed the kingdom Protista[11] in 1866. His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature). Haeckel did not support natural selection, rather believing in Lamarckism.[26]
Embryology theories of Ernst Haeckel and Karl Ernst von Baer compared
Haeckel advanced a version of the earlier recapitulation theory previously set out by Étienne Serres in the 1820s and supported by followers of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire including Robert Edmond Grant.[27] It proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up by Haeckel in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". His concept of recapitulation has been refuted in the form he gave it (now called "strong recapitulation"), in favour of the ideas first advanced by Karl Ernst von Baer.
The strong recapitulation hypothesis views ontogeny as repeating forms of adult ancestors, while weak recapitulation means that what is repeated (and built upon) is the ancestral embryonic development process.[28] Haeckel supported the theory with embryo drawings that have since been shown to be oversimplified and in part inaccurate, and the theory is now considered an oversimplification of quite complicated relationships, however comparison of embryos[6] remains a powerful way to demonstrate that all animals are related. Haeckel introduced the concept of heterochrony, the change in timing of embryonic development over the course of evolution.[29][30]
Haeckel (left) with Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, his assistant, in the Canaries, 1866
Haeckel was a flamboyant figure, who sometimes took great, non-scientific leaps from available evidence. For example, at the time when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), Haeckel postulated that evidence of human evolution would be found in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). At that time, no remains of human ancestors had yet been identified. He described these theoretical remains in great detail and even named the as-yet unfound species, Pithecanthropus alalus, and instructed his students such as Richard and Oskar Hertwig to go and find it.[citation needed]
One student did find some remains: a Dutchman named Eugène Dubois searched the East Indies from 1887 to 1895, discovering the remains of Java Man in 1891, consisting of a skullcap, thighbone, and a few teeth. These remains are among the oldest hominid remains ever found. Dubois classified Java Man with Haeckel's Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus. Some scientists of the day suggested[31] Dubois' Java Man as a potential intermediate form between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other great apes. The current consensus of anthropologists is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus (possibly Homo ergaster), rather than the Asian populations exemplified by Java Man and Peking Man. (Ironically, a new human species, Homo floresiensis, a dwarf human type, has recently been discovered in the island of Flores).[32]
Polygenism and racial theory
The creationist polygenism of Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassiz, which presented human races as separately created species, was rejected by Charles Darwin, who argued for the monogenesis of the human species and the African origin of modern humans. In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen (German: proto-humans), which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved – in a kind of Lamarckian use-inheritance – as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. From this, Haeckel drew the implication that languages with the most potential yield the human races with the most potential, led by the Semitic and Indo-Germanic groups, with Berber, Jewish, Greco-Roman and Germanic varieties to the fore.[33] As Haeckel stated:[34]
We must mention here one of the most important results of the comparative study of languages, which for the Stammbaum of the species of men is of the highest significance, namely that human languages probably had a multiple or polyphyletic origin. Human language as such probably developed only after the species of speechless Urmenschen or Affenmenschen (German: ape-men) had split into several species or kinds. With each of these human species, language developed on its own and independently of the others. At least this is the view of Schleicher, one of the foremost authorities on this subject. ... If one views the origin of the branches of language as the special and principal act of becoming human, and the species of humankind as distinguished according to their language stem, then one can say that the different species of men arose independently of one another.
Haeckel's view can be seen as a forerunner of the views of Carleton Coon, who also believed that human races evolved independently and in parallel with each other. These ideas eventually fell from favour.[35]
Haeckel also applied the hypothesis of polygenism to the modern diversity of human groups. He became a key figure in social darwinism and leading proponent of scientific racism, stating for instance:[36]
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man (Homo Mediterraneus), has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all the races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect. It is generally called the Caucasian race, but as, among all the varieties of the species, the Caucasian branch is the least important, we prefer the much more suitable appellation proposed by Friedrich Müller, namely, that of Mediterranese. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called "Universal History", first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. ... This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilisation which seems to raise men above the rest of nature.
Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.[37] In his view, 'Negroes' were savages and Whites were the most civilised: for instance, he claimed that '[t]he Negro' had stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race, which, he argued, was evidence of their being less evolved, and which led him to compare them to '"four-handed" Apes'.[38]
In his Ontogeny and Phylogeny Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "[Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a 'just' state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others ... all contributed to the rise of Nazism."[39]
In his introduction to the Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book, [The Myth of the Twentieth Century], Peter Peel affirms that Rosenberg had indeed read Haeckel.[40]
In the same line of thought, historian Daniel Gasman states that Haeckel's ideology stimulated the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France.[41]
However, Robert J. Richards notes: "Haeckel, on his travels to Ceylon and Indonesia, often formed closer and more intimate relations with natives, even members of the untouchable classes, than with the European colonials." and says the Nazis rejected Haeckel, since he opposed antisemitism, while supporting ideas they disliked (for instance atheism, feminism, internationalism, pacifism etc.).[42]
Asia hypothesis
Haeckel in Ceylon, 1882
Haeckel claimed the origin of humanity was to be found in Asia: he believed that Hindustan (Indian subcontinent) was the actual location where the first humans had evolved. Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin's hypothesis of Africa.[43][44]
Haeckel later claimed that the missing link was to be found on the lost continent of Lemuria located in the Indian Ocean. He believed that Lemuria was the home of the first humans and that Asia was the home of many of the earliest primates; he thus supported that Asia was the cradle of hominid evolution. Haeckel also claimed that Lemuria connected Asia and Africa, which allowed the migration of humans to the rest of the world.[45][46]
In Haeckel's book The History of Creation (1884) he included migration routes which he thought the first humans had used outside of Lemuria.[47]
Religious views
In Monism as Connecting Religion and Science (1892), he argued in favor of monism as the view most compatible with the current scientific understanding of the natural world. His perspective of monism was pantheistic and impersonal.
The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognizes the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere.[48]
Embryology and recapitulation theory
Further information: Recapitulation theory
Illustrations of dog and human embryos, looking almost identical at 4 weeks then differing at 6 weeks, shown above a 6-week turtle embryo and 8-day hen embryo, presented by Haeckel in 1868 as convincing proof of evolution. The pictures of the earliest embryonic stages are now considered inaccurate.[49]
When Haeckel was a student in the 1850s he showed great interest in embryology, attending the rather unpopular lectures twice and in his notes sketched the visual aids: textbooks had few illustrations, and large format plates were used to show students how to see the tiny forms under a reflecting microscope, with the translucent tissues seen against a black background. Developmental series were used to show stages within a species, but inconsistent views and stages made it even more difficult to compare different species. It was agreed by all European evolutionists that all vertebrates looked very similar at an early stage, in what was thought of as a common ideal type, but there was a continuing debate from the 1820s between the Romantic recapitulation theory that human embryos developed through stages of the forms of all the major groups of adult animals, literally manifesting a sequence of organisms on a linear chain of being, and Karl Ernst von Baer's opposing view, stated in von Baer's laws of embryology, that the early general forms diverged into four major groups of specialised forms without ever resembling the adult of another species, showing affinity to an archetype but no relation to other types or any transmutation of species.
By the time Haeckel was teaching he was able to use a textbook with woodcut illustrations written by his own teacher Albert von Kölliker, which purported to explain human development while also using other mammalian embryos to claim a coherent sequence. Despite the significance to ideas of transformism, this was not really polite enough for the new popular science writing, and was a matter for medical institutions and for experts who could make their own comparisons.[50]: 264–267 [51]
Darwin, Naturphilosophie and Lamarck
Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which made a powerful impression on Haeckel when he read it in 1864, was very cautious about the possibility of ever reconstructing the history of life, but did include a section reinterpreting von Baer's embryology and revolutionising the field of study, concluding that "Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals." It mentioned von Baer's 1828 anecdote (misattributing it to Louis Agassiz) that at an early stage embryos were so similar that it could be impossible to tell whether an unlabelled specimen was of a mammal, a bird, or of a reptile, and Darwin's own research using embryonic stages of barnacles to show that they are crustaceans, while cautioning against the idea that one organism or embryonic stage is "higher" or "lower", or more or less evolved.[52]
Haeckel disregarded such caution, and in a year wrote his massive and ambitious Generelle Morphologie, published in 1866, presenting a revolutionary new synthesis of Darwin's ideas with the German tradition of Naturphilosophie going back to Goethe and with the progressive evolutionism of Lamarck in what he called Darwinismus. He used morphology to reconstruct the evolutionary history of life, in the absence of fossil evidence using embryology as evidence of ancestral relationships. He invented new terms, including ontogeny and phylogeny, to present his evolutionised recapitulation theory that "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny". The two massive volumes sold poorly, and were heavy going: with his limited understanding of German, Darwin found them impossible to read. Haeckel's publisher turned down a proposal for a "strictly scholarly and objective" second edition.[50]: 269–270
Embryological drawings
Haeckel's tree of life
Haeckel's aim was a reformed morphology with evolution as the organising principle of a cosmic synthesis unifying science, religion, and art. He was giving successful "popular lectures" on his ideas to students and townspeople in Jena, in an approach pioneered by his teacher Rudolf Virchow. To meet his publisher's need for a popular work he used a student's transcript of his lectures as the basis of his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte of 1868, presenting a comprehensive presentation of evolution. In the Spring of that year he drew figures for the book, synthesising his views of specimens in Jena and published pictures to represent types. After publication he told a colleague that the images "are completely exact, partly copied from nature, partly assembled from all illustrations of these early stages that have hitherto become known".
There were various styles of embryological drawings at that time, ranging from more schematic representations to "naturalistic" illustrations of specific specimens. Haeckel believed privately that his figures were both exact and synthetic, and in public asserted that they were schematic like most figures used in teaching. The images were reworked to match in size and orientation, and though displaying Haeckel's own views of essential features, they support von Baer's concept that vertebrate embryos begin similarly and then diverge. Relating different images on a grid conveyed a powerful evolutionary message. As a book for the general public, it followed the common practice of not citing sources.[50]: 270–274
...
The revised 1870 second edition of 1,500 copies attracted more attention, being quickly followed by further revised editions with larger print runs as the book became a prominent part of the optimistic, nationalist, anticlerical "culture of progress" in Otto von Bismarck's new German Empire. The similarity of early vertebrate embryos became common knowledge, and the illustrations were praised by experts such as Michael Foster of the University of Cambridge. In the introduction to his 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin gave particular praise to Haeckel, writing that if Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte "had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it".
The first chapter included an illustration: "As some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo, I have given one of man and another of a dog, at about the same early stage of development, carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy" with a footnote citing the sources and noting that "Häckel has also given analogous drawings in his Schöpfungsgeschichte." The fifth edition of Haeckel's book appeared in 1874, with its frontispiece a heroic portrait of Haeckel himself, replacing the previous controversial image of the heads of apes and humans.[50]: 285–288 [53]
1874 illustration from Anthropogenie showing "very early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of embryos of fish (F), salamander (A), turtle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M)
Controversy
Later in 1874, Haeckel's simplified embryology textbook Anthropogenie made the subject into a battleground over Darwinism aligned with Bismarck's Kulturkampf ("culture struggle") against the Catholic Church. Haeckel took particular care over the illustrations, changing to the leading zoological publisher Wilhelm Engelmann of Leipzig and obtaining from them use of illustrations from their other textbooks as well as preparing his own drawings including a dramatic double page illustration showing "early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of 8 different vertebrates.
Though Haeckel's views had attracted continuing controversy, there had been little dispute about the embryos and he had many expert supporters, but Wilhelm His revived the earlier criticisms and introduced new attacks on the 1874 illustrations.[54] Others joined in: both expert anatomists and Catholic priests and supporters were politically opposed to Haeckel's views.[50]: 288–296
While it has been widely claimed that Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, there does not appear to be an independently verifiable source for this claim.[55] Recent analyses (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) have found that some of the criticisms of Haeckel's embryo drawings were legitimate, but others were unfounded.[56][57] There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and Wilhelm His.[58] Robert J. Richards, in a paper published in 2008, defends the case for Haeckel, shedding doubt against the fraud accusations based on the material used for comparison with what Haeckel could access at the time.[59]
Awards and honors
Haeckel was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1885.[60] He was awarded the title of Excellency by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907[61] and the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908. In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft (4,090 m) summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honour, as is another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m (9,649 ft) summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Haeckel.[62][citation needed]
In Jena he is remembered with a monument at Herrenberg (erected in 1969),[63] an exhibition at Ernst-Haeckel-Haus,[64] and at the Jena Phyletic Museum, which continues to teach about evolution and share his work to this day.[65]
The ratfish, Harriotta haeckeli is named in his honor.[66]
The research vessel Ernst Haeckel is named in his honor.[67]
In 1981, a botanical journal called Ernstia was started being published in the city of Maracay, Venezuela.[68]
In 2013, Ernstia, a genus of calcareous sponges in the family Clathrinidae. The genus was erected to contain five species previously assigned to Clathrina. The genus name honors Ernst Haeckel for his contributions towards sponge taxonomy and phylogeny.[69][70]
Publications
Kunstformen – plate 72: Muscinae
Kunstformen – plate 96: Chaetopoda
Medusa of Aeginura grimaldii (bottom view)
Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species had immense popular influence, but although its sales exceeded its publisher's hopes it was a technical book rather than a work of popular science: long, difficult and with few illustrations. One of Haeckel's books did a great deal to explain his version of "Darwinism" to the world. It was a bestselling, provocatively illustrated book in German, titled Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, published in Berlin in 1868, and translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876. Until 1909, eleven editions had appeared, as well as 25 translations into other languages. The Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte cemented Haeckel's reputation as one of Germany's most forceful popularizers of science. His Welträthsel were reprinted ten times after the book's first publication in 1899; ultimately, over 400,000 copies were sold.[71]
Haeckel argued that human evolution consisted of precisely 22 phases, the 21st – the "missing link" – being a halfway step between apes and humans. He even formally named this missing link Pithecanthropus alalus, translated as "ape man without speech".[72]
Haeckel's literary output was extensive, including many books, scientific papers, and illustrations.[73]...
Knowledge Web Content (see main node)
NAME: Haeckel, Ernst
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Coined: “Ecology.” Inspired Nazis.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: in full, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 16 February 1834, at Potsdam, Prussia [Germany]
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 9 August 1919, in Jena, Germany. Aged 85
DISCIPLINE: Zoologist
FIELD: Zoology
LANGUAGE: German
PARENTS: Carl Haeckel (1781-1871) and Charlotte Sethe (1799-1889)
SIBLINGS: Karl (1824-97)
SPOUSE: Anna Sethe (1835-64), married 1862; Agnes Huschke (1842-1915),
married 1867
CHILDREN: None
EDUCATION: Domgymnasium, Merseburg, 1846-52; Universities of Wurzburg and
Vienna, 1852-54; University of Berlin, 1854-58
MAJOR WORK: 'Systematic Philogeny' (1894)
LIFE AND TIMES: At Berlin, Haeckel was taught by the great pathologist <taught by> Virchow* and the equally-famous physiologist and anatomist <taught by> Johannes Muller*, who inspired in him a great interest in zoology and comparative anatomy.
After graduation, with Muller's death in 1858, Haeckel returned to Merseburg and set up a medical practice. During a zoological expedition near Messina, Sicily (1859-60), Haeckel continued Muller's investigations of the one-celled protozoan group Radiolaria and discovered 144 new radiolarian species.
On his return, Haeckel read the German translation of <defender of> Charles Darwin's* 'On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection' (1859), and became an
immediate convert to the theory of evolution.
In 1861, while writing up the results of his Mediterranean expedition, he was appointed Privatdozent (junior unsalaried lecturer) of zoology at the University of Jena, and the following year he became extraordinary (associate) professor of comparative anatomy at the Zoological Institute at Jena.
The same year he published his first monograph, 'Die Radiolarien' (1862), which treated the morphology, systematics and embryology of the radiolarians, and then interpreted his
findings in the light of Darwin's theory.
From 1863, when he publicly championed the then highly-controversial theory of organic evolution at a congress of German naturalists at Stettin, Haeckel became the first German scientific proponent of Darwinism, and was soon lecturing to scientific and lay audiences on the descent theory.
In 1865 Haeckel was appointed full professor, and he remained at Jena until his retirement in 1909, becoming a high-profile academic figure, known for his support of <supporter of> Bismarck*’s Prussian expansion.
Between 1859 and 1866, Haeckel worked on many invetebrate groups, including
radiolarians, poriferans (sponges), and annelids (segmented worms), and these studies led him to publish in 1866 his first work of importance: 'General Morphology of Organisms', which became a classic in the field of Darwinian biology, which he followed two years later with his 'Natural History of Creation', a more populist outline of his evolutionary theory.
Haeckel developed Darwin's notion of evolution (the natural selection of accumulated favourable variations that in time formed new species) further in order to provide a foundation for a science-based world view.
In these works he also first published his famous genealogical tables or "family trees" of relationships within the animal and vegetable kingdoms – for plants, coelenterates, echinoderms, articulates (infusorians, worms, anthropods), mollusks, vertebrates, and mammals - and reconstructed the human ancestral tree in order to demonstrate man's descent from the lower animals.
During the late 1860s and early 1870s Haeckel continued to try to find out, by studying the development of an individual, what its adult ancestors were like. (This concept, which Haeckel had revived, had already been disproved long before by <theory disproved by> Karl von Baer*, who had shown that embryos resemble the embryos only and not the adults of other species).
Haeckel viewed adult organisms as the embryonic stages of more advanced organisms - i.e. development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species, and thus the creation of new phyla mark steps towards the completion of human development. According to such a view, humans evolved when the embryo of the highest ape added on a new stage.
In Haeckel elaborated these ideas on the evolution of man in works widely read in his day, especially in the best-selling: 'Riddle of the Universe' (1899). In these works he tried to apply Darwin's doctrine of evolution to philosophy and religion, believing that just as the higher animals had evolved from the simpler forms of life, so the highest human faculties have evolved from the soul of the animals.
Haeckel produced his great work: 'Systematic Philogeny' in 1894. During the early
20th century, his ideas - particularly his "biogenetic law" - were adapted
uncritically by many of the new social sciences.
Early cultural anthropologists adopted his view that other cultures were "primitive" in the embryological sense, in that their development has stopped short of Western culture. Some, building on <work related to> de Gobineau's* 'Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races' (1853-55) and using Haeckel's theories as a basis, ordered the different races in a linear fashion from top to bottom.
Haeckel himself stated (1902) that there was a progression of rationality from the primitive to the greatest thinkers, that the races differed in this ability, and that the difference in rationality between the "savage races" and Europeans was greater than that
between the dogs and savages, and that this difference demanded that the savage races be subjugated to the Europeans.
These ideas gave scientific validity to the racial prejudices in Europe which culminated in the genocidal biopolicy of the Third Reich. <influenced> Hitler* paraphrased many of Haeckel's central statements in his: 'Mein Kampf' (1925).
At Jena, Haeckel established the Monist League (1906), dedicated to the dissemination of Haeckel's thought, continued to write and lecture into old age, and established important natural history collections, founding both the Phyletic Museum in Jena and the Ernst Haeckel Haus, which contains his books and archives, and in which many mementos of his life and work are preserved.
ASSESSMENT: Haeckel developed ideas that are still accepted, including his view that
the origin of life lies in the chemical and physical factors of the environment, such as sunlight, oxygen, water and methane. His method of representing evolutionary history by means of tree-like diagrams is still used today by animals systematists to show degrees of
relationship.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He criticized the work of <criticized work of> Hensen* and <work related to> Ostwald*
He was influenced by the primeval slime theory of <influenced by slime theory of>Oken*
He was influenced by the Social Darwinism theories of Herbert <influenced by ideas of>Spencer*
ONELINER: Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist
BIBLIOGRAPHY: DSB, EB
Gasman, Daniel, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social
Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, 1976