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Ernst Haeckel
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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919),
also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Artforms of Nature").
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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919),
also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Artforms of Nature"). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.
In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as is another Mount Haeckel, a summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Häckel.
The Ernst Haeckel house ("Villa Medusa") in Jena, Germany contains a historic library.
Life
Ernst Haeckel was born on February 16, 1834, in Potsdam (then part of Prussia).
In 1852, Haeckel completed studies at Cathedral High School (Domgymnasium) of Merseburg.
He then studied medicine in Berlin, particularly with Albert von Kölliker, Franz Leydig, Rudolf Virchow (with whom he later worked briefly as assistant), and with anatomist-physiologist Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858).
In 1857, Haeckel attained a doctorate in medicine (M.D.), and afterwards he received a license to practice medicine. The occupation of physician appeared less worthwhile to Haeckel, after contact with suffering patients.
Haeckel studied under Carl Gegenbaur at the University of Jena for three years, earning a doctorate in zoology, before becoming a professor of comparative anatomy at the University of Jena, where he remained 47 years, from 1862 to 1909. Between 1859 and 1866, Haeckel worked on many invertebrate groups, including radiolarians, poriferans (sponges) and annelids (segmented worms). During a trip to the Mediterranean, Haeckel named nearly 150 new species of radiolarians.
Haeckel named thousands of new species from 1859 to 1887.
From 1866 to 1867, Haeckel made an extended journey to the Canary Islands and during this period, met with Charles Darwin, in 1866 at Down House in Kent, Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell. In 1867, he married Agnes Huschke. Their son Walter was born in 1868, their daughters Elizabeth in 1871 and Emma in 1873. In 1869, he traveled as a researcher to Norway, in 1871 to Dalmatia, and in 1873 to Egypt, Turkey, and to Greece. Haeckel retired from teaching in 1909, and in 1910 he withdrew from the Evangelical church.
Haeckel's wife, Agnes, died in 1915, and Ernst Haeckel became substantially more frail, with a broken leg (thigh) and broken arm. He sold the mansion Medusa ("Villa Medusa") in 1918 to the Carl Zeiss foundation. Ernst Haeckel died on August 9, 1919.
Politics
Haeckel's political beliefs were influenced by his affinity for the German Romantic movement coupled with his acceptance of a form of Lamarckism. Rather than being a strict Darwinian, Haeckel believed that racial characteristics were acquired through interactions with the environment and that phylogeny directly followed ontogeny. He believed the social sciences to be instances of "applied biology". Most of these arguments have been shown to be over-generalizations at best and flatly incorrect at worst in modern biology and social studies.
"First World War"
Haeckel was the first person known to use the term "First World War". Shortly after the start of the war Haeckel wrote:
Indianapolis Star, September 20, 1914
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1931, with the beginning realization that another global war might be possible, that there is any other recorded use of the term "First World War".
Research
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 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.
He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including "phylum", "phylogeny", "ecology" ("oekologie"), and proposed the kingdom Protista 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 a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism).
Haeckel advanced a version of the earlier "recapitulation theory", previously set out by Étienne Serres in the 1820s and supported by followers of Geoffroy including Robert Edmond Grant, which 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 disputed in the form he gave it (now called "strong recapitulation"). "Strong" recapitulation hypothesis views ontogeny as repeating forms of the ancestors, while "weak" recapitulation means that what is repeated (and built upon) is the ancestral embryonic development process. He 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. Haeckel introduced the concept of "heterochrony", which is the change in timing of embryonic development over the course of evolution.
Haeckel was a flamboyant figure. He sometimes took great (and non-scientific) leaps from available evidence. For example, at the time that Darwin first published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), no remains of human ancestors had yet been found. Haeckel postulated that evidence of human evolution would be found in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and described these theoretical remains in great detail. He even named the as-of-yet unfound species, Pithecanthropus alalus, and charged his students to go find it. (Richard and Oskar Hertwig were two of Haeckel's many important students.)
One student did find the remains: a young Dutchman named Eugene Dubois went to the East Indies and dug up the remains of Java Man, the first human ancestral remains ever found. These remains originally carried Haeckel's Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus.
Polygenism and racism
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 recent 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, 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 formed human species with the most potential, led by the Semitic and Indo-Germanic groups, with Berber, Jewish, Greco-Roman and Germanic varieties to the fore. As Haeckel stated:
- 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 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 multi-regional hypothesis, which until the 1990s remained in contention with developments of Darwin's hypothesis of a recent African origin of modern humans. The multiregional view then fell from favour, and Darwin's view has more recently been validated by the decipherment of the human genome.
Haeckel did not hesitate to apply the hypothesis of polygenism to the diversity of human groups in the most heavy-handed way, becoming a leading apologist of scientific racism, stating for instance:
- 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 civilization which seems to raise men above the rest of nature.
"Infamous" embryo drawings
It has been claimed (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) that some of Haeckel's embryo drawings of 1874 were fabricated.
There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud but did admit one error which he corrected. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and Wilhelm His, Sr..
The controversy involves several different issues (see more details at: recapitulation theory).
Some creationists have claimed that Darwin relied on Haeckel's embryo drawings as proof of evolution
to support their argument that Darwin's theory is therefore illegitimate and possibly fraudulent. This claim ignores the fact that Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and The Descent of Man in 1871, whereas Haeckel's embryo drawings did not appear until 1874 (8 species). In The Descent of Man Darwin used only two embryo drawings, neither taken from Haeckel.
Awards
He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908.
Publications
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. It was frequently reprinted until 1926.
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." (The missing link was what the Dutchman Eugène Dubois, discoverer of Homo erectus, would later resolve to find.)
Haeckel's entire literary output was extensive, working as a professor at the University of Jena for 47 years, and even at the time of the celebration of his 60th birthday at Jena in 1894, Haeckel had produced 42 works with nearly 13,000 pages, besides numerous scientific memoirs and illustrations.
Haeckel's monographs include:
- Radiolaria (1862)
- Siphonophora (1869)
- Monera (1870)
- Calcareous Sponges (1872)
As well as several Challenger reports:
- Deep-Sea Medusae (1881)
- Siphonophora (1888)
- Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889)
- Radiolaria (1887) — illustrated with 140 plates and enumerating over four thousand (4000) new species.
Among his many books, Ernst Haeckel wrote:
- General Morphology (1866)
- Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868) — in English (1876; 6th ed.: New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1914, 2 volumes)
- Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1877), in English, Freedom in Science and Teaching, a reply to a speech in which Virchow objected to the teaching of evolution in schools, on the grounds that evolution was an unproven hypothesis.
- Die systematische Phylogenie (1894) — "Systematic Phylogeny", which has been considered as his best book
- Anthropogenie (1874, 5th and enlarged edition 1903) — dealing with the evolution of man
- Die Welträthsel (1895–1899), also spelled Die Welträtsel ("world-riddle") — in English The Riddle of the Universe, 1901
- Über unsere gegenwärtige Kenntnis vom Ursprung des Menschen (1898) — translated into English as The Last Link, 1808
- Der Kampf um den Entwickelungsgedanken (1905) — English version, Last Words on Evolution, 1906
- Die Lebenswunder (1904) — English "Wonder of Life", a supplement to the Riddle of the Universe
Books of travel:
- Indische Reisebriefe (1882) — "Travel notes of India"
- Aus Insulinde: Malayische Reisebriefe (1901) — "Travel notes of Malaysia"), the fruits of journeys to Ceylon and to Java
- Kunstformen der Natur (1904) — Artforms of Nature, with plates representing detailed marine animal forms
- Wanderbilder (1905) — "Travel Images", with reproductions of his oil-paintings and water-color landscapes.
See also
Further reading
- Di Gregorio, Mario A. From here to eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005, ISBN 3525569726
- Haeckel, Ernst, Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Atlas of 1862, Prestel Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-7913-3327-5.
- Richardson, Michael K., "Haeckel, embryos, and evolution," Science Vol. 280, no. 5366 (May 15, 1998) p. 983, 985–986.
External links
- — An exhibition of material on Haeckel, including background on many Kunstformen der Natur plates
- — Ernst Haeckel biography
- A slide-show essay about Ernst Haeckel.
- Kunstformen der Natur, Wikimedia Commons: over 100 detailed animal drawings.
- (from Stuebers Online Library)
- — An animated documentary film on the life and work of Ernst Haeckel
- and Ernst Haeckel Museum in Jena
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