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Ernst HaeckelErnst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 - August 8, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was a German biologist and philosopher who popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany. Haeckel was a physician, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including "phylum" and "ecology." 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 advanced the "recapitulation theory" which proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". He supported the theory with embryo drawings that have been shown to be inaccurate and the theory has been largely discred.
Haeckel was also known for his "biogenic theory", in which he suggested that the development of races paralleled the development of individuals. He advocated the idea that "primitive" races were in their infancies and needed the "supervision" and "protection" of more "mature" societies. He extrapolated a new religion or philosophy called Monism from evolutionary science. In Monism, all economics, politics, and ethics are reduced to "applied biology." His writings and lectures on Monism provided scientific (or quasi-scientific) justifications for racism, nationalism and social darwinism. Monism thus became the de facto religion of Nazi Germany.
Haeckel was a flamboyant figure whose popularity with the public was substantially greater than it was with his scientific peers. 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, 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.
Remarkably, one of them did so — 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.)
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, most of the speculative concepts that he championed are now seen as incorrect. For example, Haeckel described and named hypothetical ancestral micro-organisms that have not been found as of date. His concept of recapitulation called "strong recapitulation" has been disputed. Haeckel did not support Darwin's "survival of the fittest", rather believing in a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Richard and Oskar Hertwig were Haeckel´s most important students.
Mount Haeckel is a 4090 m (13,418') summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, named in honor of Ernst Haeckel. So is the asteroid 12323 Häckel.
Sources
Richard Milner, "The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for Its Origins", Henry Holt, 1993
External links
- Ernst Haeckel biography
- Ernst Haeckel – Evolution's controversial artist. A slide-show essay about Ernst Haeckel.
- Kunstformen der natur, scanned (from 1 Stuebers Online Library)
- PNG alpha-transparencies of Haeckel's "Kustformen der natur"
Books
- Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Atlas of 1862, by Ernst Haeckel, Prestel Verlag, 2005 ISBN 3791333275