Ernst Haeckel

Whether they were intentionally falsified, or drawn poorly by accident is a matter of debate.[8] 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 in Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. He also coined the "Biogenetic Law". Haeckel promoted scientific racism[10] and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism.[11] He was the first person to characterize the Great War as the "first" World War, which he did as early as 1914.

Ernst Haeckel studied at Frederick William University Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Training under Albert von Kölliker, Franz von Leydig and Rudolf Virchow is recorded. Oscar Hertwig, Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay and Heinrich Höhr are recorded as having studied under Ernst Haeckel. The recorded working language is German and Latin. The field of work recorded is common descent. Employment is recorded with University of Jena. Positions recorded include rector of the University of Jena. Distinctions recorded are Darwin Medal, Cothenius Medal, Darwin–Wallace Medal and Linnean Medal.

• Name — Ernst Haeckel • Birth Name — Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel • Born — 16 February 1834 • Birthplace — Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia • Died — 9 August 1919 • Place of death — Jena, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Germany • Workplaces — University of Jena • Spouse — Anna Sethe, Agnes Huschke • Education — * University of Berlin • University of Würzburg • University of Jena • Author Abbrev Zoo — Haeckel • Author Abbrev Bot — Haeckel • Awards — * Linnean Medal (1894) • Darwin–Wallace Medal (Silver, 1908) • Citizenship — German Empire • Fields — * Zoology • Natural History • Eugenics • Philosophy • Marine Biology • Academic Advisors — Johannes Peter Müller • Known for — Recapitulation theory • Works — Kunstformen der Natur

• Illustration — Ernst Haeckel, Christmas of 1860, at the age of 26. Ernst Haeckel was born on 16 February 1834, in Potsdam (then part of the Kingdom of Prussia). In 1852, Haeckel completed studies at the Domgymnasium, the cathedral high-school of Merseburg.[13] 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). 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.

Haeckel studied under Carl Gegenbaur at the University of Jena for three years. In 1861 he earned a habilitation in comparative anatomy and became a professor of zoology at the University of 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). During a trip to the Mediterranean, Haeckel named nearly 700 new species of radiolarians. 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.[14] 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 Croatia (where he lived on the island of Hvar in a monastery),[15] and in 1873 to Egypt, Turkey, and Greece. 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. • Illustration — Ernst Haeckel 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.[16]

In 1864, his first wife, Anna Sethe, died. Haeckel dedicated some species of jellyfish that he found beautiful (such as Desmonema annasethe) to her.[18][19] Haeckel's second wife, Agnes, died in 1915, and he became substantially frailer, breaking his leg and arm. He sold his "Villa Medusa" in Jena in 1918 to the Carl Zeiss foundation, which preserved his library. Haeckel died on 9 August 1919.[20]

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.[21] Haeckel became the most famous proponent of monism in Germany.[22] In 1906 Haeckel belonged to the founders of the Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund), which took a stance against philosophical materialism promoting a "natural Weltanschauung".[23] This organization lasted until 1933 and included such notable members as Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg von Arco (1869–1940), Helene Stöcker and Walter Arthur Berendsohn.[24]

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.[25] He was the first person to use the term "first world war" about World War I.[26] 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.[27]

• Illustration — Sea anemones from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms in 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.[28] He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also 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 in nature). Haeckel did not support natural selection, rather believing in Lamarckism.[29] • Illustration — 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.[30] It proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up by 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.[31] 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[32] 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.[33][34] • Illustration — Haeckel (left) with Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, his assistant, in the Canaries, 1866 • Illustration — Portrait of two P. alalus, speculative species 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. 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[35] 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).[36]

• Illustration — 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.[49] 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.[51] In Haeckel's book The History of Creation (1884) he included migration routes which he thought the first humans had used outside of Lemuria.[53]

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.[59] Expert anatomists were critical of Haeckel's work. Catholic priests also opposed Haeckel's views. Specifically, Haeckel's critics accused him of manipulating the embryo drawings to make the early stages of different species look more similar. They claimed that the drawings of four-week dog and human embryos had been copied without attribution from other sources, and changed by expanding dog's head and reducing the human head, moving the eye, and exaggerating the size of the human tail. Haeckel himself considered the drawings stylized and illustrative, but his detractors considered them forgery and fraud. 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.[60] 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.[61] 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.[63] 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.[64]

• Radiolaria (1862) • Siphonophora (1869) • Monera (1870) • Calcareous Sponges (1872)

• Deep-Sea Medusae (1881) • Siphonophora (1888) • Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889) • Radiolaria (1887)

Ernst Haeckel recognized psychology as an extension of physiology, advocating monism. Haeckel's biogenetic law influenced G. Stanley Hall, an influential developmental psychologist who served as the first president of the APA and the founder of the American Journal of Psychology. A famous photo comes from a conference that G. Stanley Hall organized in 1909 as the first president of Clark University. Gould (1977) names an influence of the biogenetic law on all from this photo except for Brill and Jones, where Hall is along Gustav Jung, Ferenczi, Brill, Jones, and Freud who was a "devout recapitulationist" (Gould, 1977, p. 156–161). As the influential account Ontogeny and Phylogeny by Stephen J. Gould shows, Haeckelian recapitulationism influenced psychoanalysts like Freud or criminologists like Cesare Lombroso. Based on how quickly developmental stages occur (Heterochrony, paedomorphosis), psychologists like Havelock Ellis (1894) proposed observations about how people with Asian ancestry are closer to "infantile conditions"; more recently, Hans Eysenck (1971) took up the timing of sensory-motor development for classification of people with African ancestry (Gould, 1977, p. 134). While mostly disputed, recapitulationism in psychology still comes up when trying to account for why some fears are easy to learn—appearing semi-innate—like fear of snakes or fear of water due to the threat posed to modern people's ancestors (Gould, 1977, pp. 139–140). Play therapy can be still thought of as functioning partly due to recapitulation.[99]

Ernst Haeckel's popularization of palingenesis made an impact on politicians from both end of the spectrum—from Friedrich Engels's 1876 essay (Gould, 1977, p. 136) and Marxism to palingenetic ultranationalism.[100] For a fuller list of works of and about Haeckel, see his entry in the German Wikisource. Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel was recorded at birth as Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel. His recorded languages were German and Latin. He was the child of Carl Haeckel. He married Anna Sethe and Agnes Huschke. 2 children are recorded: Walter Haeckel and Elisabeth Haeckel. Other recorded relations include Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek.

Ernst Haeckel worked in common descent. He was employed by University of Jena. Recorded position is rector of the University of Jena. He belonged to German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Zoological Society of London, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Ernst Haeckel is recorded as having received Darwin Medal, Cothenius Medal and Darwin–Wallace Medal. Within the Encyclopedia. Connected to 1 other published record in the VALÉORINE Encyclopedia.

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. Haeckel put forward a racist[37] 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 (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. As Haeckel stated:[38] 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.[39] 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:[40] Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.[41] 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'.[42] 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."[43] 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.[44] In the same line of thought, historian Daniel Gasman states that Haeckel's ideology stimulated the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France.[45] However, in 2009 Robert J. Richards noted: "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.).[46] The Jena Declaration, published by the German Zoological Society, rejects the idea of human "races" and distances itself from the racial theories of Ernst Haeckel and other 20th century scientists. It claims that genetic variation between human populations is smaller than within them, demonstrating that the biological concept of "races" is invalid. The statement highlights that there are no specific genes or genetic markers that match with conventional racial categorizations. It also indicates that the idea of "races" is based on racism rather than any scientific factuality.[47][48]

• Illustration — 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.[54] 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.[55][56]

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.[57] 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.

• G enerelle Morphologie der Organismen: allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie. (1866) Berlin (General morphology of organisms: general foundations of form-science, mechanically grounded by the descendance theory reformed by Charles Darwin) • Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868); in English The History of Creation (1876; 6th ed.: New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1914, 2 volumes) • Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1877), in English, Free Science and Free Teaching • Die systematische Phylogenie (1894) – Systematic Phylogeny * • Die Welträtsel (1895–1899), also spelled Die Welträtsel – in English The Riddle of the Universe: At the Close of the Nineteenth Century, Translated by Joseph McCabe, New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1900. • Über unsere gegenwärtige Kenntnis vom Ursprung des Menschen (1898) (On our current understanding of the origin of man) – in English The Last Link, 1898 • Der Kampf um den Entwickelungsgedanken (1905) (The struggle over thought on evolution) – in English Last Words on Evolution: A Popular Retrospect and Summary, Translated from the Second Edition by Joseph McCabe, New York: Peter Eckler, Publisher; London: A. Owen & Co., 1906. • Die Lebenswunder (1904) – in English The Wonders of Life • Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben (1917) (Crystal souls: studies on inorganic life)

• Illustration — Kunstformen – plate 72: Muscinae • Illustration — Kunstformen – plate 96: Chaetopoda • Illustration — 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.[96] 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".[97] Haeckel's literary output was extensive, including many books, scientific papers, and illustrations.[98]

• Indische Reisebriefe (1882) – Travel notes of India • Aus Insulinde: Malayische Reisebriefe (1901) – Travel notes of Malaysia • Kunstformen der Natur (1904) – art forms in nature, Digital Edition (1924) • Wanderbilder (1905) – "Travel Images" • A visit to Ceylon