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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. Ernst Haeckel discovered, described and named thousands of new species (see below), mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista (details below). Haeckel promoted Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial "recapitulation theory" claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (see below).

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 Welträthsel (1895-1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträthsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.

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 honor, as are another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941-m (9,649-ft) 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 Mersburg. 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 1862-1909. 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 time, Haeckel met with Charles Darwin, 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 coin the term First World War. Shortly after the start of World War I, Haeckel wrote:

There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared "European War"...will become the first world war the full sense of the word. Indianapolis Star September 20, 1914

This is the first known instance of the term First World War, which had previously been recorded as 1931 for the earliest usage.

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 the "recapitulation theory" which proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". His concept of recapitulation has been disputed in the form he gave it (now called "strong recapitulation"). 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.

"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 the Darwin published the "Origin of the Species" in 1859, and "The Descent of Man" in 1871, whereas Haeckel's famous embryo drawings did not appear until 1874 (8 species). In "The Descent of Man" (1871) Darwin used only two embryo drawings, neither taken from Haeckel.

It has been claimed that Ernst Haeckel sent a letter to the January 9 1909 publication of "Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung" (translated: "Munich general newspaper") which reads, translated: "a small portion of my embryo-pictures (possibly 6 or 8 in a hundred) are really (in Dr Brass’s sense of the word) 'falsified' — all those, namely, in which the disclosed material for inspection is so incomplete or insufficient that one is compelled in a restoration of a connected development series to fill up the gaps through hypotheses, and to reconstruct the missing members through comparative syntheses. What difficulties this task encounters, and how easily the draughts- man may blunder in it, the embryologist alone can judge."

Publications

Haeckel's 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 sixtieth 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) and Calcareous Sponges (1872), as well as several Challenger reports: Deep-Sea Medusae (1881), Siphonophora (1888), Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889), and another Radiolaria (1887), the last being 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, The Natural History of Creation reprinted 1883); Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1877, in English, Freedom in Science and Teaching) in 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, "Wonder of Life"), a supplement to the Riddle of the Universe; also books of travel, such as Indische Reisebriefe (1882, "Travel notes of India") and 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; and Wanderbilder (1905, "travel images"), with reproductions of his oil-paintings and water-color landscapes.

See also

Notes

References

  • Charles Darwin (1859). On the Origin of Species (by Means of Natural Selection). London: John Murray.
  • Charles Darwin (2003 edition). The Origin of Species (with introduction by Julian Huxley). Signet Classics. ISBN 0-451-52906-5.

  • Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching (1879), reprint edition, University Press of the Pacific, February 2004, paperback, 156 pages, ISBN 1-4102-1175-4.

  • Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1868), translated by E. Ray Lankester, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1883, 3rd edition, Volume 1.

  • Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur ("Artforms of Nature"), 1904, (from series published 1899-1904): over 100 detailed, multi-color illustrations of animals and sea creatures.

  • Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (Die Weltraetsel, 1895-1899), Publisher: Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1992, reprint edition, paperback, 405 pages, illustrated, ISBN 0-87975-746-9.

  • Richard Milner, The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for Its Origins, Henry Holt, 1993.

  • Michael K. Richardson, "Haeckel's embryos continued" (article), Science Volume 281:1289, 1998.

  • Richardson, M. K. & Keuck, G. (2001) "A question of intent: when is a 'schematic' illustration a fraud?," Nature 410:144 (vol. 410, no. 6825, page 144), March 8, 2001.

  • Richardson, M. K. & Keuck, G. (2002) Haeckel's ABC of evolution and development Biological Reviews (2002), 77: 495-528

  • M. Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Further reading

  • Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Atlas of 1862, by Ernst Haeckel, Prestel Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-7913-3327-5.
  • Works by Ernst Haeckel at Project Gutenberg.
  • Richardson, Michael K., "Haeckel, embryos, and evolution," Science Vol. 280, no. 5366 (May 15, 1998) p. 983, 985-986.

External links



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