[52][53] There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. [25], 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. With each of these human species, language developed on its own and independently of the others. SS captain and biologist Heinz Brücher wrote a biography of Haeckel in 1936, in which he praised Haeckel as a "pioneer in biological state thinking". Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The occupation of physician appeared less worthwhile to Haeckel after contact with suffering patients. An ardent Darwinist, Haeckel made several zoological expeditions and founded the Phyletic Museum at Jena and the Ernst Haeckel Haus, which contains his books, records, and other effects. [76], On the other hand, Haeckel was not an anti-Semite. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919) wanted to be a botanist—his favorite book as a teenager was Mathias Schleiden’s Die Pflanzen und ihr Leben (1848), and his hero was Humboldt (Uschmann 1972, Krausse 1987, Hopwood 2000, Di Gregorio 2005, Richards 2008). [14] This group lasted until 1933 and included such notable members as Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg von Arco (1869-1940), Helene Stöcker and Walter Arthur Berendsohn. and says the Nazis rejected Haeckel, since he opposed antisemitism, while supporting ideas they disliked (for instance atheism, feminism, internationalism, pacifism etc.). 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. [46]:264–267[47], 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." 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). Such experiences in marine biology strongly attracted Haeckel toward zoology, but dutifully he took a medical degree, as his family wished, at Berlin in 1857. [38], In the same line of thought, historian Daniel Gasman states that Haeckel's ideology stimulated the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernst-Haeckel, Strange Science - Biography of Ernst Haeckel, University of California, Berkeley: Museum of Paleontology - Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), How Stuff Works - Science - Biography of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. With the fall of Ernst Haeckel's Biogenetic Law in the 1920s, the evolutionary study of embryos receded into the intellectual backwaters for decades. Ernst Haeckel deserves to be remembered for the many contributions he made to zoology, including the discovery of thousands of new species as well as his magnificent artistic talent in depicting the natural world in minute detail. [12] Together with Hermann Steudner he attended botany lectures in Würzburg. Haeckel grew up in Merseburg, where his father was a government official. [85] Kurt Hildebrandt, a Nazi political philosopher, also rejected Haeckel. [40], 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. Affiliations 46 Issue 2, p123 . He declared that ontogeny (the embryology and development of the individual) briefly, and sometimes necessarily incompletely, recapitulated, or repeated, phylogeny (the developmental history of the species or race). [13] During a trip to the Mediterranean, Haeckel named nearly 150 new species of radiolarians. Together with Hermann Steudner he attended botanylectures in Würzburg. Ernst Haeckel was a German biologist, naturalist, and artist who pioneered the practice of using artistic illustrations to capture the likenesses of animals in the wild during the 19th century. Though he made no suggestion that embryo illustrations should be directly based on specimens, to him the subject demanded the utmost "scrupulosity and conscientiousness" and an artist must "not arbitrarily model or generalise his originals for speculative purposes" which he considered proved by comparison with works by other authors. Over the next few days he met Charles Lyell, and visited Thomas Huxley and family at their home. [75] Haeckel was also an extreme German nationalist who believed strongly in the superiority of German culture. [28][29], Haeckel was a flamboyant figure, who sometimes took great, non-scientific leaps from available evidence. 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. 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. [13], In 1864, his beloved first wife, Anna Sethe, died. While he was a student, his professor Johannes Müller, took him on a summer field trip to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea, sparking his life-long fascination for natural forms and biology. 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. 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. At least this is the view of Schleicher, one of the foremost authorities on this subject. [81], Nazis themselves divided on the question of whether Haeckel should be counted as a pioneer of their ideology. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – 1919) was a philosopher, professor, physician, naturalist, biologist and artist. From Ernst Haeckel's. ), German zoologist and evolutionist who was a strong proponent of Darwinism and who proposed new notions of the evolutionary descent of human beings. [46]:275–276;282–286, 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. Haeckel retired from teaching in 1909, and in 1910 he withdrew from the Evangelical Church of Prussia. [50] Others joined in: both expert anatomists and Catholic priests and supporters were politically opposed to Haeckel's views. He invented new terms, including ontogeny and phylogeny, to present his evolutionised recapitulation theory that "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny". Updates? The first published concerns came from Ludwig Rütimeyer, a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Basel who had placed fossil mammals in an evolutionary lineage early in the 1860s and had been sent a complimentary copy. 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. These ideas eventually fell from favour. [46]:285–288[49], 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. Ernst Haeckel’s most popular book is Art Forms in Nature. Save 30% off a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. [86], German biologist, philosopher, physician, and artist, "Haeckel" redirects here. Haeckel was fond of drawing linear and symmetrical trees of evolution, tracing humanity's ancestry back to life's earliest forms, especially the protozoa he had published on at the beginning of his career. The turning point in Haeckel’s thinking was his reading of Charles Darwin’s 1859 work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. He left the Lutheran church in 1910. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). A staunch evolutionary biologist, Haeckel put Darwin on the world map. He accused Haeckel of "playing fast and loose with the public and with science", and failing to live up to the obligation to the truth of every serious researcher. 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. 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. [46]: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. [46]:269–270, Haeckel's aim was a reformed morphology with evolution as the organising principle of a cosmic synthesis unifying science, religion, and art. 1: 1–363. 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. [21], Haeckel's affinity for the German Romantic movement, coupled with his acceptance of a form of Lamarckism, influenced his political beliefs. Watts E, Levit GS, Hossfeld U (2019). Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin's hypothesis of Africa. Haeckel tended to speculate, and for some years, he pondered the problem of heredity. [84] Gunther Hecht, a member of the Nazi Department of Race Politics, also issued a memorandum rejecting Haeckel as a forerunner of Nazism. 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. 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. 215 ff. He studied at Würzburg and at the University of Berlin, where his professor, the physiologist and anatomist Johannes Müller, took him on a summer expedition to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea. Developmental series were used to show stages within a species, but inconsistent views and stages made it even more difficult to compare different species. In 1852 Haeckel completed studies at the Domgymnasium, the cathedral high-school of Merseburg. He also proposed the kingdom Protista[12] in 1866. [71] As an advocate of eugenics, he also believed that about 200,000 mentally and congenitally ill should be killed by a medical control board. Michael K. Richardson. Haeckel's publisher turned down a proposal for a "strictly scholarly and objective" second edition. [60], 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. At the end of 1868 his review in the Archiv für Anthropologie wondered about the claim that the work was "popular and scholarly", doubting whether the second was true, and expressed horror about such public discussion of man's place in nature with illustrations such as the evolutionary trees being shown to non-experts. He is most well known for his descriptions of phylogenetic trees, studies of radiolarians, and illustrations of vertebrate embryos to support his biogenetic law and Darwin’s work with evolution. 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. Ernst Haeckel, in full Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, (born Feb. 16, 1834, Potsdam, Prussia [Germany]—died Aug. 9, 1919, Jena, Ger. But in a great majority of animals, including man, this is not possible because the infinitely varied conditions of existence have led the embryonic forms themselves to be changed and to partly lose their original condition (Haeckel, 1903: pp. He termed these early organisms Mon… [63][64][65] Others have denied the relationship all together. 435–436)". We welcome any additional information. The science was named by German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who introduced the term in several works in the 1860s and 1870s, first in German and then in English, inspiring others to develop the science. Richardson and Keuck, (Biol. In 1857 Haeckel attained a doctorate in medicine, and afterwards he received the license to practice medicine. He was an atheist. p. 518. illustrations of animals and sea creatures, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Kristallseelen : Studien über das anorganische Leben, "Ernst Haeckel's contribution to Evo-Devo and scientific debate: a re-evaluation of Haeckel's controversial illustrations in US textbooks in response to creationist accusations", "Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919): The German Darwin and his impact on modern biology", Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction, "Pictures of evolution and charges of fraud: Ernst Haeckel's embryological illustrations", "Ernst Haeckel and the Struggles over Evolution and Religion", E. Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte 1868 (front page of 1st edition, German), E. Haeckel: Die Welträthsel 1899 (front page of 1st edition, German). Ernst Haeckel has 251 books on Goodreads with 19547 ratings. He was giving successful "popular lectures" on his ideas to students and townspeople in Jena, in an approach pioneered by his teacher Rudolf Virchow. At that time, no remains of human ancestors had yet been identified. He even formally named this missing link Pithecanthropus alalus, translated as "ape man without speech". Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership - Now 30% off. [48] 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. Born in Germany in 1834, Ernst Haeckel studied medicine at the University of Berlin and graduated in 1857. Ernst Haeckel was born on 16 February 1834, in Potsdam (then part of the Kingdom of Prussia). "Haeckel's embryos continued". 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