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WP_128 (RORSCHACH SERIES)/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Paintings 2 | | Medium: | acrylic on paper | | Size (inches): | 43 x 31 | | Size (mm): | 1091 x 788 | | Catalog #: | WP_0128 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse/ the usual central vertical fold.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)
"I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).'" - Haeckel, E. 1899. Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.
Biography of Haeckel:
Ernst Haeckel, much like Herbert Spencer, was always quotable, even when wrong. Although best known for the famous statement "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", he also coined many words commonly used by biologists today, such as phylum, phylogeny, and ecology. On the other hand, Haeckel also stated that "politics is applied biology", a quote used by Nazi propagandists. The Nazi party, rather unfortunately, used not only Haeckel's quotes, but also Haeckel's justifications for racism, nationalism and social darwinism.
Although trained as a physician, Haeckel abandoned his practice in 1859 after reading Darwin's Origin of Species. Always suspicious of teleological and mystical explanation, Haeckel used the Origin as ammunition both to attack entrenched religious dogma and to build his own unique world view.
Hackel studied under Carl Gegenbauer in Jena for three years before becoming a professor of comparative anatomy in 1862. Between 1859 and 1866, he worked on many "invertebrate" groups, including radiolarians, poriferans (sponges) and annelids (segmented worms). He named nearly 150 new species of radiolarians during a trip to the Mediterranean. "Invertebrates" provided the fodder for most of his experimental work on development, leading to his "law of recapitulation". Haeckel was also a free-thinker who went beyond biology, dabbling in anthropology, psychology, and cosmology. Haeckel's speculative ideas and possible fudging of data, plus lack of empirical support for many of his ideas, tarnished his scientific credentials. However, he remained an immensely popular figure in Germany and was considered a hero by his countrymen.
Haeckel's Scientific Thought:
While materialists and utilitarians were shaking away traditional beliefs in England, German thinking was decidely more idealist and romantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influential philosopher Goethe, who like Haeckel lived for a time in Jena, stressed the importance of the spirit as a creative, organizing force. German morphologists, influenced both by Goethe and by Hegel's idealistic philosophy, believed in progressive perfection of both the universal plan of creation and the recapituation of that plan in the growth of the embryo.
Haeckel was influenced both by the German idealistic tradition and by the works of Darwin. After reading Origin of Species, Haeckel became one of the more prolific and vociferous supporters of evolution, but was less supportive of natural selection as the mechanism by which evolution occured. Hacekel was certainly an evolutionist but less so a Darwinian.
An extremely common misperception is that natural selection and evolution are the same thing. In fact, Haeckel is one of many thinkers who believed that all species were historical entities (lineages) but did not share Darwin's enthusiasm for natural selection as the main mechanism for generating the diversity of the biological world. Haeckel instead believed that the environment acted directly on organisms, producing new races (a version of Lamarckism). The survival of the races did depend on their interaction with the environment, a weak form of natural selection. Haeckel's mechanism of change required that formation of new characters diagnostic of new species occured through progressive addition to the developmental trajectory. For example, most metazoans go through a developmental stage called a gastrula -- a ball of cells with an infolding that later forms the gut. Haeckel thought that at one time an organism called a "gastraea" existed that looked much like the gastrula stage of ontogeny. This hypothesized ancestral metazoan gave rise to the rest of the multi-celled animals.
The "law of recapitulation" has been discredited since the beginning of the twentieth century. Experimental morphologists and biologists have shown that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between phylogeny and ontogeny. Although a strong form of recapitulation is not correct, phylogeny and ontogeny are intertwined, and many biologists are beginning to both explore and understand the basis for this connection.
-www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/haeckel.html
Ernst Haeckel
In a letter to her son in the 1870s, Emma Darwin, the great naturalist's wife, wrote that a recent guest was "very nice and hearty and affectionate, but he bellowed out his bad English in such a voice that he nearly deafened us." The guest was Ernst Haeckel.
Born in 1834, Haeckel was both an early and an ardent proponent of Darwinism. He studied medicine at the universites of Würzburg and Berlin, but soon realized he hated disease too much to be a good doctor, observing, "I view anatomy purely from the viewpoint of the natural history of man — not a medical one!" When he opened a medical practice in Berlin, it was only a formality. The young man then embarked on a lengthy trip to Italy, financed by his father, where he toyed with the idea of becoming a landscape painter. By then, Dad had lost patience, and Haeckel abandoned that fancy and turned to science. Armed with a powerful microscope he had picked up in Florence and tiny marine organisms he had identified during his trip, he set out to make history in science. Later historians had to admit, however, that plenty of his science was speculative.
In 1868, Haeckel published History of Creation arguing that human evolution consisted of precisely 22 phases, the 21st — the "missing link" — being a halfway step between apes and humans. (The missing link was what the Dutchman Eugène Dubois, discoverer of Homo erectus, would later resolve to find.) Haeckel championed the notion of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," in other words, the development of an individual shows the evolutionary history of its species. He compared embryos of various vertebrate species to support this argument, but exaggerated the similarity of the embryos in their early stages. Some of his contemporaries, Wilhelm His among them, accused him of distorting his images. In fairness to Haeckel, however, dissecting, observing and portraying embryos were tough tasks in the 19th century, when scientists had to work with relatively primitive equipment. Moreover, he followed a practice of portraying idealized "types" of organisms rather than producing faithful representations of specific individuals. Scientists argued over which approach was better, and this dispute influenced criticism of his work. The years have been kinder to the more retrained hypothesis of Karl Ernst von Baer, who argued that different species' embryos look more alike than do the adults.
Many of the ideas Haeckel promoted throughout his career have failed to endure 20th- and 21st-century scientific scrutiny, particularly his ideas about race. Haeckel hypothesized that humans comprised 12 distinct species, evolved from an ancestor who had lived on a now submerged continent he called Lemuria. He expected — and wasn't very upset by the idea — that the "superior" Germanic peoples would eventually drive out the "inferior" groups. He advocated strong governments encouraging racial competition and war. In the decades after his death, such extreme eugenic leanings had murderous consequences. It's hard to say what Haeckel actually would have thought had he seen the impact of the Third Reich, and in fact, his sentiments were commonplace around the turn of the 20th century.
In 1866, Haeckel published a set of genealogical trees showing the relationships of all known orders of organisms. These, like his theories on human evolution, have been criticized by later scientists. In his tree of vertebrate evolution, he downplayed seemingly unimportant organisms, such as fish, even though fish remain the most diverse of all vertebrates. He also portrayed patterns of evolution that don't necessarily occur, like increasing diversity over time. Yet this was the first outline of biology incorporating the principles of Darwinian evolution, and a major accomplishment. And Haeckel's speculations sometimes proved correct. The Cambrian Period, roughly 545 to 505 million years ago, marked a dramatic diversification of life forms found in the fossil record, yet the fossil record is pretty sparse before that time. In the 1870s, Haeckel asserted that Precambrian life forms had been tiny — roughly the same size as modern embryos. Modern finds of Precambrian fossils suggest that Haeckel was right.
One of Haeckel's earliest works was an atlas of radiolarians, published in 1862. Radiolarians are single-celled organisms whose lineage extends back to the Precambrian. Haeckel thought radiolarians were multi-cellular animals, and he misinterpreted their nuclei and the symbiotic algae that some of them carried. Nevertheless, he produced illustrations of the radiolarians that were both detailed and beautiful. It has been argued that what he "saw" was influenced by Jugendstil, the Art Nouveau form popular in Germany at the time. Whether or not artistic style influenced Haeckel's illustrations, his illustrations certainly influenced later art forms, including light fixtures, jewelry, furniture, and even a gateway to the Paris Word Fair in 1900. Later in his career, Haeckel produced Art Forms in Nature, a work that he published in a series of 10 installments. Designed to interest the general public in naturalism, they included Haeckel's own illustrations of animals, plants and microscopic organisms. In 1913, he published a set of photographs titled Nature as an Artist, aimed at countering accusations that his illustrations could be misleading. Today, however, many scientists and science historians share the conviction that his images were at best highly contrived, beautiful as they may be.
For more information:
Art Forms in Nature by Ernst Haeckel
Art Forms from the Ocean by Ernst Haeckel
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould
I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution by Edward J. Larson
Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
"Painting the Whole Picture?" by Philip Ball in Nature Magazine, February 1, 2007 issue
"Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud" in Isis by Nick Hopwood, June 2006
Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus
Java Man by Swisher, Curtis and Lewin
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Evolution by Linda Gamlin
The Man Who Found the Missing Link by Pat Shipman
The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould
-www.strangescience.net/haeckel.htm
Biography of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, 1834-1919
Biography of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (From: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, 1910-1911)
HAECKEL ERNST HEINRICH (1834- ), German biologist, was born at Potsdam on the 16th of February 1834. He studied medicine and science at Würzburg, Berlin and Vienna, having for his masters such men as Johannes Müller, R. Virchow and R. A. Kölliker and in 1857 graduated at Berlin as M.D. and M. Ch. At the wish of his father he began to practise as a doctor in that city, but his patients were few in number, one reason being that he did not wish them to be many, and after a short time he turned to more congenial pursuits. In 1861, at the instance of Carl Gegenbaur, he became Privatdozent at Jena in the succeeding year he was chosen extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy and director of the Zoological Institute in the same university, in 1865 he was appointed to a chair of zoology which was specially established for his benefit. This last position he retained for 43 years, in spite of repeated invitations to migrate to more important centres, such as Strassburg or Vienna, and at Jena he spent his life, with the exception of the time he devoted to travelling in various parts of the world, whence in every case he brought back a rich zoological harvest.
As a field naturalist Haeckel displayed extraordinary power and industry. Among his monographs may be mentioned those on Radiolaria (1862), Siphonophora (1869), Monera (1870) and Calcareous Sponges (1872), as well as several Challenger reports, viz. Deep-Sea Medusae (1881), Siphonophora (1888), Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889) and Radiolaria (1887), the last being accompanied by 140 plates and enumerating over four thousand new species. This output of systematic and descriptive work would alone have constituted a good life's work, but Haeckel in addition wrote copiously on biological theory. It happened that just when he was beginning his scientific career Darwin's Origin of Species was published (1859), and such was the influence it exercised over him that he became the apostle of Darwinism in Germany. He was, indeed, the first German biologist to give a wholehearted adherence to the doctrine of organic evolution and to treat it as the cardinal conception of modern biology. It was he who first brought it prominently before the notice of German men of science in his first memoir on the Radiolaria, which was completely pervaded with its spirit, and later at the congress of naturalists at Stettin in 1863. Darwin himself has placed on record the conviction that Haeckel's enthusiastic propagandism of the doctrine was the chief factor of its success in Germany. His book on General Morphology (1866), published when he was only thirty-two years old, was called by Huxley a suggestive attempt to work out the practical application of evolution to its final results; and if it does not take rank as a classic, it will at least stand out as a landmark in the history of biological doctrine in the 19th century. Although it contains a statement of most of the views with which Haeckel's name is associated, it did not attract much attention on its first appearance, and accordingly its author rewrote much of its substance in a more popular style and published it a year or two later as the Natural History of Creation (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte), which was far more successful. In it he divided morphology into two sections -- tectology, the science of organic individuality; and promorphology, which aims at establishing a crystallography of organic forms. Among other matters, he laid particular stress on the "fundamental biogenetic law" that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the individual organism in its development is to a great extent an epitome of the form-modifications undergone by the successive ancestors of the species in the course of their historic evolution. His well-known "gastraea" theory is an outcome of this generalization. He divided the whole animal creation into two categories -- the Protozoa or unicellular animals, and the Metazoa or multicellular animals, and he pointed out that while the former remain. single-celled throughout their existence, the latter are only so at the beginning, and are subsequently built up of innumerable cells, the single primitive egg-cell (ovum) being transformed by cleavage into a globular mass of cells (morula), which first becomes a hollow vesicle and then changes into the gastrula. The simplest multicellular animal he conceived to resemble this gastrula with its two primary layers, ectoderm and endoderm, and the earliest hypothetical form of this kind, from which the higher animals might be supposed to be actually descended, he called the "gastraea." This theory was first put forward in the memoir on the calcareous sponges, which in its sub-title was described as an attempt at an analytical solution of the problem of the origin of species, and was subsequently elaborated in various Studies on the Gastraea Theory (1873-1884). Haeckel, again, was the first to attempt to draw up a genealogical tree (Stammbaum) exhibiting the relationship between the various orders of animals with regard both to one another and their common origin. His earliest attempt in the General Morphology was succeeded by many others, and his efforts in this direction may perhaps be held to culminate in the paper he read before the fourth International Zoological Congress, held at Cambridge in 1898, when he traced the descent of the human race in twenty-six stages from organisms like the still-existing Monera, simple structureless masses of protoplasm, and the unicellular Protista, through the chimpanzees and the Pithecanthropus erectus, of which a few fossil bones were discovered in Java in 1894, and which he held to be undoubtedly an intermediate form connecting primitive man with the anthropoid apes.
Not content with the study of the doctrine of evolution in its zoological aspects, Haeckel also applied it to some of the oldest problems of philosophy and religion. What he termed the integration of his views on these subjects he published under the title of Die Welträtsel (1899), which in 1901 appeared in English as The Riddle of the Universe. In this book, adopting an uncompromising monistic attitude, he asserted the essential unity of organic and inorganic nature. According to his "carbontheory," which has been far from achieving general acceptance, the chemico-physical properties of carbon in its complex albuminoid compounds are the sole and the mechanical cause of the specific phenomena of movement which distinguish organic from inorganic substances, and the first development of living protoplasm, as seen in the Monera , arises from such nitrogenous carbon -compounds by a process of spontaneous generation. Psychology he regarded as merely a branch of physiology, and psychical activity as a group of vital phenomena which depend solely on physiological actions and material changes taking place in the protoplasm of the organism in which it is manifested. Every living cell has psychic properties, and the psychic life of multicellular organisms is the sum-total of the psychic functions of the cells of which they are composed. Moreover, just as the highest animals have been evolved from the simplest forms of life, so the highest faculties of the human mind have been evolved from the soul of the brute-beasts, and more remotely from the simple cell-soul of the unicellular Protozoa. As a consequence of these views Haeckel was led to deny the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the existence of a personal God.
Haeckel's literary output was enormous, and at the time of the celebration of his sixtieth birthday at Jena in 1894 he had produced 42 works with 13,000 pages, besides numerous scientific memoirs. In addition to the works already mentioned, he wrote Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1877) in reply to a speech in which Virchow objected to the teaching of the doctrine of evolution in schools, on the ground that it was an unproved hypothesis; Die systematische Phylogenie (1894), which has been pronounced his best book, Anthropogenie (1874, 5th and enlarged edition 1903), dealing with the evolution of man; 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), a supplement to the Riddle of the Universe; books of travel, such as Indische Reisebriefe (1882) and Aus Insulinde (1901), the fruits of journeys to Ceylon and to Java; Kunstformen der Natur (1904), with plates representing beautiful marine animal forms; and Wanderbilder (1905), reproductions of his oil-paintings and water-colour landscapes.
There are biographies by W. Bölsche (Dresden, 1900, translated into English by Joseph McCabe, with additions, London, 1906) and by Breitenbach (Odenkirchen, 1904). See also -- Walther May, Ernst Haeckel; Versuch einer Chronik seines Lebens und Werkens (Leipzig, 1909).
[Note: Ernst Haeckel died in 1919.]
-www.gennet.org/facts/haeckel.html
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