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friends!
Pauli D. Ojala and Matti Leisola
Translation: I. Chistyakova (Christian Scientific and Apologetic Center)
Translated with permission from creation.com
Ernst Haeckel
Embryology was once called Entwicklungsgeschichte- "the evolutionary history of organisms", believing that each organism repeats this history in its development. The typology of Ernst Haeckel absorbed the ideas of Goethe, the classification constructions of Cuvier, Lamarck's "mechanisms" of inheritance of acquired traits - and placed all this in the system of Darwinian phylogenesis.
The falsification of drawings depicting the development of the embryo is not the only falsification of Haeckel. Haeckel constructed the first universal phylogenetic tree and described the first ape-man before any actual evidence was found. He accompanied his article "Moneron" with artistic sketches of the spontaneous generation of life from inorganic matter, which then, during the period of the spread of evolutionary doctrine (until the 1920s), wandered from textbook to textbook.
Thanks to the legacy of Haeckel, myths about the absence of pain in newborns, abortion laws, psychoanalysis, and even the sexual revolution have received a logical “justification”. Haeckel supplied materialism with a whole arsenal of slogans and new terms. He founded the League of Monists, which publicly proclaimed evolutionism as the supreme deity of science and inspired ordinary people that science denies "dualism" - the idea of the coexistence of spirit and matter. This idea turned out to be equally attractive to socialists and "proto-fascists": this is evidenced by the numerous letters that came to Haeckel - a Darwinian demagogue - from all over the world. Recently found letters sent to him from Scandinavia show that Haeckel's views prevailed in Darwinism not only in Germany but also in the Nordic countries.
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834-1919) was professor of zoology at the University of Jena from 1862 to 1909. In this post, he succeeded the eminent morphologist Karl Gegenbaur, who resigned in 1862 (and later moved to Heidelberg). Haeckel got a place at the university even before the spread of evolutionary teachings. He studied invertebrates - in particular, radiolarians (amoeba-like protozoa with a bizarre mineral skeleton), sponges and annelids. In his scientific work, he described more than 3,500 species of radiolarians.
Like Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Haeckel married his cousin (the deeply religious Emma Darwin was against the publication of her husband's research). Anna Haeckel (nee Sete) died on the day of her husband's thirtieth birthday, and her death aroused in him an aversion to the spiritual. Hegel's "General Morphology" is an explosion of feelings of a hardened person who, out of grief, could not even attend the funeral of his beloved wife. In a letter to Darwin, Haeckel wrote: after Anna's untimely death, he doesn't care what they think of him.
Darwin avoided discussing how his theory relates to Christianity; Haeckel even opposed the idea of dualism, which presupposes the coexistence of matter and spirit, ansich(as such) - and therefore called his views "monism".
It was Haeckel, and not Darwin, who stamped out the ill-conceived terms one after the other. Actually, thanks to the newly introduced terminology, Haeckel managed to succeed. In the scientific community, "ecology", "type", "phylogenesis", "ontogenesis", "protists", "palingenesis", "coenogenesis", "gastrula", "blastula" and "morula" are still popular. Haeckel's terms took root even despite the fact that the most important evidence and drawings were forged.
Olaf Breidbach, director of the Haeckel House Museum in Jena, points out the fundamental classificatory differences between Haeckel's typology and Darwin's phylogeny. The term "morphology" was introduced by the German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Haeckel combined the ahistorical views of Goethe with the radical constructions of Darwin. In order to “reveal the true structure of nature,” Haeckel added to the theory of gradual evolutionary development proposed by Darwin the idea of preformed “ontogenesis” (individual development of an organism). To do this, he borrowed the classification system of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and reworked it in accordance with the Darwinian concept of phylogeny.
Haeckel was 25 years younger than Darwin. He gained fame and position in no small measure because of his biased approach to the study of embryonic development and, in particular, due to the recognition of the founder of evolutionary theory. Later editions of The Origin of Species (Chapter XIV) say:
“Professor Haeckel ... devoted his vast knowledge and talent to the study of what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of kinship that link all organic beings. When constructing such [genealogical] series, he relies mainly on embryological signs ... "
As a result of Haeckel's popularizing activities, his ideas had a greater influence on science than Darwin's. The main work of the tireless Jena professor "General Morphology" was an attempt to systematize all biology in accordance with Darwin's theory. Haeckel's "phylogenetic trees" included all forms of life. Haeckel wrote this book in just a year in places where he was once happy with his wife. If Darwin wrote only three hours a day, then Haeckel, broken by the loss, on the contrary, completely lost sleep. According to contemporaries, he could sleep three to four hours a day. Darwin, whose academic titles were limited, as far as is known, to the degree of a master of arts and whose mined "species" were mostly safely eaten by the researcher himself, admired Haeckel's energy and scientific approach. He did not stop praising the young professor:
“When trying to trace the genealogy of mammals, and therefore of man, descending lower and lower along the steps of the animal kingdom, we plunge into more and more dark areas of science ... Anyone who wants to know what mind and knowledge can give must turn to the writings of prof. Haeckel".
Often, following Darwin, the idea of recapitulation is mistakenly attributed to Carl von Baer (1792-1876) or equated to a simple similarity of embryos. But Darwin mentioned in this context the Estonian German von Baer, who at that time was already in old age, by mistake. A year before von Baer's death, Darwin apparently did not have his work.
Picture 1. Vulgar evolutionary racism as presented by Ernst Haeckel in the famous book "The Evolution of Man" (German edition 1874), where the infamous drawings of embryos were published.
In 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favorable Races in the Struggle for Life. There was only one illustration in the book. But in the introduction to the next Darwinian work on human evolution, a whole cavalcade of drawings already flaunted: the ill-fated Haeckelian embryos. Until the publication of The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin did not undertake to extrapolate his theory to humans. But by that time, the works of the ambitious Haeckel had already begun to appear. And paying tribute to a colleague, the elderly Darwin wrote in the introduction to his new book: “Nevertheless, the idea that man, along with other species, represents the descendant of some ancient ... type, is not at all new ... is now supported by many famous naturalists and philosophers like ... and especially Haeckel ... The latter, in addition to his excellent work "Generelle Morphologie" (1866), recently published in 1868, and the second edition in 1870, his "Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte", in which he comprehensively analyzed human pedigree. If this book had appeared before my essay had been written, I probably would not have finished it. Almost all the conclusions I have come to are confirmed by Haeckel, and his knowledge is in many respects much more complete than mine.
By 1914, Haeckel had been accepted as a member of almost a hundred professional and scientific societies. According to contemporaries, after Haeckel retired, his theories turned, in fact, into egocentric dogmatism. For example, in 1911, during lengthy discussions, and later in correspondence with the founder of Finnish genetics, Harry Federley, Haeckel stubbornly denied Mendel's laws.
Haeckel's classic work "World Riddles" ( Die Weltratsel, 1899) became one of the most popular books in the history of science. In Germany, the first edition was published in more than a hundred thousand copies and sold out within a year. By 1919, the book had already been reprinted ten times and translated into 30 languages. By 1933, nearly half a million copies had been sold in Germany.
This book inspired the revolt of both the “right” and the “left” alike. Indeed, it is difficult to find a point of contact in the twentieth century that would unite political extremists of all stripes and persuasions better than the ideology of evolutionism. The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) argued that Haeckel's books
"Undoubtedly, to a greater extent than the works of any of the scientists, including Darwin and Huxley (by the frank admission of the latter), managed to convince the whole world of the validity of the theory of evolution."
Haeckel's theory of recapitulation influenced both the exact sciences (for example, paleontology) and the humanities (in particular, forensic anthropology and psychoanalysis). Paradoxically, its influence can be traced even to the sexual revolution, the Scouting movement, and the behaviorist hypothesis " tabula rasa". Wilhelm Ostwald mentions the interscientific lobby of the monists in his "Monistic Sermons". Haeckel's drawings, in which he depicted a naked woman surrounded by lustful ape-like males, can rightfully be considered the forerunners of Sigmund Freud's "recapitulation pansexualism".
Although Haeckel's academic merit in Jena was long gone, he continued to be an iconic figure on the European continent. He entered into polemics with church authorities and promoted nationalism. The militant professor was convinced that the laws of nature (as he understood them) should become the laws of society, and offered to save nations from biological degeneration, calling for help anti-clericalism, rationalism, materialism, racism (Figure 1), patriotism, eugenics and the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race .
Haeckel first used the vague expression "labyrinth of ontogenesis" in "World Riddles". This book did not need any illustrations or detailed explanations. All twenty chapters consisted of discussions about the "embryology of the soul" and the "phylogeny of the soul." Images of a human embryo with gill slits, tail, fins, and furrows, illustrating the idea of external resemblance of vertebrate embryos, remain one of the most common illustrations in biology textbooks, although they are fake.
In 1906, Haeckel organized the League of Monists in Jena ( Monistebund). By 1911, it numbered almost 6,000 people, among whom were theologians of the most radical persuasion. League groups met in 42 cities in Germany and Austria.
Decades have passed since Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), as a result of his experiments with sterile media, set by him in 1859-1862, it would seem that he finally said goodbye to the idea of spontaneous generation of life. But Haeckel continued to keep faith in the supernatural evolutionary possibilities of proteins. In his opinion, shapeless deposits of gypsum on the seabed were proof of the existence of the simplest forms of life. When popularizing this idea, not only the discovery of Mendel's "latent factors" ("Anlagen"), but also Pasteur's observations were ignored.
Haeckel imagined and drew a group of precellular protoplasmic organisms, which he called "moners" (Figure 2). He believed that
“there should be absolutely no organs in their structure, they should consist entirely of formless, primitive homogeneous matter ... just some formless, mobile clot of mucus or silt, which is a protein compound of carbon.”
Figure 2. The cycle of reproduction of monera - the alleged intermediate link between inanimate matter and living organisms. The figure shows the "details" of the spontaneous generation of a living organism. This is one of the most obvious falsifications among the illustrations given in the writings of Haeckel. (From the Swedish edition of The History of the World, p. 127).
Until the last reprint in the 1920s, Haeckel's History of the World was printed unchanged. The detailed description of the fictitious "life particles" seems to have been a deliberate deception, since Haeckel was an outstanding connoisseur of marine organisms and even published art albums with their real images. In its original form, the article about "moners" consisted of 70 pages of text and included 30 figures.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Huxley) (1825-1895) - grandfather of Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley - allegedly confirmed in 1868 the existence of Haeckel's "moneron" and named it Bathybius haeckelii. However, he later refuted this discovery (when it turned out that he had observed a siliceous mass). By the way, he owns the aphorism: "Science is an organization of common sense, where many beautiful theories have been destroyed by ugly facts."
The correspondence between Huxley and Haeckel shows that the British Isles and continental Europe differed markedly in spirit. Perhaps this is partly why England offered ideological resistance to the German Nazis with their "racial hygiene". The English edition of General Morphology did not include Haeckel's main arguments about the origin of man, nor his "system of monism". Huxley, being an ardent champion of Darwinism, nevertheless cut out entire chapters from Haeckel's main work. Huxley himself was agnostic- by the way, it was he who coined the term "agnosticism".
To designate the hypothetical particles of heredity, Haeckel introduced the concept of "plastidula". These "memory molecules" were thought to be the precursors of genes. In the West, quasi-scientific theories of chemical evolution have tended towards the DNA/RNA primacy; in the socialist countries, the dogma about the primacy of protein was more popular. In general, Haeckel's "solid foundation" of nihilistic materialism suited the Soviet system perfectly. Haeckel and his views were admired by Lenin (1870-1924). Under the influence of Haeckel's ideas, Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), the inventor of harmful agricultural practices that became one of the causes of famine in the Soviet Union, also acted. Lysenko was a favorite of Stalin (1878-1953) and, of course, was completely subordinate to the leader. In a eulogy published in 1953 in the newspaper Pravda, Lysenko notes that "Comrade Stalin devoted time to the most careful study of the most important problems of biology", "directly edited the draft report" On the situation in biological science ", explained his corrections to me in detail, gave instructions on how to present individual passages of the report.
Haeckel also denied the theory of entropy (counter-evolution). He believed that life differs from inorganic matter only in the degree of organization. Memory is only a general function of any organized mother. After the discovery of liquid crystals, in particular albumin, all matter began to be considered alive; even electrons were regarded as primitive life. The "specific physical and chemical properties of coal" were considered to be the mechanical causes of the "specific motor phenomenon" called life. It was believed that life continues to spontaneously arise wherever suitable conditions are formed.
In 1878, Haeckel formulated the concept of "cell souls" and "soul cells", and with this he laid the foundation for the idea of "unity" based on "plastidules", invisible homogeneous elementary molecules of protoplasm. His last published work DieKristallsehen, 1917) was devoted to the development of "descriptive crystallography" and "physiology" of "psychosomatic" crystals. According to Haeckel, the "souls of atoms" interact with each other through attraction, repulsion and crystallization. He endowed cells with a soul, and considered matter to be composed of cells.
It must be remembered that at the beginning of the 20th century, life was not defined in terms of information theory, as is customary today after the revolutionary discoveries of DNA. Back in the 1960s, cells were thought to be just reagent vessels containing complex chemical mixtures maintained at constant temperature and pressure. Information about metabolism was just emerging, and scientists still believed that cellular processes could be described as a complex series of random collisions that occur as a result of the diffusion of substances in a limited space.
Haeckel was not a consistent materialist, since he considered some mystical forces to be the driving force of evolution. inside matter itself. Denying the teachings of Gregor Mendel (1823-1884), based on countless experiments, was a monstrous mistake. New traits did not appear in peas "from nothing". Haeckel completely went over to the side of anti-Mendelian "science", which believed that the environment has a direct effect on organisms and as a result new races arise.
Figure 3 The first comprehensive family/phylogenetic tree compiled by Ernst Haeckel. Pay attention to the fictitious "moner" at the foot of the tree. Haeckel transferred the same drawings from book to book. (Illustration from the 5th edition of The Evolution of Man).
In his recent book, Richard Weikart specifically notes that at the monist congress, Haeckel opposed the spiritual principle and stubbornly defended determinism, denying the free will of man. Nature and man are one, therefore, in order to survive, it is necessary to adapt to the "ecological" community. It seems that Haeckel's concept of "ecology" originally had a proto-fascist meaning.
Haeckel made his considerable contribution to various fields of the natural sciences. Even before the discovery of any remains of the first alleged human ancestor, he had already given this ancestor a name: Pithecanthropus alalus(non-speaking monkey-man). Later, it was Haeckel's associate anthropologist Eugène Dubois (1858-1940) who discovered the Java Man. The Haeckelian roots of this find are hidden by renaming: now the "Javanese man" is called Homo erectus, but it was originally called Pithecanthropus erectus.
In his first phylogenetic tree, Haeckel included the entire animal kingdom (Figure 3). He presented it in the form of a series - from simple to complex, and filled the voids with imaginary creatures. The various embryonic phases were given names corresponding to the links in this evolutionary chain. Significant signs in the images of embryos already known to us were called "heterochrony" (evolutionary changes in the relative timing of the appearance and rate of development of signs). When Haeckel faced the problem of whether to attribute lower organisms to the animal kingdom or the vegetable kingdom, he invented another new concept - “protists”.
Even half a century after the publication of The Origin of Species, biologists continued to argue heatedly about the principle of natural selection. Darwin was revered for the idea of common descent, although, in essence, he simply made the first attempt at a causal explanation of persistent sexual selection.
Even aside from the fact that Darwin meticulously edited his autobiography and letters prior to 1860, downplaying the pioneering contributions of Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), it is clear that Darwin was following the tradition of Malthusian rationale for the persistence of "class society." During the years of the Industrial Revolution, which took place in the childhood of a scientist, in London, even girls under 12 years old were often forced to work more than 100 hours a week. Darwin himself belonged to high society. Ironically, it was Charles's cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), who coined the term "eugenics" (racial hygiene), and referred to his noble family as "hereditary genius" - after the title of his own work, published in 1869.
However, Charles Darwin, who spent his life in social visits or hunting in the forest, never tried to transfer his evolutionary ideas, "observed" in nature, to the hierarchy of English society. Haeckel, on the contrary, persistently convinced ordinary people, prominent representatives of German science and countless officials of all ranks of this - until, in the end, his "remarkable" biogenetic law was recognized as an inexhaustible storehouse of evolutionary information.
The methodological vagueness of Haeckel's reasoning created the ground for a more hostile attitude towards "inferior" races and people than the teachings of Darwin. However, Darwin also argued for the Malthusian indifference and lack of compassion characteristic of high society:
“In the struggle for existence, the more civilized peoples of the so-called Caucasian race defeated the Turks. If we look at the world in the not too distant future, we will see what an immense number of lower races will be destroyed throughout the world by more highly developed races!
Haeckel emphasized the physical similarity of people and animals, and considered human thought to be just a physiological process. His comparative embryology transformed man from a special creature into one of the innumerable members of the animal kingdom.
In 1904, in addition to his bestseller The Mysteries of the World, Haeckel published the book Bizarre Forms of Nature. It proclaimed that newborns are born deaf and devoid of consciousness - from which the author further concluded that at birth a person has neither a soul nor a spirit. Haeckel advocated the killing of newborns with pathology or mutilation. He called it an "act of mercy" - as well as the killing of any terminally ill or handicapped person:
“Modern society artificially supports the lives of hundreds of thousands of incurable people - crazy people, lepers, cancer patients, and so on. Their suffering is diligently prolonged, without benefiting either them or society as a whole ... With a total population of three hundred and ninety million people in Europe, at least two million are mentally ill people, of which more than two hundred thousand are incurable. How much suffering for the patients themselves, how much adversity and grief for their loved ones, how much personal and social expenses! How much suffering and waste could be saved if people finally decided to free the terminally ill from indescribable torture with just one dose of morphine!
In his controversial but groundbreaking study (1971), Daniel Gasman reminds us of Hegel's words about what his conclusions were based on:
“The Spartans carried out a thorough examination and selection of all newborns. The weak, sick, or suffering from some physical infirmity were killed. Only perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and only they subsequently continued the race.
Haeckel was ahead of Hitler in promoting the Spartan worldview of "nature over care" - and therefore is directly responsible for the Nazi atrocities.
From infanticide, “corporal” science and “corporal” law moved on to substantiating the legitimacy of the extermination of entire peoples:
"... morphological differences between two generally recognized species - for example, sheep and goats - are much less significant than ... between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race."
Haeckel divided people into two categories - "curly" and "straight-haired". The former, in his opinion, were "incapable of real internal culture and higher intellectual development." And "the symmetry of all parts of the body and that harmonious development, which we consider integral to the perfect human beauty", according to Haeckel, could only be found among the Aryans.
“The mental activity of savages has risen not much higher than highly developed mammals, especially primates, with which they are united by genealogical relationship. All their interests are reduced to the physiological needs of nutrition and reproduction, or the satisfaction of hunger or thirst in the crudest animal form ... one can speak of their intelligence no more (or no less) than the intelligence of the most intelligent animals.
“... such lower races as the Vedas or the Australian Negroes are psychologically closer to mammals - primates and dogs - than to civilized Europeans. Therefore, we must give their life a completely different value ... their only interests are food and reproduction ... many highly developed animals, especially monogamous mammals and birds, have risen to a higher stage of development than the lower savages.
Already more than half a century ago, anthropologists rejected Haeckel's racist drawings of the brain, skulls, faces (Figure 4), ears and hands of representatives of human races and primates. "Embryology" began to be called "developmental biology", trying to get rid of not only the scandalous episode in the history of this science, but also from its original name. Entwicklungsgeschichte(evolutionary history of organisms).
With the recent emergence of methods for growing embryonic cells, it has become clear that the idea of embryological recapitulation is still alive (despite emerging stem cell legislation affecting the use of fertilized embryos for scientific purposes and regulating the activities of transnational corporations). An example is the widely circulated university textbook by Gerhart and Kirschner, which talks about the "ability to develop" and the need to transform the "unipolar Haeckel model" into a "bipolar Haeckel", "two-dimensional Haeckel" and "three-dimensional Haeckel model". Obviously, no one was going to reject the idea of recapitulation. It has taken root as a scientific myth.
Fascism is a heterogeneous political movement associated with events such as World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, and the October Revolution. He was also influenced by the pervasive Haeckel heritage.
Daniel Gasman is criticized for misinterpreting Haeckel's ideas in his aforementioned work: in particular, he was unable to find direct references to the writings of Ernst Haeckel in the documents of the Nazi aristocracy. Nevertheless, Gasman shows that "Hackelism" influenced a wide range of widely separated currents - from National Socialism to Marxism, from psychoanalysis to Theosophy and the movement of free thought. Even German liberal theology and the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner are built on the shaky scientific foundation of Haeckelian evolutionism.
Richard Wyckart's book From Darwin to Hitler (2004) complements Gasman's research. It tells how the Nazis sought to hush up passages that they did not want in Haeckel's works - in particular, the fact that Haeckel spoke out in favor of homosexuality, pacifism and feminism. In his analytical work, Gasman does not criticize Darwinism, because he does not consider Haeckel a real Darwinist. According to Gasman, Nazi ideology could only echo Darwinism by pure chance, but in relation to "Hackelism" it is its natural consequence. (Indeed, Haeckel wrote a lot about natural selection, although he also adhered to Lamarckism; at the same time, Darwin considered him his like-minded person.) Weikart also writes about other people who influenced Nazi ideology - such as Friedrich Ratzel, Ludwig Woltmann, Theodor Fritsch, Alfred Ploetz, Dietrich Eckart.
Haeckel skillfully felt the conjuncture. In The World's Riddles one can find the full range of arguments put forward against traditional values. Haeckel's drawings have become a source of inspiration for symbolist poets, modern art and the aesthetics of avant-garde modernism. "Haeckelianism" has a complex relationship with fascism, modernism, and positivism.
In Scandinavia, Darwinism, at least in its popular form, was essentially "Haeckelism." Haeckel's vulgar extrapolations - both verbal and visual - were easy to grasp. In 1907, before the first editions of the classic books of Haeckel and Darwin appeared in Finnish, a contemporary wrote:
“But even more zealous were his [Darwin's] supporters, especially the aforementioned Huxley from England and Ernst Haeckel from Germany. The latter especially contributed to the rapid spread of "Darwinism" on the European continent ... Without a doubt, it is to Haeckel that our general public owes their acquaintance with "Darwinism"» [emphasis added].
The influence that Haeckel's views and ideas had on his contemporaries can be judged by the following fact: recently, the Haeckel House Museum published a catalog of almost 40,000 letters sent to him and answers written by him. In addition, we found Haeckel's remarkable correspondence in Finland. In particular, Harry Federley, the founder of Finnish genetics and eugenics, caught our attention. Anthropology in Finland was not infected with racial hygiene. The topic of the correspondence was not “Sami”, “Gypsies”, “Jews”, etc.: instead, they discussed “degenerates”, “insane”, “crazy”, “alcoholics” and “criminals”.
A review of Haeckel's Swedish correspondence leads to the following conclusion:
“Serious criticism of Haeckel's ideas in letters is almost never found. Haeckel corresponded with many leading Swedish scientists and cultural figures, therefore, most likely, both the philosophical ideas of monism and Darwinism penetrated into Sweden due to the popularity of Haeckel's books.
Most of Haeckel's 39 Swedish correspondents were members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same one that elects Nobel laureates. Haeckel's followers here also held a variety of political persuasions.
When we talk about "Haeckelianism" we are reminded again and again of the words from 1 Corinthians 12:23: "And those who seem to us less noble in body, we take more care of them."
Directly opposite ideas were formed in the critical years of the spread of evolutionary ideology. It was a violent intellectual revolution. Along with this ideology, views were adopted that the current apologists for evolution would simply recoil from. Haeckel was lifted up to the "seat of Moses" and handed over to him the "keys of understanding." The biogenetic law, the linear evolution of cultures, the spontaneous generation of life, the denial of entropy, and Lamarckian mechanisms tipped the scales in favor of the theory of evolution.
Were Haeckel's drawings a deliberate falsification, or did he himself not notice his own desires to wishful thinking? Hard to say. However, one thing is clear: Haeckel's materialism and outright anti-Christian and anti-Semitic rhetoric were in demand. Haeckel's teaching was accepted almost as a heuristic principle, not limited to embryos and recapitulation.
Ernst Haeckel was a Darwinian demagogue, and the scientific community has been criminally frivolous in reproducing his falsifications. The "self-regulation" of the process of scientific research may allow you to correct some minor errors, but it is too liberal in terms of errors made in order to prove the "necessary" theory. As a result, scientists only strain the mosquito, while swallowing the camel.
Has Haeckelism succeeded in conquering other countries as well? This can be evidenced by the huge number of still unexamined letters stored in the archives of the Haeckel House Museum in Jena.
The birth of ecology is associated with the name of the German scientist Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919). Studying at three universities (Berlin, Würzburg and Vienna), he had the opportunity to get a thorough education, listening to the lectures of outstanding teachers. At the University of Berlin, Haeckel worked at the chair of Johann Müller (1801 - 1858), a well-known researcher in comparative physiology, anatomy and embryology of marine invertebrates and an outstanding teacher who instilled in Haeckel an interest in the study of marine fauna. In 1861, Haeckel received a position as Privatdozent at the Department of Comparative Anatomy in Jena, and in 1862, after defending his dissertation, he became an ordinary professor in this department. All further life of Haeckel was connected with Jena.
E. Haeckel made many trips: around the Mediterranean (1859-1860), to the Canary Islands (1866-1867) together with his assistant N.N. Miklukho-Maclay (Russian traveler and scientist), to Norway (1869), to the Red Sea (1873), Ceylon (1881 - 1882), Sumatra. E. Haeckel is known to biologists as a scientist who widely promoted the formulated J.L. Agassiz famous triad - "the principle of triple parallelism": phylogenetic schemes, genealogical trees should be built on the basis of a combination of comparative anatomical, comparative embryological and paleontological studies. In the two-volume "General Morphology of Organisms" (1866), Haeckel not only introduces into scientific use the now generally accepted terms "ontogeny" (individual development) and "phylogenesis" (historical development), but also formulates the "basic biogenetic law", according to which ontogenesis is a short and condensed repetition (recapitulation) of phylogenesis.
E. Haeckel's theory of Gastreya, as one of the theories of the colonial origin of multicellular organisms, had many unfounded assumptions and is currently of only historical interest to science. In his own specific studies on the system and phylogeny of radiolarians, calcareous sponges, jellyfish, Haeckel not only demonstrated the productivity of the methods of phylogenetic analysis developed by him, but also how the artist was able to show the beauty and diversity of life forms. In all the old universities of the world, the teaching of the course of zoology begins with a demonstration of Haeckel's drawings of radiolarians, striking in accuracy and beauty.
But the merit of E. Haeckel in the context of presenting the history of ecology is that he was the first to introduce the term "ecology" into scientific use, gave a clear definition of its content. The term was introduced in 1866 in the book of the scientist “General Morphology of Organisms”, in which E. Haeckel gave his definition of ecology as a science: “By ecology we mean the general science of the relationship of organisms with the environment, where we refer in a broad sense to all conditions existence." Speaking of "organisms", E. Haeckel, as was customary then, did not mean individual individuals, but considered organisms as representatives of specific species.
The main direction formulated by E. Haeckel corresponds to the modern understanding of autecology, i.e., the ecology of individual species. For a long time, the main development of ecology was in line with the autecological approach. Its development was greatly influenced by the theory of Charles Darwin, which showed the need to study the natural totality of plant and animal species that are continuously rebuilt in the process of adaptation to environmental conditions, which is the basis of the evolutionary process.
As shown above, when formulating the concept of ecology as a new science, E. Haeckel built it on the basis of a large amount of factual material accumulated in biology during its long development. During the entire previous period of the formation of biological knowledge, there was an accumulation of not only descriptions of individual species, but also materials on their way of life, individual generalizations. So, back in 1798, T. Malthus described the equation of exponential population growth, on the basis of which he built his demographic concepts. The logistic growth equation was proposed by P.F. Verhulst-Pearl in 1838. J.B. Lamarck in "Hydrogeology" actually anticipated the concept of the biosphere. The French physician W. Edwards (1824) published the book The Influence of Physical Factors on Life, which laid the foundation for ecological and comparative physiology, and J. Liebig (1840) formulated the famous Law of the Minimum, which has not lost its significance in modern ecology.
Ernst Haeckel Awards
1900 - Darwin Medal
1864 - Kotenius Medal
1894 - Linnaeus Medal
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was born on February 16, 1834 in Potsdam, Germany. The boy studied at the Cathedral High School in Merseburg. After leaving school in 1852, the young man continued his medical studies in Berlin and Würzburg. Later, he entered the University of Jena, where, under the guidance of Karl Gegenbaur, he defended his doctoral dissertation in zoology. As a student, Haeckel showed an interest in embryology. In 1857 he received the degree of doctor of medicine and received a license to engage in his own practice. But the profession of a doctor ceased to please Haeckel immediately after he met his first patients.
In 1863, Haeckel gave a public speech on Darwinism at a meeting of the German Scientific Society. Three years later, the scientist's book "General Morphology of Organisms" was published, which was a generalization of Darwin's idea, German philosophy of nature and Lamarck's evolutionary theory, which Ernst accordingly called "Darwinismus". The author used morphology for a new interpretation of the theory of evolution due to the fact that there were not enough organic remains for the development of embryology, which can be used as evidence of kinship.
The scientist even went further and argued that the origin of mankind can be traced back to South Asia, where the first people come from. Ernst believed that primates from South Asia had a strong resemblance to humans, and also abandoned Darwin's idea that the primates of Africa had a resemblance to humans. Haeckel believed that part of the ancient continent of Gondwana in the Indian Ocean was the source of human development, which later moved to other parts of the world. In his book History of Creation, Haeckel describes the migration routes that the first people used when they got out of Gondwana.
Further, in 1886, Haeckel developed a theory of the origin of multicellular organisms: the gastrula theory. Further, he formulated the biogenetic law, according to which the main stages of its evolution are, as it were, reproduced in the individual development of an organism. The first genealogical tree of the animal kingdom is also attributed to the merits of the German scientist. Continuing his zoological research in the laboratory and during expeditions to Madeira, Ceylon, Egypt and Algeria, Ernst published monographs on radiolarians, deep-sea jellyfish, siphonophores, deep-sea anglerfish, as well as his last systematic work: Systematic Phylogeny.
After 1891, Haeckel completely devoted himself to the development of the philosophical aspects of evolutionary theory. The scientist becomes a passionate admirer of "monism": scientific and philosophical theory, designed, in his opinion, to replace religion. Later he founded the Monist League.
During his life, Ernst published many works, introduced the terms "Pithecanthropus", "ontogeny" and "phylogenesis" into science. Exploring the marine fauna on expeditions, he discovered more than a hundred species of radiolarians. Haeckel was among the first German zoologists who joined Darwin's theory. Supporting the evolutionary theory in his research, he tried to determine the system of development of the animal kingdom, formulated the biogenetic law and the theory of the origin of multicellular organisms.
In 1913, with the French socialist Henriette Meyer, he founded the Franco-German Institute for Reconciliation, in an editorial titled "Reason and War" to the printed organ of which he condemned the arms race and national chauvinism that plagued Germany, France and Great Britain. It is believed that the German scientist was the first to use the term "world war" shortly after it began.
Ernst Haeckel Awards
1900 - Darwin Medal
1864 - Kotenius Medal
1908 - Darwin - Wallace Medal
Known as the "Darwin Bulldog of the Continent" and the "Huxley of Germany", Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a scientist who constantly cheated to promote the theory of evolution.
Haeckel was born on February 16, 1834 in Potsdam, Prussia (modern Germany). He studied medicine and other sciences at Würzburg and the University of Berlin. From 1865 until his retirement in 1909 he was professor of zoology at Jena. The turning point in his thinking came after he read Charles Darwin's work " Origin of Species”, which was translated into German in 1860.
In a letter to his mistress, written when he was 64 years old (it was then that he received the nickname "The Horsefly of Jena"), he says that at first he was a Christian, but after studying evolution he became a freethinker and pantheist.
Darwin believed that it was Haeckel's enthusiastic dissemination of the doctrine of organic evolution that ensured the success of the theory of evolution in Germany. Ian Taylor writes:
"He (Haeckel) became the main supporter of Darwin in Europe, who proclaimed the evolutionary doctrine with the fervor of an evangelist not only to the intelligentsia, but also to the common people through popular books and to the working class through lectures in rented halls."
During these lectures, he used numerous posters showing embryos, skeletons, and so on. As a result, his performances were often called "Darwin's passions"!
Haeckel's enthusiasm for the theory of evolution led him to fraudulently fabricate "data" that supported his views. He was the first person to draw an evolutionary "family tree" of humanity. In order to plug the apparently gaping hole between inorganic non-living matter and the first signs of life, he created a whole series of images of tiny protoplasmic organisms, which he named Monera. According to him, these organisms:
Haeckel's depiction of the mode of feeding and reproductive cycle of the supposed Moner species, to which he gave the scientific name Pseudopodia ( ), as stated in his book titled " Creation story". The intricacy of the drawing indicates the extent of his fraud, since Moneron did not exist either in the past or in the present!
In 1868, a prestigious German scientific journal allocated 73 pages for Haeckel's theory, which also included more than 30 drawings of this imaginary species. Monera(as well as the scientific names of other organisms, such as proto-amoeba, Protamoeba primitivia). The drawings also depicted the cell-splitting process by which these species allegedly reproduced, despite the fact that its detailed descriptions and carefully drawn drawings were completely fictional, since these "particles of life" never existed.
Later that same year, Thomas Huxley, an ardent advocate of Darwin in England, reported that he had discovered something that was similar to the species described by Haeckel. This is something Huxley discovered in samples of silt preserved in alcohol, which was obtained from the bottom of the North Atlantic. Huxley named his find Bathybius haeckelii.
Unfortunately for Huxley, Haeckel, the Moner species and the theory of evolution, in 1875 a chemist aboard an expeditionary ship discovered that these dubious samples of protoplasm turned out to be nothing more than amorphous lime sulphate precipitated from seawater with alcohol! Haeckel refused to accept this proof that proved him wrong, and for 50 years he continued to mislead people with uncorrected reprints of his popular book entitled " Creation story» (1876), which contained images of Moner. Changes were made only in the last edition in 1923.
A story about or "monkey man dumb" is nothing more than a product of Haeckel's imagination.
Human thinking was much more important to Haeckel than facts and data. In his opinion, the only thing that distinguished a man from a monkey was his ability to talk. Therefore, he suggested the existence of an intermediate link between ape and man, which he called (ape-man, speechless) and even asked the artist, Gabriel Max, to draw this imaginary creature, despite the fact that he did not have no data, which might help compose an example image.
Haeckel's contemporary, Professor Rudolf Virchow (the founder of cellular pathology and for many years president of the Berlin Anthropological Society), sharply criticized Haeckel's theory. He believed that giving a zoological name to a creature whose reality no one has proven is a huge mockery of science.
In the last century, the Dutch scientist, Professor G. H. R. von Koeningswald, described the drawing as follows:
“Under a tree, cross-legged, sits a woman with long, sleek hair, holding a child in her arms. She has a flat nose, thick lips, large feet, and her big toe is noticeably shorter than her other toes. Next to her is her husband, with a sagging belly and a low forehead. His back is densely covered with hair. He looks benevolent and stupid, with the suspicious look of a drunkard on his face. They must be happy together; they don’t quarrel, because neither of them can talk.”
No such confirmed "missing link" has ever been found.
Of all Haeckel's dubious deeds for which he is most famous, spreading the completely false theory that he is completely similar to the embryos of all mammals, and then goes through a stage where he has gills like a fish, a tail like a monkeys, etc. This idea, sometimes called the "law of recapitulation" or, in Haeckel's own words, the "biogenetic law," is the basis of the famous phrase "ontogeny repeats phylogeny," meaning that the development of an individual embryo repeats the whole dubious evolutionary history.
Drawings fabricated by Haeckel of dog and human embryos placed in the book "History of Creation".
Real images of dog (4th week of development) and human (4th week of development) embryos, edited by Ecker. Comparing with the drawings above, one can see to what extent Haeckel fraudulently altered the images.
The first thing to note about this saying is that this "law" is not! Today it is already known that this idea is completely false. And therefore it is not surprising that Haeckel could not find suitable anatomical evidence to support his theory. Haeckel couldn't let the lack of evidence get in his way, so he came up with a "proof" by shamelessly altering drawings of embryos made by two other scientists.
In his book entitled " Natural Creation History”, published in Germany in 1868 (and in England in 1876 under the title “ Creation story”), Haeckel used a drawing of an embryo aged 25 days, which had previously been published by T.L.W. Bischoff in 1945, and a drawing of a human embryo aged 4 weeks, published by A. Ecker in 1851–59. This deception was revealed by Wilhelm Hees (1831-1904), a well-known scientist in the field of comparative embryology at that time and professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig.
The resentment in German scientific circles was enormous, and Haeckel realized that he could no longer remain silent. In a letter to the newspaper Münchener Allegemeine Zeitung, (an international weekly publication on science, art and technology) in the issue of January 9, 1909, Haeckel (translated from German) wrote:
“... a tiny fraction of my drawings of embryos (probably 6 or 8 out of a hundred) are indeed (according to Dr. Brass, one of his critics) “forged” - at the time of compiling these drawings, the material identified for examination was so insufficient, that I had no choice but to reconstruct the sequence of stages of development in order to fill in the gaps in the hypothesis and, by comparative synthesis, restore new missing links. What difficulties the compiler of drawings faces and how easily he can make a mistake in doing so, only an embryologist can judge.
Astute readers who compare Haeckel's fabricated images of dog and human embryos with images of natural embryos (see photos) will easily understand that Haeckel's "confession" was in itself a deliberate distortion of facts and, in essence, an attempt to justify and forever preserve in history his shameful false drawings.
Despite this completely deceitful and very harmful basis for the theory of embryonic recapitulation and the fact that science itself refutes this basis, the absolutely false idea that the human embryo in the mother's womb repeats its evolutionary past has been invested in the minds of schoolchildren and students as proof of evolution, and is still included in many popular science books.
But what's worse is that an argument like "the fetus is still in the fish stage, so you're just killing the fish" and is still used to this day by abortion doctors to convince young women and girls that it is okay to kill an unborn child.
Concerning this, Dr. Henry Morris writes:
"We can legitimately blame the killing of millions of defenseless, unborn children on this evolutionary recapitulation nonsense - or at least on the evolutionists' pseudoscientific rationale for it." /span>
Unfortunately, in spite of all his heinous actions, Haeckel had a great deal of success in Germany, not only because his ideas made evolution look like an origin story, but also because he infected the people of Germany with a unique form of social Darwinism and racism. "He became one of the main ideologists in Germany of racism, nationalism and imperialism".
This led to the view that the Germans were members of a biologically superior society (similar to Nietzsche's "supermen").
Unfortunately for all of mankind, Haeckel's evolutionism laid the foundation for militarism in Germany, which ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. And then,
"Social Darwinism, racism, militarism and imperialism eventually culminated in Nazi Germany under the monstrous leadership of Adolf Hitler...Hitler himself became the chief evolutionist, and Nazism the chief fruit of the evolutionary tree."
Thus, through his obsession with the anti-divine principles of evolution and his scandalous forgery of false data, Haeckel became a source of bad influence and destructive inspiration, which indirectly caused the outbreak of two world wars and the brutality of the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.
The German naturalist and philosopher Ernst Heinrich Haeckel was an ambiguous and, to some extent, scandalous personality. He was fond of bold theories, made discoveries, was accused of falsification, became the theorist of scientific racism and the founder of the science of ecology.
Ernst Haeckel was born in 1834 in the Prussian city of Potsdam. In his youth, he studied at three universities, studying medicine and natural science. Later, he never associated himself with medical practice and devoted himself to the study of wildlife and the development of various theories related to the origin and development of life.
Haeckel traveled extensively in the Mediterranean, Asia and Northern Europe, collecting material for scientific work. As a result of his trips, he discovered about 120 species of radiolarians, published monographs on these unicellular organisms, as well as jellyfish, some deep-sea fish and other interesting organisms.
One of his books, The Beauty of Forms in Nature, has more influence on art than science. This is a lithographic edition, which contained 100 prints with images of mosses, orchids, mollusks, radiolarians, bats, lizards, made according to the sketches of Ernst Haeckel himself. The publication was appreciated by architects, sculptors and modern artists, many of whom parodied or were inspired by his illustrations.
Throughout his scientific career, the researcher published about 26 papers, he taught at the university and received four awards for his contribution to the fields of biology and natural science. One of Haeckel's students was the anthropologist and biologist Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay.
Studying the life and structure of various organisms, the scientist drew attention to the important role of the habitat. He believed that living beings are formed and developed under the influence of external conditions to which they must adapt.
Of course, Ernst Haeckel was not the first person to notice the connection between habits, the external form of organisms, and habitat. Lamarck, Zimmermann, Boyle and even Aristotle were interested in these questions before him. However, it was Haeckel who introduced the concept of "ecology" in his work "The General Morphology of Organisms" and substantiated this direction as a new scientific direction.
The scientific activity and worldview of Ernst Haeckel was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory. He supported and developed this topic in every possible way - he made presentations on Darwinism, and outlined his vision of the concept in the works "General Morphology of Organisms", "Natural History of the World Creation", "Anthropogeny".
Exploring the problems of evolution, the scientist developed his own hypothesis - the "theory of gastrea". On its basis, Ernst Haeckel introduced the definition of the biogenetic law, later called the Haeckel-Müller law. According to it, every living organism in its individual development repeats those basic forms that its species passed through at the stages of evolution. The scientist argued that all embryos are similar and have features of distant ancestors (for example, they have a tail, gills, etc.), but as they develop, they increasingly acquire individual features characteristic of the modern species.
As proof of the biogenetic law, he cited his own illustrations depicting the development of embryos of various animal species. They clearly demonstrated the similarity of forms at the initial stage of development of organisms. For a long time, Haeckel's theory was considered expedient and completely correct. But over time, it was expanded, and some of its provisions were refuted.
The activities of Ernst Haeckel made a significant contribution to the development of science, but it cannot be called unambiguous. The scientist was often criticized and accused of falsifying certain facts in order to justify his own conjectures and assumptions. Thus, the journals Anatomy and Embryology and Science in 1997 and the journal Natural History in 2000 claimed that Haeckel falsified his drawings and did not indicate many important details on them that refute his theory. In turn, the journal Biology & Philosoph came out in support of the scientist and accused other publications of manipulation.
The philosophical views of Haeckel were also criticized. Developing the theme of evolution, he became fascinated with the idea that the human races descended from different ancestors and formed in different places. His statements were quickly taken up by racist propagandists and contributed to the spread of Nazism.
