Haekel, Ernst (1834-1919) -- from Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography

Portions of this entry contributed by Steve Pappas

Portions of this entry contributed by Michel Barran

German zoologist, biologist, and philosopher who was born in Potsdam, Prussia. He studied medicine at the Universities of Würzburg, Vienna, and Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in medicine in 1858. He was a lecturer in comparative anatomy (1861-1865), then professor of zoology at Jena (1865-1909). He worked quickly and intensively and was a member of more than ninety learned societies and scientific associations, ranging from the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Vienna (1872) to the American Philosophical Society (1885). He undertook scientific expeditions in Mediterranean (1859-1860), where he discovered 144 radiolarian species, to the Canary Island (1866-1867), Red Sea (1873), Ceylon (1881-1882), Java (1900-1901), and so on.

Haeckel's zoological works included descriptions of approximately 4000 new species of lower marine animals, mainly radiolarians, medusae, and sponges. He was immediately converted to Darwinism upon reading On the Origin of Species, and was the first German advocate of organic evolution. He developed Haeckel's law of recapitulation according to "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," and was first to draw up a genealogical tree relating the various orders of animals. As philosopher he was an exponent of monistic philosophy, which postulated a totally materialistic view of life as unity and which he presented as a necessary consequence of the theory of evolution.

Haeckel's contributions to zoological science were a mixture of sound research and speculations often with insufficient evidence (including use of forged drawings). His law is now discredited and some of his theses became a part of the pseudoscientific basis for Nazism. Nevertheless, other ideas of Haeckel are still accepted, one of them being his view that the origin of life lies in the chemical and physical factors of the environment, theory shown to be likely by works of Miller and Urey (1953). Lastly it's perhaps interesting to mention that he coined the word "ecology""(to mean the study of living organisms in relation to one another and the inanimate environment) and also words as phylum, phylogeny, chorology, and the term Pithecanthropus.

Haeckel's greatest discovery was the observation that early embryos of different species resembled each other, and one of his most important theories was the recapitulation doctrine, which maintains that the development of the individual organism obeys the same laws as the development of the whole animal species. Unfortunately, Haeckel's work was exposed as fraudulent more than 100 years ago. In his book Natural History of Creation (Natürliche Schopfungsgeschichte), published in 1868, he included woodcut prints represented as embryos of various animals to support the idea that during development, an embryo recapitulated its supposed evolutionary history, hypothetically from single celled organism through fish, amphibian, "lower mammals," to final progeny. On page 240, Haeckel placed woodcut prints of dog and human embryos. He stated that he obtained the dog embryo print from Bischoff's earlier work. On page 249, he placed woodcut prints which he stated were of tortoise, chicken, and dog. Haeckel stated that the actual embryos possessed the same likeness represented in the woodcuts. In fact, they were all fraudulently printed from the same woodcut.

L. Rutimeyer, a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy, at the University of Basel, reviewed Haeckel's work and exposed the fraud (Rutimeyer 1868). He stated, "There is considerable manufacturing of scientific evidence perpetrated. Yet the author has been very careful not to let the reader become aware of this state of affairs" Rutimeyer showed that the prints of dog and human embryo were not simply similar, but were one and the same woodcut print. He also pointed out that the prints of tortoise, chicken, and dog were also from the same woodcut print. As evidence, he looked up the Bischoff dog embryo print that Haeckel claimed he obtained from Bischoff and showed that it did not look like the one published by Haeckel alongside the supposedly human embryo (the two of which were identical). Others who joined in the exposé were Wilhelm His and Albert Fleischmann. His, an anatomist, also commented on the print fakery mentioned above and others he noted on pages 256-257 of Natural History of Creation. He added that Haeckel published further fraudulent prints in Anthropogenie, in which human blastulae were represented showing allantois, whereas this structure does not appear at this stage of development.

In response to his critics, Haeckel replied that he was only trying to make them more accurate than the faulty specimens on which they were based, thus admitting that the prints were not representative of the true specimens and inadvertently admitting his fraud (Milner 1990, p. 206). Though his fraud, comparable to the Piltdown hoax, has been known to the scientific community for over 100 years, the exposures were not translated from German into English. The zeal with which the evolutionary community of the period was willing to accept any support for Darwinism unfortunately resulted in widespread propagation of Haeckel's work, but as quietly received the fraud exposure as it later did the Piltdown exposure. Unfortunately, many of the zealots preferred to let fraud exposures die out quietly rather than vocally admit that many scientists unquestioningly accepted and science writers wrote textbook chapters based on fraudulent information. Because science text writers typically pass on matter already well publicized in previous texts and are not within the inner circle of those conversant in the field, Haeckel's frauds and evolutionary concepts based on these frauds are still unfortunately included as fact in many science textbooks in U.S. school systems in the 1990s.

Darwin (Charles), His

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