Abstract
In the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) (General Morphology of Organisms), the two men interacted like comrades in arms, leading the theory of evolution to victory in the international arena. This relationship broke up during the early decades of the twentieth century. The cause was primarily political, not scientific, and was brought about by the nationalistic mobilization of scientists that accompanied WW I and the Russian Revolution. In the course of these military and political upheavals, national flags were wrapped around different approaches to evolutionary biology. Darwinian natural selection became Anglified, Haeckelian morphology was Germanified, and in the Soviet Union, a Marxist version of Darwinian theory took root. The process of break-up was further affected by the emergence of Nazi ideology.
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Notes
Much of the same that was written about Darwin in the Generelle Morphologie der Organismen was repeated in the many editions of Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Die Welträtsel, and also in his Anthropogenie.
For a lucid and spirited debate between Robert J. Richards (Darwin was substantively influenced by German Romantic biology) and Michael Ruse (Darwin was pure-bred British), see their Richards and Ruse (2016).
The existence and importance of national research traditions in evolutionary biology, especially with respect to Germany’s contributions, are discussed in detail by Levit and Hoßfeld (2017).
I deal here with broad categories of evolutionary theory that have found large followings, not with idiosyncratic, for the most part individualistic interpretations of evolution. For a variety of alternative evolution theories, see Hoßfeld et al. (2008).
For more on the term “structuralist”/”structuralism” in evolutionary biology, see among others Webster and Goodwin 1982. It contains much of value, but the choice of Hans Driesch as a typical structuralist is in my view infelicitous.
At the time, structuralist evolution theory was not known by this name nor during much of the nineteenth century. The absence of the name, however, need not subtract from its conceptual distinctiveness. Also the term “evolution,” in the sense of “the natural origin of species,” did not become current until through the second half of the nineteenth century, and before that time had the creationist meaning of “preformation,” also in the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The more commonly used, contemporaneous terms for what we now refer to as “structuralist evolution” was “law-like (progressive) development” or “nomogenesis,” the latter term coined by Owen (Rupke 2009, 173, 177). Also “formalist” or “morphological” have been in circulation as synonyms of “structuralist,” which itself only gained common currency through the post-WW II period, helped along by trend-setters such as Stephen Jay Gould, the title of whose last major work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), flirted with the notion of “the structure of evolution,” i.e., “structuralist evolution”.
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This article is a contribution to the Special Issue Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919): The German Darwin and his impact on modern biology—Guest Editors: U. Hossfeld, G. S. Levit, U. Kutschera.
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Rupke, N. The break-up between Darwin and Haeckel. Theory Biosci. 138, 113–117 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00283-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00283-5