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Beauty Beyond Belief

Natural History, Dec, 1998 by James Hanken

The art of Ernst Haeckel transcends his controversial scientific ideas.

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Nineteenth-century German morphologist, embryologist, natural philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel must surely be counted as one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of evolutionary biology. To some a genius, to others a bigoted zealot and fraudulent scientist, Haeckel was arguably, next to Darwin, the dominant intellectual figure of his time. His writings and lectures ranged widely, touching on everything from microscopic unicellular forms of organisms to larger and more complex animals and plants, the evolution of humans and human culture, and the philosophical relationship between mind and matter. Many of his scientific ideas engendered vigorous debate at the time and were often more widely accepted by his lay audience than by his more critical colleagues, but his overall influence on biological research was enormously stimulating. Haeckel's forays into social theory had less benign consequences, however. He treated evolutionary biology almost as a religion and believed that just as one could apply the concept of natural selection to animals and plants, one could also determine which groups of humans were superior. Offering intellectual justification and "scientific" support for racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics, his ideas were later a major ideological influence on the National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazis.

Haeckel coined several scientific terms in use today, including ecology and phylogeny, but among students of biology, he is principally known as the author of the biogenetic law. Commonly summarized as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," it posits that the embryonic stages in the development of an individual (its ontogeny) repeat the evolutionary history of its ancestors (its phylogeny). Haeckel thought that if you could watch a vertebrate embryo develop, you would see it pass through the adult forms of its ancestors in the order in which they evolved. A corollary of the biogenetic law is the idea that new evolutionary features are typically added at the end of development, with formerly adult, or "terminal," stages gradually being compressed into progressively earlier stages (or sometimes being eliminated outright).

Biologists today regard the similarity between some living embryos and their putative adult ancestors as more apparent than real. And where it does exist, they see it as due most likely to the retention of basic embryonic features among a group of related organisms. Furthermore, in this century, science has accumulated many examples of natural selection's acting principally on early stages of development, proving that "terminal addition" cannot be the sole, or even the principal, mode of evolutionary change. Nevertheless, Haeckel's vital role in drawing professional and popular attention to the fundamental importance of development in evolution remains undisputed.

For better or, as it sometimes turned out, for worse, Haeckel the thinker was inextricably entwined with Haeckel the artist. A talented craftsman and painter, he contributed many of the figures and plates that illustrate his numerous writings on biology. Indeed, his 1874 depiction of comparable embryonic stages in humans and other vertebrates may be the single most familiar illustration in the history of biology. A prolific landscape artist as well, Haeckel produced hundreds of watercolors and oil paintings during his extensive travels; many of his tropical landscapes were published in 1905 in Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures). The culmination of his career as a scientific illustrator, however, came a year earlier, with the publication of Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), a collection of one hundred lithographic plates, including elaborate and ornate depictions of a wide variety of single-celled organisms, plants, and animals.

Combining science and art in the study of natural history was not unusual in Haeckel's day. Art historian Beryl Hartley has noted, for example, that beginning in the early nineteenth century, Western landscape painters worked hard to accurately portray individual species of trees and other natural features. The British painter John Constable epitomized the thinking behind this approach when, in 1836, he asked why "landscape painting should not be considered as a branch of natural philosophy of which paintings are but experiments." Equally (if not more) important to Haeckel's art was his fervent belief in evolutionary monism, an extreme worldview that purported to have found in Darwinism the unifying principle for all of life. With its romantic and, at times, mystical notions, monism encouraged artistic expression as a means of venerating the natural world.

But the enormous intensity and energy with which Haeckel promoted many of his theories frequently overreached their limited empirical foundations, as many of his contemporaries pointed out. Some of the leading embryologists and anatomists of the time, for example, criticized his depictions of vertebrate embryos, considering them fraudulent. In 1868, Ludwig Rutimeyer, a paleontologist at the University of Basel, demonstrated that Haeckel had used the same illustration for embryos of at least three different species.

Beauty Beyond Belief

Natural History, Dec, 1998 by James Hanken

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