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Ernst Haeckel not only promoted, defended, and elaborated upon Charles Darwin’s theory, but also unified biology within a historical framework and developed a practical program of research into phylogeny. This chapter examines Haeckel’s indebtedness to both Darwin and Heinrich Georg Bronn, his responses to Bronn’s challenges, and his differences from the older morphological tradition. Haeckel read Bronn’s German translation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1861 and came up with a complete system of evolution, morphology, systematics, and monist philosophy, detailed in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General morphology of organisms), five years later. This chapter also looks at Haeckel’s collaboration with Carl Gegenbaur on a program of evolutionary morphology, his introduction to Darwinism in 1860, and his views on adaptation, heredity, creativity, and constraint. In addition, it considers his views on the Gastraea theory and his answers to the arguments of Karl Ernst von Baer regarding species transformation.

This chapter focuses on champions of Darwin's evolutionary theory, the most prominent being Thomas Henry Huxley in the UK and Ernst Haeckel in Germany. Topics discussed include man's place in nature, natural theology and agnosticism, archetype and idealism, ontogeny and phylogeny, and the philosophical and religious implications of Darwinism.

Historical accounts of the accomplishments of Ernst Haeckel have not been kind. He has been frequently dismissed as derailing Darwin’s theory by focusing only on phylogenetics and systematics, and by even committing fraud in conducting his embryological analyses. He was, with little doubt, a provocative and redoubtable polemicist. Yet he drew to his small outpost in Jena students who would become the most notable biologists of the next generation. His magnetic power resided in his inventiveness as a research scientist and innovator of methods, a scientist willing to push beyond the current horizon. Whereas Darwin, in the German context, had been thought only to argue that evolution was possible, Haeckel set out to demonstrate through experimentation and experimental observation that it was real. Moreover, he would show another side of the evolutionary process by revealing through extraordinary artistic works the beauties of nature – a romantic and even dream-like endeavor. In doing so, Haeckel literally painted new horizons for biology, ones which seemed to his contemporaries, among them Darwin, almost fantastical. Ultimately, however, more individuals learned of evolutionary theory through his voluminous works than from any other author, including Darwin himself. This chapter asks, how and why?

This chapter examines how the disputes which dominated the theological arena in Germany were mirrored in the philosophical debates with which many theologians were occupied in the first decades of the 20th century. These disputes include questions about the extent to which religion was sui generis and the extent to which it shared its epistemology with other forms of knowledge. This chapter discusses the theological appropriation of Kantian philosophy by post-Ritschlian theologians, the materialistic or naturalistic philosophy of Ernst Haeckel, and Ernst Troeltsch's criticism on Haeckel's gospel of monism.

Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859 and sent complimentary copies to perhaps a dozen German scientists. One of those who received a copy was Heinrich Georg Bronn, Germany’s most prominent paleontologist, whose research had strangely paralleled that of Darwin. The two men were even consulting each other’s work at times in the 1840s. Bronn’s German translation of The Origin of Species appeared only a few months after the original. This book examines the translation and early interpretation of Darwin’s book and theory and how German Darwinism relates to his own version. It argues that Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s most famous German interpreter, followed Bronn very closely on important matters of interpretation and terminology concerning Darwinian evolution. In comparing German and British biology and Darwinism, the book juxtaposes Darwin and Bronn, their careers and intellectual commitments, before analyzing the Bronn translation and Haeckel’s use of it.

Chapter 11 discusses the neo-Kantian reception of Darwinism, which rose to power in Germany simultaneously with the neo-Kantian movement. It focuses first upon three figures who were especially important in forming the neo-Kantian attitude towards Darwinism: Lange, Meyer and Liebmann. A final section treats the neo-Kantian critique of Ernst Haeckel, the Darwinian apologist, as it appears in the writings of Friedrich Paulsen and Erich Adickes.

This book has examined the texts, the translation process, and especially the intellectual context in which Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was written and interpreted. The result is a very different picture, not only of Heinrich Georg Bronn and Ernst Haeckel but also of the older morphology with which they were associated. This new picture of Haeckel has implications for our understanding of later developments in evolution and evolutionary thought and sheds new light on his conflicts over “mechanistic” and experimental approaches to embryology, particularly with Wilhelm His or Wilhelm Roux, and with August Weismann. Haeckel’s dispute with Weismann to define and defend Darwinism persisted into the twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the golden age of Lamarckism in the period from 1866 until 1926. It focuses on Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and his generation, the generation after them, and the rival evolutionists who continued to refute or reconceive Lamarckism. Some of the nineteenth-century Lamarckians include Theodor Eimer, Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897), Alpheus Hyatt (1838–1902), and Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935).

This chapter examines the continuities and discontinuities from pre- to post-Darwinian biology in Germany and situates Heinrich Georg Bronn and Ernst Haeckel in between. It first describes the pre-Darwinian period and shows that early-nineteenth-century German biology was more than just about morphology, and that morphology was more than just about transcendentalism. It then considers the growth and diversification of natural history collections during the nineteenth century, along with the proliferation of comparative studies of anatomy and embryology. It offers a new interpretation of pre-Darwinian (and especially pre-Baerian) thought on evolution and morphology and looks at the common interests between Charles Darwin and the German scientists. In addition, the chapter discusses Bronn and Haeckel’s concern with establishing a Wissenschaft of life as well as their applications of Darwinism; the views of Immanuel Kant and Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer on the complexity of life; Johann Friedrich Meckel’s system of recapitulational embryology; and Karl Ernst von Baer’s work on descriptive embryology.

Chapter 4 documents Müller’s growing reputation among biological experts, focusing on Ernst Haeckel, Charles Darwin, and Alexander Agassiz. In Generelle Morphologie (1866), Haeckel utilized considerable material from Für Darwin but misinterpreted it with regard to crustacean phylogeny and its implicit criticisms of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. Müller argued that natural selection can alter every stage of development, thus invalidating the claim that ontogeny exactly recapitulates phylogeny. Darwin immediately incorporated material from Müller’s publications and correspondence into his publications (e.g., into six chapters of the fourth edition of Origin). Darwin understood most of Müller’s views and arguments, including the arguments against Haeckel’s biogenetic law. Their collaboration by correspondence continued until Darwin’s death, leading to major improvements in both men’s research and publications. Müller’s 1863–1868 correspondence with Alexander Agassiz persuaded Agassiz to part with his father Louis’s creationist stance.

This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and Audre Lorde’s TheCancer Journals reveal the stakes of this intra-activity as it pertains to the semio-material history of “the black female body,” reproductive function, and sex(uality) as linchpin and opposable limit of “the human” in scientific taxonomies and medical science, particularly that of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s highly aesthetic approach to evolutionary theory. Mutu’s art is notable for its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race via a reflexive methodological practice of collage, one that reframes the spectatorial encounter from that of a determinate Kantian linear teleological drama of subjects and objects to that of intra-active processes and indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a study of a reified object but of an intra-actional field that includes material objects but is not limited to them.

Chapter 3 examines the ontological implications of Troeltsch’s eschatological Absolute by considering his critique of pantheistic and monistic conceptions of the Absolute. Monism was an important philosophical force in early twentieth-century religion, popularized by writers such as Ernst Haeckel and radical preachers such as Carl Jatho. Beginning in his own lifetime, some interpreters considered Troeltsch himself a monist or even a sort of pantheist. This chapter clarifies Troeltsch’s commitment to a metaphysical dualism and transcendence by examining critiques of Troeltsch and his responses to them. It also provides an account of the theological context within which various misreadings of Troeltsch circulated.

This book examines theater's engagement with evolution from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentienth century. Focusing primarily on British and American drama, it shows how theater provides a particularly potent and fascinating example of scientific ideas making their way into culture because of its combination of liveness and immediacy, kinetic human bodies in action, and time working on two levels (“real” and “theatrical” time) and because of its sheer variety, from mainstream drama to comedies to street theater and the public lecture; from the expansive epic theater of George Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder to the spare minimalism of Samuel Beckett. The stage particularly embraced varieties of non-Darwinian evolution, from Lamarckism to Ernst Haeckel's monism to saltation, often to test scientific ideas in broader cultural contexts and with “a cavalier attitude toward comprehension.” This book considers plays and performances that explore evolution in ways that map onto a specific theme or motif under debate, such as extinction or sexual selection.

Chapter 6 considers how Blavatsky constructed science as a category and situates this construal within a world in which the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ science were more contested than they are today. The chapter demonstrates that Blavatsky’s conceptualisations of rebirth owe a considerable debt to the scientific theories under discussion at her time of writing. It explores her debt to the controversial physicists Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1909), her hostility towards the popular materialist monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), her hatred of Darwinism, and her preference for theories of evolution influenced by German Romanticism, such as the theories of orthogenesis proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817–1891), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and Darwin’s nemesis, Richard Owen (1804–1892).

The first chapter elaborates on the Introduction’s claim that the coming-of-age plot and the scientific model of recapitulation share basic structural features, drawing on the history and philosophy of Bildung in its artistic, scientific, and political forms, as well as on narrative models developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Brooks and Judith Roof. In addition, the chapter explains the mechanics of recapitulation theory and the models that replaced it between 1890 and 1940, notably those of Mendelian genetics and experimental embryology. It finally outlines how various scientific concepts relate to one another, and how they pertain to the literary works considered in subsequent chapters.

James Joyce's aesthetic interest in medicine becomes very apparent in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode. This chapter, which Joyce wrote between February and May 1920, cultivates associative readings of the text as a National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street and indirectly indicates the birth of Mortimer Edward Purefoy. It is the first time, therefore, that Joyce chooses a medical institution as a geographic backdrop for an episode. Both the Linati schema and the Gilbert-Gorman plan also designate “medicine” as the episode's art and “the womb” as its organ. Joyce also suggested that the episode's individual parts are linked “with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of the faunal evolution in general.” It has therefore been suggested that “Oxen” adopts Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory. In this theory, Haeckel proposed that the fetus in its embryonic development parallels and repeats the evolutionary progress that produced the human race.

In reaction to Darwin’s On theOrigin of Species, which he read in October 1861, Müller reorganized his ongoing research on crustacea. One result was his Für Darwin, published in 1864, utilizing detailed crustacean research. Müller applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection to crustaceans, yielding some novel predictions, some of which he subsequently verified. Müller showed that crustacean embryology provided a partial guide to crustacean genealogy, demonstrated that genealogical thinking resolved puzzles in the chaotic taxonomy of crustaceans, defended Darwin’s theory against several common objections, and demonstrated its superiority to special creationist alternatives. Darwin responded to Für Darwin with high praise and instigated an English translation of the book. He initiated correspondence with Müller, in which they discussed applications and extensions of Darwin’s theories and directions for further fieldwork. Für Darwin initially drew a generally tepid reception, with severe reviews from some critics. The chapter closes by comparing Müller’s evaluations of Darwin’s theory with those of Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann.