Haeckel, Ernst

Figure 37.1. Radiolarians. Reproduced from Haeckel, Ernst, Art Forms in Nature, Dover Publications, New York (1974) with the permission of the publisher. Originally published by Ernst Haeckel in Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904). In comparison to organisms such as diatoms and choanoflagellates, much less is known concerning the formation of the skeletons of these organisms as they are much more difficult to culture in the laboratory. Organisms may be up to many hundreds of micrometres in diameter.

The fundamental difference between ancient and modern science is not at all in the field of theory. Sir William Thomson was just as metaphysical as Pythagoras or Raymond Lully, and Lucretius quite as materialistic as Ernst Haeckel or Buchner. 

Figure 15.2 Plate from Ernst Haeckel s Kunstformen der Natur (1904), depicting (perhaps slightly exaggerated) radiolarians classified as Acanthophracta.

The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as simple. One of the chief advocates of the theory of spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin s theory. From the limited view of cells that microscopes provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon, 7 not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better. 

Ernst Haeckel thought that a cell was a homogeneous globule of... 

Figure 7.7 Messengers from outer space. [From Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature (New York Dover, 1974).]...

In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed a phylogenetic tree where the first forms of life were cells without a nucleus (which he called Monera), which later generated nucleated cells (Protista), which in turn gave rise to all multicellular organisms. Already in 1883, Schimper proposed that chloroplasts had once been free-living bacteria that happened to be incorporated, by a kind of symbiosis, into some eukaryotes, and from 1905 to 1930 this hypothesis was not only reproposed but also extended to mitochondria by Mereschowsky, by Portier and by Wallin. 

Nearly everyone in the world knows the name Darwin, but outside of evolutionary biologists and people who like to read about the history of biology, probably the only people who know the name Haeckel are those living in a place called Jena in Germany, where Ernst Haeckel was born in 1834 and spent most of his life until he died in 1919. 

As interesting, and the primary reason for this digression about mountain peaks, is the fact that Ernst Haeckel proposed a grand scheme about the development of embryos that was first... 

WilUams, D.M. (2007). Ernst Haeckel and Louis Agassiz trees that bite and their geog[raphicai dimension. 

The much Debated Tree of Life was set into three domains by Ernst Haeckel Monophyletischer Stammbaum der Organismen consisting of Protista, Plantae and AnimaUa. Extraordinary acquisition of genes through horizontal (lateral) routes invalidates the evolutionary pathways that were constmcted by tme vertical inheritance. Among Bacteria, Mycoplasmataceae vie with Aquifex aeolicus for the basic position regression of Mycoplasmataceae from Bacteroides is unacceptable... 

The ideas of interrelationship between individual and historic development of living oiganisms appeared back in XIX centuiy, when, according to Zhuchenko [13], basic provisions of bio-genetic /ow of Friedrich Muller (1864) and Ernst Haeckel (1866/" [13] were proclaimed. According to this law ontogenesis recapitulates ma-... 

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