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The Views of Haeckel in the Light of Genetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
The extent to which Ernst Haeckel was hated and attacked by reactionary scientists, philosophers, litterateurs and preachers, is, as Lenin has pointed out in his “Materialism and Empirocriticism,” a measure of the success with which he originally expounded the results of natural science and drove them home to their logical conclusions in the interpretation of nature on a materialistic basis. Haeckel, in the days of his greatest mental vigor, made himself the spearhead of the scientific attack upon the then dominant forces of theology and obscurantism, showing fearlessly how revolutionary were the results of modern science, and particularly those concerned with evolution, in altering fundamentally man's outlook upon the world in which he lived and his own nature. It has become the mode among many intellectual circles in Western countries to refer slurringly both to the more technical scientific work and to the more general reasoning of Haeckel, as being crude and out of date; but this derogation has its origin in the despair of the teleologists and is not founded in the facts of modern scientific development. Certainly, so far as genetics is concerned, the most modern results are not merely in harmony with, but brilliantly confirmatory of, those main tenets of Haeckel's general interpretation of nature which involved him in the bitterest controversy. In addition they help to show the general soundness of his more technical zoological contributions. By contrast, Haeckel's deficiencies in the realm of social affairs stand out the more strongly, although his own materialism of natural science is a necessary basis for an adequate social materialism. We will not concern ourselves here, however, with Haeckel's own social theories, but only with those in the field of natural science; it was only in the latter field that he attained his real prominence.
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1934
References
1. Based on address given at Haeckel Centenary of the Academy of Sciences of the U. S. S. R., in Leningrad, Feb. 16, 1934.
2. Thus, to illustrate the second statement, the striking agreement between man and the higher apes in numerous characteristics which distinguish them both from ordinary monkeys shows that the common ancestor of both was less remote than an ordinary monkey; but, on the other hand, the agreement of the higher apes with the ordinary monkeys in many non-human particulars which, taken together, would label their possessors as, in a more general sense, monkeys, shows that the above common ancestor of apes and men must itself have been, in a more general sense, a monkey, of a tree-dwelling sort (though belonging, more specifically, to the ape subdivision). In a similar way, it can be shown that this ancestral ape must have had a common ancestor with the “lower” old-world monkeys, less remote than the new-world monkeys, and that this ancestor, if living today, would be classed in the group of ordinary old-world monkeys (since the more specifically un-ape-like characters are common both to old-world and new-world monkeys).
3. H. J. Muller. “The Method of Evolution,” Scientific Monthly, 29: 481–505; 1929.