Ernst Haeckel coined ecology, drew exquisite sea creatures, and got embryos wrong
Ernst Haeckel named thousands of species, gave biology words like ecology and phylum, and produced illustrations of sea life so beautiful they helped inspire Art Nouveau. He also pushed a famous but false law about embryos using inaccurate drawings, and he promoted scientific racism, a stain that sits beside his real achievements.
Haeckel was born in Potsdam on 16 February 1834 and trained in medicine in Berlin and Würzburg under figures including Rudolf Virchow, qualifying in 1857. Contact with suffering patients soured him on practising. He turned to zoology, earned his habilitation in comparative anatomy in 1861, and taught at the University of Jena for 47 years, from 1862 to 1909. On one Mediterranean trip alone he named nearly 700 new species of radiolarians, tiny marine organisms.
He championed Charles Darwin's ideas in Germany, visiting Darwin at Down House in 1866, and drew one of the first family trees linking all living things. Words he coined include ecology, phylogeny, ontogeny and Protista. His art book Kunstformen der Natur, Art Forms in Nature, gathered more than 100 detailed colour plates. His grief was written into taxonomy too: after his first wife, Anna Sethe, died in 1864, he named a jellyfish he found beautiful in her honour.
His best-known idea is also his most discredited. The recapitulation theory, summed up as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, claimed that an embryo's development replays its species' evolutionary history. Haeckel supported it with incorrectly drawn images of human embryos, and it is still debated whether they were deliberately falsified or merely careless. The theory is now disproven, though it was influential.
Beyond the lab he was a public philosopher. His book The Riddles of the Universe popularised the idea of a world riddle, and he became Germany's leading advocate of monism, a pantheistic, impersonal view uniting religion and science. He embraced Social Darwinism and scientific racism. In 1914 he was the first to call the Great War the first World War. He built a museum in Jena in 1907 to teach evolution, and died on 9 August 1919.
Source: Ernst Haeckel
