Nick Hopwood

Ernst Haeckel was a 19th and early 20th-century German zoologist and artist who was well-known as a supporter of Darwin. Haeckel thought that embryological development of advanced species recapitulated the features of adults of more primitive species. This was summarized with the phrase, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Haeckel illustrated his theory with a grid-like image with different species in columns and different stages of embryos in rows, purporting to show how similar the early embryos were. This captured the imagination of a generation of scientists and the general public to whom embryos and embryology were unfamiliar; some considered it one of the principal pieces of evidence for evolution. Haeckel had many opponents including colleagues like Wilhelm His and non-scientific anti-evolutionists. Some of his colleagues claimed that his drawings had been schematized, miscopied, or even had had the species fraudulently switched. Haeckel admitted that the drawings were schematized, but claimed that this was common in material intended for education. The history of the drawings continues to the current day, long after Haeckel’s death, and has been complicated by religious objection to the idea of evolution itself, the adoption of Haeckel by eugenicists and the Nazi party, and recent discoveries about the Hox genes and new theories about possible periods of convergent embryological development in different species.
Anyway … I thought I had to outline these points before discussing Hopwood’s book. The book was remaindered at the University of Chicago Press, so I got it for close to nothing. It is very attractive and well-illustrated. The text is not that easy to follow if you don’t know the story already, but I think that the book’s strong points are its attempt at extensive discussion of Haeckel’s diagram, their various uses up to today, and all of the historic illustrations.… (mais)