Haeckel’s Embryos

In this book, Nick Hopwood masterfully reconstructs a set of three related controversies regarding Ernst Haeckel’s infamous diagrams comparing the embryos of different species. These iconic images depicting similar developmental trajectories for vertebrates ranging from fish to chickens to human beings became widely reproduced textbook illustrations of the embryological evidence for evolution even while embryologists were calling their veracity into question. How images could at once be fraudulent and icons of evolution and development lies at the heart of Hopwood’s history. The book is, in Hopwood’s words, a ‘comprehensive study of a scientific image’ (p. 4). The lavish illustrations that adorn almost every page certainly speak to Hopwood’s careful analysis of the visual, but the disputes surrounding these images address important issues regarding how scientific controversies and allegation of scientific fraud are sustained and contained over decades of scientific and social change. In the first chapters, Hopwood introduces us to the nineteenth-century European tradition of embryology and Haeckel’s role in blending both art and evolution with analysis of the developmental stages of vertebrate embryos. Because his critics will charge him with reusing images of overly schematic embryos, Hopwood takes great care in tracing the genesis of Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, which first presented the images in question, as well as its subsequent ten editions published as late as the First World War. Although Haeckel was heralded as the rising star of German Darwinism, Wilhelm His and other critics in the 1870s expressed grave concern that Haeckel had visually manufactured similarities between embryonic forms that masked important physiological differences. With his emphasis on mechanical models and the physiology of development, His resisted Haeckel’s willingness to find evidence of evolutionary patterns in developmental similarities. Despite the objections of specialists in the 1870s, and even Haeckel’s admission that some of the schematic representations were exaggerated, the images of the comparative grid of developing embryos survived this first round of controversy—indeed, Haeckel would expand his grid representation to include more species in the 1890s and 1900s

Archaeology · Art history · Biology · Darwinism · Evolutionary biology · German · Classics · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine