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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (; ; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, natural history, eugenics, Philosophy, physician, professor, marine biology and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, From p. 286: "Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle "Existenz-Bedingungen" rechnen können." (By "ecology" we understand the comprehensive science of the relationships of the organism to its surrounding environment, where we can include, in the broader sense, all "conditions of existence".) phylum, Haeckel noted that species constantly evolved into new species that seemed to retain few consistent features among themselves and therefore few features that distinguished them as a group ("a self-contained unity"). "Wohl aber ist eine solche reale und vollkommen abgeschlossene Einheit die Summe aller Species, welche aus einer und derselben gemeinschaftlichen Stammform allmählig sich entwickelt haben, wie z. B. alle Wirbelthiere. Diese Summe nennen wir Stamm (Phylon)." (However, perhaps such a real and completely self-contained unity is the aggregate of all species which have gradually evolved from one and the same common original form, as, for example, all vertebrates. We name this aggregate a Stamm i.e., ( Phylon).) phylogeny,(Haeckel, 1866), vol. 1, p. 29: "Die Untersuchung der Entwicklung dieser Stämme und die Feststellung der genealogischen Verwandtschaft aller Species, die zu einem Stamm gehören, halten wir für die höchste und letzte besondere Aufgabe der organischen Morphologie. Im sechsten Buche werden wir die Grundzüge dieser Phylogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte der organischen Stämme (Kreise oder "Typen") festzustellen haben." (The investigation of the evolution of these phyla and the identification of the genealogical kinship of all species that belong to a phylum—we deem this the highest and ultimately specific task of organic morphology. In the sixth book, we will have to establish the outline of this "phylogeny" or history of the evolution of the organic phyla (groups or "types").) ontogeny, and Protista.(Haeckel, 1866), vol. 1, pp. 215 ff. From p. 215: "VII. Character des Protistenreiches." (VII. Character of the kingdom of Protists.) From p. 216: "VII. B. Morphologischer Character des Protistenreiches. Ba. Character der protistischen Individualitäten. Der wesentliche tectologische Character der Protisten liegt in der sehr unvollkommenen Ausbildung und Differenzirung der Individualität überhaupt, insbesondere aber derjenigen zweiter Ordnung, der Organe. Sehr viele Protisten erheben sich niemals über den morphologischen Werth von Individuen erster Ordnung oder Plastiden." (VII. B. Morphological character of the kingdom of protists. Ba. Character of the protist Individualities. The essential character of protists lies in the very incomplete formation and differentiation of individuality generally, however particularly of those of the second order, the organs. Very many protists never rise above the morphological level of individuals of the first order or plastids.) Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the debunked but influential recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), wrongly claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny, using incorrectly drawn images of human embryonic development. Whether they were intentionally falsified, or drawn poorly by accident is a matter of debate.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddles of the Universe, 1900), the genesis for the term "world riddle" ( Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching Freedom in Science and Teaching. German 1877, English 1879, . to support teaching evolution.
Haeckel promoted scientific racismHawkins, Mike (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 140. and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism.Hawkins, Mike (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 137. He was the first person to characterize the Great War as the "first" World War, which he did as early as 1914.
From 1866 to 1867 Haeckel made an extended journey to the Canary Islands with Hermann Fol. On 17 October 1866 he arrived in London. Over the next few days he met Charles Lyell, and visited Thomas Huxley and family at their home. On 21 October he visited Charles Darwin at Down House in Kent. In 1867 he married Agnes Huschke. Their son Walter was born in 1868, their daughters Elizabeth in 1871 and Emma in 1873. In 1869 he traveled as a researcher to Norway, in 1871 to Croatia (where he lived on the island of Hvar in a monastery), New York Times Haeckel Again Honored in Spite of Himself on his 80th Birthday, published: 22 February 1914 and in 1873 to Egypt, Turkey, and Greece. In 1907 he had a museum built in Jena to teach the public about evolution. Haeckel retired from teaching in 1909, and in 1910 he withdrew from the Evangelical Church of Prussia.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday celebration he was presented with a two-volume work entitled Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken (What We Owe to Ernst Haeckel), edited at the request of the German Monistenbund by Heinrich Schmidt of Jena.
Haeckel's second wife, Agnes, died in 1915, and he became substantially frailer, breaking his leg and arm. He sold his "Villa Medusa" in Jena in 1918 to the Carl Zeiss foundation, which preserved his library. Haeckel died on 9 August 1919.
The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognizes the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere.Haeckel became the most famous proponent of Monism in Germany.Weir, Todd H. Secularism and religion in nineteenth-century Germany. The rise of the fourth confession. Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 67 In 1906 Haeckel belonged to the founders of the Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund), which took a stance against philosophical materialism and promote a "natural Weltanschauung".
He was the first person to use the term "first world war" about World War I.
However, Haeckel's books were banned by the Nazi Party, which refused Monism and Haeckel's freedom of thought. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that Haeckel had often overtly recognized the great contribution of educated Jews to the German culture.
He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed the kingdom Protista in 1866. His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur ( Art forms of nature). Haeckel did not support natural selection, rather believing in Lamarckism.Ruse, M. 1979. The Darwinian Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haeckel advanced a version of the earlier recapitulation theory previously set out by Étienne Serres in the 1820s and supported by followers of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire including Robert Edmond Grant. It proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up by Haeckel in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". His concept of recapitulation has been refuted in the form he gave it (now called "strong recapitulation"), in favour of the ideas first advanced by Karl Ernst von Baer. The strong recapitulation hypothesis views ontogeny as repeating forms of adult ancestors, while weak recapitulation means that what is repeated (and built upon) is the ancestral embryonic development process.Richardson and Keuck, (Biol. Review (2002), 77, pp. 495–528) show that it is a simplification to suppose that Haeckel held the recapitulation theory in its strong form. They quote Haeckel as saying "If recapitulation was always complete, it would be a very easy task to construct whole phylogeny on the basis of ontogeny. … There is certainly, even now, a number of lower vertebrate animals (e.g. some Anthozoa and Vermes) where we are authorised to interpret each embryological form directly as the historical representation or portrait-like silhouette of an extinct ancestral form. But in a great majority of animals, including man, this is not possible because the infinitely varied conditions of existence have led the embryonic forms themselves to be changed and to partly lose their original condition (Haeckel, 1903: pp. 435–436)" Haeckel supported the theory with embryo drawings that have since been shown to be oversimplified and in part inaccurate, and the theory is now considered an oversimplification of quite complicated relationships, however comparison of embryos remains a powerful way to demonstrate that all animals are related. Haeckel introduced the concept of heterochrony, the change in timing of embryonic development over the course of evolution.
Haeckel was a flamboyant figure, who sometimes took great, non-scientific leaps from available evidence. For example, at the time when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), Haeckel postulated that evidence of human evolution would be found in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). At that time, no remains of human ancestors had yet been identified. He described these theoretical remains in great detail and even named the as-yet unfound species, Pithecanthropus alalus, and instructed his students such as Richard Hertwig and Oskar Hertwig to go and find it.
One student did find some remains: a Dutchman named Eugène Dubois searched the East Indies from 1887 to 1895, discovering the remains of Java Man in 1891, consisting of a skullcap, thighbone, and a few teeth. These remains are among the oldest hominid remains ever found. Dubois classified Java Man with Haeckel's Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus. Some scientists of the day suggested Dubois' Java Man as a potential intermediate form between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other great apes. The current consensus of anthropologists is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus (possibly Homo ergaster), rather than the Asian populations exemplified by Java Man and Peking Man. (Ironically, a new human species, Homo floresiensis, a dwarf human type, has recently been discovered in the island of Flores).
Haeckel's view can be seen as a forerunner of the views of Carleton Coon, who also believed that human races evolved independently and in parallel with each other. These ideas eventually fell from favour.
Haeckel also applied the hypothesis of polygenism to the modern diversity of human groups. He became a key figure in social darwinism and leading proponent of scientific racism, stating for instance: The History of Creation, 6th edition (1914), volume 2, page 429.
Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian race was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman. Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction, Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 87 In his view, 'Negroes' were savages and Whites were the most civilised: for instance, he claimed that 'the Negro' had stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race, which, he argued, was evidence of their being less evolved, and which led him to compare them to four-handed" Apes'.Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, 1999, p. 83
In his Ontogeny and Phylogeny Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "Haeckel's evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a 'just' state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others ... all contributed to the rise of Nazism."Gould, S.J. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press pp. 77–78
In his introduction to the Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century Peter Peel affirms that Rosenberg had indeed read Haeckel.
In the same line of thought, historian Daniel Gasman states that Haeckel's ideology stimulated the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France.Daniel Gasman (1998). "Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology". Studies in Modern European History 33. Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. .
However, in 2009 Robert J. Richards noted: "Haeckel, on his travels to Ceylon and Indonesia, often formed closer and more intimate relations with natives, even members of the untouchable classes, than with the European colonials." and says the Nazis rejected Haeckel, since he opposed antisemitism, while supporting ideas they disliked (for instance atheism, feminism, internationalism, pacifism etc.).Robert J. Richards, "Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology", in Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion, Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 174.
The Jena Declaration, published by the German Zoological Society, rejects the idea of human "races" and distances itself from the racial theories of Ernst Haeckel and other 20th century scientists. It claims that genetic variation between World population is smaller than within them, demonstrating that the biological concept of "races" is invalid. The statement highlights that there are no specific or that match with conventional racial . It also indicates that the idea of "races" is based on racism rather than any Science factuality.
Haeckel later claimed that the missing link was to be found on the lost continent of Lemuria located in the Indian Ocean. He believed that Lemuria was the home of the first humans and that Asia was the home of many of the earliest ; he thus supported that Asia was the cradle of hominid evolution. Haeckel also claimed that Lemuria connected Asia and Africa, which allowed the Human migration to the rest of the world.Christopher J Norton and David R Braun. Asian Paleoanthropology: From Africa to China and beyond. p. 4Mario A. Di Gregorio. From here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and the scientific faith. p. 480
In Haeckel's book The History of Creation (1884) he included Human migration routes which he thought the first humans had used outside of Lemuria.
The book sold very well, and while some anatomical experts hostile to Haeckel's evolutionary views expressed some private concerns that certain figures had been drawn rather freely, the figures showed what they already knew about similarities in embryos. The first published concerns came from Ludwig Rütimeyer, a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Basel who had placed fossil mammals in an evolutionary lineage early in the 1860s and had been sent a complimentary copy. At the end of 1868 his review in the Archiv für Anthropologie wondered about the claim that the work was "popular and scholarly", doubting whether the second was true, and expressed horror about such public discussion of man's place in nature with illustrations such as the evolutionary trees being shown to non-experts. Though he made no suggestion that embryo illustrations should be directly based on specimens, to him the subject demanded the utmost "scrupulosity and conscientiousness" and an artist must "not arbitrarily model or generalise his originals for speculative purposes" which he considered proved by comparison with works by other authors. In particular, "one and the same, moreover incorrectly interpreted woodcut, is presented to the reader three times in a row and with three different captions as the embryo of the dog, the chick, and the turtle". He accused Haeckel of "playing fast and loose with the public and with science", and failing to live up to the obligation to the truth of every serious researcher. Haeckel responded with angry accusations of bowing to religious prejudice, but in the second (1870) edition changed the duplicated embryo images to a single image captioned "embryo of a mammal or bird". Duplication using galvanoplastic stereotypes (clichés) was a common technique in textbooks, but not on the same page to represent different eggs or embryos. In 1891 Haeckel made the excuse that this "extremely rash foolishness" had occurred in undue haste but was "bona fide", and since repetition of incidental details was obvious on close inspection, it is unlikely to have been intentional deception.
The revised 1870 second edition of 1,500 copies attracted more attention, being quickly followed by further revised editions with larger print runs as the book became a prominent part of the optimistic, nationalist, anticlerical "culture of progress" in Otto von Bismarck's new German Empire. The similarity of early vertebrate embryos became common knowledge, and the illustrations were praised by experts such as Michael Foster of the University of Cambridge. In the introduction to his 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin gave particular praise to Haeckel, writing that if Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte "had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it". The first chapter included an illustration: "As some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo, I have given one of man and another of a dog, at about the same early stage of development, carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy" with a footnote citing the sources and noting that "Häckel has also given analogous drawings in his Schöpfungsgeschichte." The fifth edition of Haeckel's book appeared in 1874, with its frontispiece a heroic portrait of Haeckel himself, replacing the previous controversial image of the heads of apes and humans.
Expert anatomists were critical of Haeckel's work. Catholic priests also opposed Haeckel's views. Specifically, Haeckel's critics accused him of manipulating the embryo drawings to make the early stages of different species look more similar. They claimed that the drawings of four-week dog and human embryos had been copied without attribution from other sources, and changed by expanding dog's head and reducing the human head, moving the eye, and exaggerating the size of the human tail. Haeckel himself considered the drawings stylized and illustrative, but his detractors considered them forgery and fraud.
While it has been widely claimed that Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, there does not appear to be an independently verifiable source for this claim. Recent analyses (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) have found that some of the criticisms of Haeckel's embryo drawings were legitimate, but others were unfounded.Michael K. Richardson. 1998. "Haeckel's embryos continued". Science 281:1289, quoted in NaturalScience.com webpage Re: Ontogeny and phylogeny : A Letter from Richard Bassetti; Editor's note."While some criticisms of the drawings are legitimate, others are more tendentious", Richardson and Keuck "Haeckel's ABC of evolution and development", Biol. Rev. (2002), 77, pp. 495–528. Quoted from p. 495. There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and Wilhelm His.Richardson & Keuck 2001. See for example, their Fig. 7, showing His's drawing of the forelimb of a deer embryo developing a clef, compared with a similar drawing (Sakurai, 1906) showing the forelimb initially developing as a digital plate with rays. Richardson and Keuck say "Unfortunately His's embryos are mostly at later stages than the nearly identical early stage embryos illustrated by Haeckel top. Thus they do not inform the debate and may themselves be disingenuous." p. 518. Robert J. Richards, in a paper published in 2008, defends the case for Haeckel, shedding doubt against the fraud accusations based on the material used for comparison with what Haeckel could access at the time.
The evidence is in some respects ambiguous. On one hand, Haeckel was an advocate of scientific racism. He held that evolutionary biology had definitively proven that races were unequal in intelligence and ability, and that their lives were also of unequal value, e.g., "These lower races (such as the Veddahs or Australian negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilised Europeans; we must therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives." As a result of the "struggle for existence", it followed that the "lower" races would eventually be exterminated. He was also a social Darwinist who believed that "survival of the fittest" was a natural law, and that struggle led to improvement of the race. As an advocate of eugenics, he also believed that about 200,000 Mental illness and Genetic disorder should be killed by a medical control board. This idea was later put into practice by Nazi Germany, as part of the Aktion T4 program. Alfred Ploetz, founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, praised Haeckel repeatedly, and invited him to become an honorary member. Haeckel accepted the invitation. (2025). 9781403965028, Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 9781403965028 Haeckel also believed that Germany should be governed by an authoritarian political system, and that inequalities both within and between societies were an inevitable product of evolutionary law. Haeckel was also an extreme German nationalist who believed strongly in the superiority of German culture.
On the other hand, Haeckel was not an anti-Semite. In the racial hierarchies he constructed Jews tended to appear closer to the top, rather than closer to the bottom as in Nazi racial thought. He was also a pacifist until the First World War, when he wrote propaganda in favor of the war. The principal arguments of historians who deny a meaningful connection between Haeckel and Nazism are that Haeckel's ideas were very common at the time, that Nazis were much more strongly influenced by other thinkers, and that Haeckel is properly classified as a 19th-century German liberal, rather than a forerunner to Nazism. They also point to incompatibilities between evolutionary biology and Nazi ideology.
Nazis themselves divided on the question of whether Haeckel should be counted as a pioneer of their ideology. Schutzstaffel captain and biologist Heinz Brücher wrote a biography of Haeckel in 1936, in which he praised Haeckel as a "pioneer in biological state thinking". This opinion was also shared by the scholarly journal, Der Biologe, which celebrated Haeckel's 100th birthday, in 1934, with several essays acclaiming him as a pioneering thinker of Nazism. Other Nazis kept their distance from Haeckel. Nazi propaganda guidelines issued in 1935 listed books which popularized Darwin and evolution on an "expunged list". Haeckel was included by name as a forbidden author. Gunther Hecht, a member of the Nazi Department of Race Politics, also issued a memorandum rejecting Haeckel as a forerunner of Nazism. Kurt Hildebrandt, a Nazi political philosopher, also rejected Haeckel. Eventually Haeckel was rejected by Nazi bureaucrats.
In Jena he is remembered with a monument at Herrenberg (erected in 1969), an exhibition at Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, and at the Jena Phyletic Museum, which continues to teach about evolution and share his work to this day.
The ratfish, Harriotta haeckeli is named in his honor.
The research vessel Ernst Haeckel is named in his honor.
In 1981, a botanical journal called Ernstia was started being published in the city of Maracay, Venezuela.
In 2013, Ernstia, a genus of calcareous sponges in the family Clathrinidae. The genus was erected to contain five species previously assigned to Clathrina. The genus name honors Ernst Haeckel for his contributions towards sponge taxonomy and phylogeny.
Haeckel argued that human evolution consisted of precisely 22 phases, the 21st – the "missing link" – being a halfway step between apes and humans. He even formally named this missing link Pithecanthropus alalus, translated as "ape man without speech".
Haeckel's literary output was extensive, including many books, scientific papers, and illustrations.
For a fuller list of works of and about Haeckel, see his entry in the .
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