Byline: Robbert Striekwold
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Of Embryos and Transmutation IV – there and back again
By Robbert Striekwold Throughout the 19th century, ideas concerning embryonic and species development were joined together in a unification that many biologists took to be self-evident. Near the end of that century they split up, however, and embryology was largely left out of the Modern Synthesis of Darwin and Mendel. That is, until several spectacular…
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Of Embryos and Transmutation III – Darwinian recapitulations
By Robbert Striekwold The name that is most often associated with recapitulation is that of Ernst Haeckel, who believed that the study of embryos provided the best means of reconstructing evolutionary history. In this he took his cue from Darwin, who wrote in 1860 that embryology was the “strongest single class of facts in favour…
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Of Embryos and Transmutation. Part II – Malformations and Abortions
By Robbert Striekwold Theories of recapitulation arose in the late 18th but came to full bloom in the early 19th century. The common feature of such theories was the idea of a strong relationship between embryonic and species development. Such views were popular especially among the German Naturphilosophen, whose worldviews proved highly conductive to recapitulationist…
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Of Embryos and Transmutation Part I – A Genealogy of Evolution
By Robbert Striekwold Ideas concerning species transformation and embryonic development enjoy a long and quirky history of perceived parallels and cross-pollination. In the first and introductory part of this series, I will take a look at the etymology of the word ‘evolution’ in biology. It entered the field as a term in embryology in the…