Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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2012

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Abstract

Ernst Haeckel’s monistic worldview and his interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution worked together to help him rule out any role for divine providence or any non-material mind, spirit, will, or purpose in the organic world. In his account of 1866, the impersonal, unpredictable, and purposeless external environment was what drove evolutionary change. By around the turn of the twentieth century, however, new theories of evolution, heredity, and embryology were challenging Haeckel’s, but Haeckel no longer responded with his earlier vigor. Younger monistically oriented evolutionary biologists had to take the lead in modernizing and defending the monistic interpretation and the external causes of evolution. Three of these younger biologists are discussed here: Haeckel’s student, the morphologist-turned-theoretician Richard Semon (1859–1918); Ludwig Plate (1862–1937), who took over Haeckel’s chair at the University of Jena and became an influential journal editor and commentator on new research on heredity and evolution; and Paul Kammerer (1880–1926), whose experimental evidence for the modifying power of the environment was hotly debated.

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Monism, Morphology, Evolution, Old-School Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel, Paul Kammerer, Ludwig Plate, Richard Semon

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Sander Gliboff, "Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd Weir, 135–158, New York: Palgrave USA, 2012.

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Book chapter