Kunstformen der Natur

Posted in Discourse on Fri Oct 27, 06 by Kyle under Art and Science.

Have you ever heard the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? No? How strange… Well! Now you have and doesn’t it just roll right off the tongue? That phrase was one of the trademark utterances of German naturalist, biologist, theoretician, artist, and generally fascinating guy, Ernst Haeckel. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is a complicated way of saying that as an embryonic creature grows and develops it retraces the evolutionary path that the sum of its genetic ancestors went through. It is certainly an interesting idea, but ultimately turned out to be wrong.

Biologists determined that Haeckel’s theory was not the mechanism that caries out evolution and natural selection was declared the fittest theory. Haeckel was working during the 19th century alongside Darwin before we had so much conclusive information about genes, DNA, and other micro-biotic bits. So one might forgive him for making conclusions that were a little hasty. After all, the most sophisticated instruments and procedures biologists had available to them at that time were their eyes, albeit aided by early microscopes.

What is interesting to me from an aesthetic perspective was what the eyes of Ernst Haeckel saw, and subsequently transcribed.