Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud

397 Pages·2015·17.502 MB·English

by  Nick Hopwood

Haeckel’s Embryos
{
Haeckel’s Embryos
I M A G E S ,
E V O L U T I O N ,
A N D
F R A U D
}
NI C K H O P W O O D
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Published with the support of the Getty Foundation
NICK HOPWOOD is reader in history of science
and medicine in the Department of History and
Philosophy of Science at the University of
Cambridge. He is the author of Embryos in Wax, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
coeditor of Models: The Third Dimension of The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
Science, and cocurator of the online exhibition
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Making Visible Embryos.
Printed in China
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04694-5 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04713-3 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226047133.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hopwood, Nick, author.
Haeckel’s embryos : images, evolution, and fraud / Nick Hopwood.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-04694-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-04713-3
(e-book) 1. Haeckel, Ernst, 1834–1919. 2. Evolution (Biology)—History.
3. Scientific illustration—History. 4. Embryos. I. Title.
QH361.H67 2014
576.8—dc23
2014016887
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
For my parents,
David and Joyce

CONTENTS
1 Icons of Knowledge 1
2 Two Small Embryos in Spirits of Wine 9
3 Like Flies on the Parlor Ceiling 31
4 Drawing and Darwinism 53
5 Illustrating the Magic Word 69
6 Professors and Progress 89
7 Visual Strategies 107
8 Schematics, Forgery, and the So-Called Educated 127
9 Imperial Grids 145
10 Setting Standards 171
11 Forbidden Fruit 189
Acknowledgments 303 12 Creative Copying 201
Abbreviations 307 13 Trials and Tributes 217
Notes 309 14 Scandal for the People 229
Reference List 339 15 A Hundred Haeckels 249
Index 373 16 The Textbook Illustration 263
17 Iconoclasm 281
18 The Shock of the Copy 297
vii
Fig. 1.1 Early vertebrate embryos, credited to a secondary source
from 1901, in Scott Gilbert’s developmental biology textbook, alongside
photomicrographs and more recent diagrams. Gilbert 1997, 254–55,
by permission of Sinauer Associates.
{ 1 }
Icons of Knowledge
At the end of the twentieth century the leading textbook of developmental bi-
ology reproduced a figure first published over a hundred years before (fig. 1.1).
With columns for species and rows for stages, the grid shows embryos of hu-
mans and other backboned animals beginning almost identical and diverging
toward their adult forms. Images like this debuted in 1868 in the first accessible
Darwinist system, an anticlerical gospel of progress by the combative German
evolutionist Ernst Haeckel. For the first eight weeks of development, he roared,
you cannot tell even an aristocrat from a dog. The church denied these pictures
as “diabolical inventions of materialism,” he said, yet that only testified to their
power as evidence of common descent.1 Schools initially banned Haeckel’s books,
but children sneaked them to read “with burning eyes and soul.”2 In the early
1900s his embryos entered American classrooms and were eventually repro-
duced worldwide. As the most influential illustration of the relations between
evolution and development, they are still a reference point for research.
Old images shape current views. Look through websites, books, and TV pro-
grams, the main vehicles for communicating knowledge today. Among the flood
of new pictures, copies represent a select few from the distant past. Their contem-
poraries fell by the wayside long ago, but the survivors have lasted for decades.
Some are celebrities. The 1895 X-ray of Bertha Roentgen’s “hand with rings” is
hailed as a “photograph that changed the world,” the atomic mushroom cloud
held up as a “cultural icon” that encapsulates an era.3 Since the 1960s the Apollo
snapshots of Earth from space have portrayed the planet for environmentalists
and advertisers. Antiabortionists and sex educators exploited Lennart Nilsson’s
fetal photographs from around the same time.4 Such icons have exceptional
reach and symbolic power, but far more images have played influential roles.
1