Robert J. Richards's outstanding new biography of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) should be of much interest to all scholars of modern German history, above all because it addresses head-on a number of allegations concerning the relationship of Haeckel's thought to the rise of Nazism. If Richards is Haeckel's defender, he has much reason to be so: until now, scientists and their historians have portrayed Haeckel as, at best, a mere epigone and popularizer (Darwin's bulldog in Germany), and, at worst, as a fraud, an ideologue, and a forerunner of the Nazis. This impressive biography rehabilitates Haeckel as a scientist and defends him against charges of having contributed to the rise of the Third Reich.

In exquisite detail Richards's exhaustively researched, well-written, and beautifully illustrated book places the man Ernst Haeckel at the heart of its story: a passionate individual whose loss of his young wife shortly after their marriage became a driving force in his science and helped to give his life a tragic sense. Indeed, a long, loveless second marriage served largely to frustrate him and to drive him on further to satisfy his emotional needs by scientific work as well as by popularizing science and by becoming a public intellectual. Richards shows how Haeckel became a leading specialist in marine invertebrate biology (including morphology, embryology, and systematics), as well as a leading evolutionary theorist, ecologist, and biogeographer. (In 1866, Haeckel coined the term “ecology.”) In so doing Richards establishes that, despite his later reputation for scientific speculation, Haeckel was in fact a solid practitioner of observational science. Building on his own earlier work, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002), Richards portrays Haeckel as a Romantic scientist in the tradition of Goethe, Humboldt, and Schleiden. Like them, he argues, Haeckel sought some sort of ur-type that might account for the morphology and development of the organism as a whole and that would simultaneously explain its individual features. This outlook attracted him to Darwinian evolutionary theory, and it lay behind his development of what he called the biogenetic law (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”): that the embryological development of an individual follows the same morphological course taken by its own species in its development. The law dominated biological thought for much of Haeckel's professional lifetime and became the centerpiece of his evolutionary interpretation of life.

Haeckel's greatest talent, however, lay in his ability to connect his own and others' empirical work to Darwin's views of evolution by means of natural selection and to make those views accessible to a broad audience. Building on Darwin's Origin of Species, Haeckel became the foremost evolutionary theorist and popularizer of science of his day. He first became widely known for his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868), which contributed more than any other single work (including Darwin's own writings) to the public's understanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Haeckel became Darwin's greatest advocate, both in Germany and beyond. Nearly three decades later, his Die Welträthsel (1899) became a world-wide best seller. It placed evolutionary theory at the heart of Haeckel's own philosophical analysis, a doctrine he dubbed “monism,” or the belief that mind and matter were merely the surface manifestation of some deeper metaphysical entity. Haeckel “waged war” against religion, Richards argues, even as his monism itself became tantamount to a religion. Through these and other strident books, advocacy of teaching evolution in the schools, and opposition to established religions of all sorts, Haeckel became the bête noire of the religiously minded.

Still, Haeckel may have been his own worst enemy: his claims about human embryology and accompanying illustrations especially got him into deep trouble. Richards shows that Haeckel had extraordinary artistic talent. Yet it was precisely his carelessness with a set of scientific illustrations that severely damaged his reputation. In the first edition of the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel published a set of illustrations purportedly showing different stages of embryological development in a dog, a human, a turtle, and a chicken that were aimed at demonstrating the biogenetic law empirically. He had, however, modeled his illustrations on those of other anatomists, and charges of fraud were leveled against him. Worse still, he also presented three illustrations of very early-stage embryos that were, in fact, one and the same illustration. Although Haeckel changed and clarified his illustrations in subsequent editions, the damage was done. Ever since he has been attacked by opponents of Darwinism. Richards argues, by contrast, that Haeckel made only minor, inadvertent errors stemming from alterations made from his original, public lectures. Richards judges this not as a case of “gross fraud” or intentional misrepresentation but rather as “a very minor infraction,” and believes that these (and other) charges against Haeckel should be seen within the context of opposition to Darwinism and as a response to “Haeckel's aggressive personality.”

Haeckel's anthropological views also brought him trouble. He was certainly a believer in the hierarchy of the races, as Richards acknowledges. In his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel included a stem-tree of the human species that had a definite racist tinge to it: races were represented hierarchically. But as Richards explains, racial categories and a racial outlook were widespread among nineteenth-century scientists and others. He argues, too, that Haeckel gave no evidence of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, while Haeckel praised “cultured” Jews assimilated to Germany, he (once) expressed concerns about unassimilated east European Jews. Richards judges that Haeckel was, to say the least, no racial anti-Semite; rather, as a Darwinian and monist he was opposed to all religions (including Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism), except his own (Monism).

Richards's sensitive biography of Haeckel the man and scientist convincingly defends him against his sundry critics, not least Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Gasman, and Richard Weikart, who have declared Haeckel to have helped to pave the way for the formation of the Nazis' biological views and their consequences. Richards believes that these and other critics have taken Haeckel's words and views out of context; that their analyses are mono-causal; that they have failed to point to other cultural figures who expressed similar thoughts and were “recruited” by the Nazis; or that they have failed to demonstrate any anti-Semitism on Haeckel's part or to note that Nazi representatives themselves rejected Haeckel's views. By contrast, Richards characterizes Haeckel as having modernist convictions, as being variously a liberal or a socialist, and a nationalist or an internationalist. Even as he recognizes Haeckel's shortcomings, Richards convincingly defends him against his contemporary and posthumous detractors. He sees him as a tragic, romantic figure, whose original scientific research became eclipsed by his popularizations, his monistic philosophy, and the passion with which he expressed himself. Richards's study should become the definitive biography of Haeckel.