Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a German zoologist, evolutionary theorist, and artist who popularized Darwinism in Germany and coined terms including ecology and phylum.

Charles Darwin: English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed biology. Darwin’s work supplied the evolutionary framework Haeckel promoted and extended in Germany.
Recapitulation theory: The claim that an organism’s development repeats, in compressed form, the evolutionary history of its lineage. Haeckel’s biogenetic law presented this as a general link between embryonic development and ancestry.
Evolution: Change in heritable characteristics of populations across generations. Haeckel’s theories and classifications were built around evolutionary change.
Ecology: The study of relationships among organisms and between organisms and their environments. Haeckel coined the term in 1866 to name the study of these relationships.
Weismann barrier: The proposed separation between hereditary information in germ cells and changes acquired by the body during life. This principle conflicts with inheritance of acquired traits, which Haeckel sometimes accepted.
Rudolf Virchow: German physician and politician who helped establish cellular pathology and opposed Haeckel’s evolutionary teaching in schools. Virchow publicly challenged Haeckel’s efforts to teach evolution as established fact.
Phylogenetics: The study of evolutionary relationships among organisms and their representation as branching histories. Haeckel used evolutionary relationships to reorganize biological classification.
Homology: Similarity between biological structures due to inheritance from a common ancestor. Haeckel interpreted shared structures as evidence of evolutionary kinship.
Phylum: A major taxonomic rank grouping organisms by broad patterns of body organization. Haeckel helped popularize this rank in biological classification.
Modern synthesis: The twentieth-century framework joining Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics and population biology. It replaced Haeckel’s speculative evolutionary mechanisms with a genetics-based account.

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