APPENDIX B
A PASSAGE FROM HAECKEL[*]

UNDER the title of Design in the Living Organism, the famous embryologist, Carl Ernst Baer, published a work in 1876 which, together with the article on Darwinism which accompanied it, proved very acceptable to our opponents, and is still much quoted in opposition to evolution. It was a revival of the old teleological system under a new name, and we must devote a line of criticism to it. We must premise that, though Baer was a scientist of the highest order, his original monistic views were gradually marred by a tinge of mysticism with the advance of age, and he eventually became a thorough dualist. In his profound work on The Evolution of Animals (1828), which he himself entitled Observation and Experiment, these two methods of investigation are equally applied. By careful observation of the various phenomena of the development of the animal ovum, Baer succeeded in giving the first consistent presentation of the remarkable changes which take place in the growth of the vertebrate from a simple egg-cell. At the same time, he endeavoured, by far-seeing comparison and keen reflection, to learn the causes of the transformation, and to reduce them to general constructive laws. He expressed the general result of his research in the following thesis: “The evolution of the individual is the story of the growth of individuality in every respect.” He meant that “the one great thought that controls all the different aspects of animal evolution is the same that gathered the scattered fragments of space into spheres, and linked them into solar systems. This thought is no other than life itself, and the words and syllables in which it finds utterance are the varied forms of living things.”

[*] This translation from Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe” is taken from an edition published by The Rationalist Press in England, and Harper & Brothers in the United States of America, Copyright 1900, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made for permission for its use in this volume.

Baer, however, did not attain to a deeper knowledge of this great genetic truth and a clearer insight into the real efficient causes of organic evolution, because his attention was exclusively given to one-half of evolutionary science, the science of the evolution of the individual, embryology, or, in a wider sense, ontogeny. The other half, the science of the evolution of species, phylogeny, was not yet in existence, although Lamarck had already pointed out the way to it in 1809. When it was established by Darwin in 1859, the aged Baer was no longer in a position to appreciate it; the fruitless struggle which he led against the theory of selection clearly proved that he understood neither its real meaning nor its philosophic importance. Teleological and, subsequently, theological speculations had incapacitated the aging scientist from appreciating this greatest reform of biology. The teleological observations which he published against it in his Species and Studies, in his eighty-fourth year, are mere repetitions of errors which the teleology of the dualists has opposed to the mechanical or monistic system for more than 2,000 years. The “telic” idea, which, according to Baer, controls the entire evolution of the animal from the ovum is only another expression for the eternal “idea” of Plato, and the entelecheia of his pupil, Aristotle.

Our modern biogeny gives a purely physiological explanation of the facts of embryology, in assigning the functions of heredity and adaptation as their causes. The great biogenetic law, which Baer failed to appreciate, reveals the intimate causal connection between the ontogenesis of the individual and the phylogenesis of its ancestors; the former seems to be a recapitulation of the latter. Nowhere, however, in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller, instead of the provident God, that affects the changes of organic forms by a mutual action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. And there is no more trace of “design” in the embryology of the individual plant, animal, or man. This ontogeny is but a brief epitome of phylogeny, an abbreviated and condensed recapitulation of it, determined by the physiological laws of heredity.

Baer ended the preface to his classical Evolution of Animals (1828) with these words: “The palm will be awarded to the fortunate scientist who succeeds in reducing the constructive forces of the animal body to the general forces or life-processes of the entire world. The tree has not yet been planted which is to make his cradle.” The great embryologist erred once more. That very year, 1828, witnessed the arrival of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University (for the purpose of studying theology!)—the “fortunate scientist,” who richly earned the palm thirty years afterward by his theory of selection.

In the philosophy of history—that is, in the general reflections which historians make in the destinies of nations and the complicated course of political evolution—there still prevails the notion of a “moral order of the universe.” Historians seek in the vivid drama of history a leading design, an ideal purpose, which has ordained one or other race or State to a special triumph, and to dominion over the others. This teleological view of history has recently become more strongly contrasted with our monistic view in proportion as monism has proved to be the only possible interpretation of inorganic nature. Throughout the whole of astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry there is no question to-day of a “moral order,” or a personal God, whose “hand hath disposed all things in wisdom and understanding.” And the same must be said of the entire field of biology, the whole constitution and history of organic nature, if we set aside the question of man for the moment. Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the “survival of the fittest,” or the “victory of the best”; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense). Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that, besides the predominant advance toward perfection, there are at all times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer’s notion of “design” has no moral feature whatever.