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Article ID: CBB001510261

Alexei Sewertzoff and Adolf Naef: Revising Haeckel's Biogenetic Law (2015)

Levit, Georgy S. (Author)
Hossfeld, Uwe (Author)
Olsson, Lennart (Author)

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Volume: 36, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 357-370

DOI: 10.1007/s40656-014-0043-9

Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: Crossroads between nature and culture: Papers in honour of Christiane Groeben
Language: English

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Phylogeny Evolution Developmental biology Morphology 19th century Haeckel, Ernst Naef, Adolf

Ernst Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in 1872. The Russian evolutionist Alexei Sewertzoff, and the Swiss-born zoologist Adolf Naef were among those who revised Haeckel's law, thus changing the course of evolutionary theory and of developmental biology. Although Sewertzoff and Naef approached the problem in a similar way and formulated similar hypotheses at a purely descriptive level, their theoretical viewpoints were crucially different. While Sewertzoff laid the foundations for a Darwinian evolutionary morphology and is regarded as a forerunner of the modern synthesis, Naef was one of the most important figures in “idealistic morphology”, which is usually seen as a type of anti-Darwinism. Both Naef and Sewertzoff aimed to revise Haeckel's biogenetic law and came to comparable conclusions at the empirical level. This paper is an attempt to explain how their fundamentally different theoretical backgrounds influenced their views on the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny.

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Article Bernardi, Giorgio; Fantini, Bernardino; Dröscher, Ariane (2015) Crossroads between Nature and Culture: An Introduction. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (pp. 301-304). unapi

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