The Wonders of Life

by Ernst Haekel

Overview

The Wonders of Life is a classic and venerable biology text and "a popular study of biological philosophy" by Ernst Haeckel that examines the merits of evolution theory and the origins of life. The publication of the present work on The Wonders of Life has been occasioned by the success of The Riddle of the Universe, which I wrote five years ago. Within a few months of the issue of this study of the monistic philosophy, in the autumn of 1899, ten thousand copies were sold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774419267
Publisher:	Whispering Pines Press
Publication date:	09/02/2021
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.

Haeckel was also a promoter of scientific racism and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism