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THE SCIENTIFIC ORIGINS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League
DANIEL
GASMAN
Assistant
Professor of History,
@ Daniel
Gasman 1971 First pub1ished 1971 Sole distributors for the United States and
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Contents
Preface
Introduction
Ernst Haeckel and the Volkish Tradition
I Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League I
II The Political Assumptions of Monism 31
III Monism and Christianity 55
IV Monism, The Corporative State and
Eugenics 82
V Monism and Marxism 106
VI Monism, Imperialism, and the First World War126
VII Monism and National Socialism 147
Selected Bibliography 183
Index 203
Inserts from
Chapter
Seven
Monism
and National Socialism
IFone surveys the
origins of the Volkish movement in
...Wilhelm Schallmayer, Heinrich Ziegler, and August Forel... Ludwig Woltman (1871-1907), Who
Even
closer than Woltmann to Haeckel's social theories was Otto Ammon (1842-1916),
another leading social Darwinist and racial
In 1904,
Dr. Ploetz became one of the principal founders of the racially inspired
eugenic journal, Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie. Among the
editors were not only such future Nazi scientists as Eugen Fischer and Fritz
Lenz, but also Ludwig Plate, a close colleague of Haeckel, a member of the
Monist League, and the successor to Haeckel's chair in zoology at the
In regard
to the racial theory of the Germans as Aryans, one should take note of the famous
colleague of Haeckel, Ernst Krause (pseudonym Carus Steme).18
Together with Haeckel, Krause edited the joumal Kosmos, the chief organ
of the Darwinian movement in Germany in the 1870'S and in the 1880's. In
addition, Krause had been the noted author of popular biographies of Erasmus
and Charles Darwin. In these books he had attempted to demonstrate the
continuity which he believed to exist between English and German Darwinism, and
he became one of the most widely read popularizers of Darwinian ideas in
...From the start there were close ties between the Artamanen and the Nazis and many of the individuals who first received their ideological and social training in this movement later on became officers and leaders in the SS.22 Among the charter members of the Artamanen are Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, and Walther Darré, Hitler's minister of agriculture and architect of Nazi resettlement policy in the east.23 Through Hentschel, therefore, and the Artamanen, Haeckel's racial eugenics found one more way to practical expression in the Third Reich...
Even
further, Haeckel's influence is to be noted in the Germanic Faith movement, an
organization founded by Wilhelm Schwaner and Ludwig Fahrenkrog, which
unquestionably accelerated the development of an anti-Christian pagan religion
in Germany. Schwaner was one of the original founders of the Monist League,41
and in 1913 wrote the Germanenbibel, a rather popular collection of
patriotic writings derived from famous German literary figures. Another popular
book which he wrote was a work for educators which was entitled Unterm
Hakenkreuz, a collection of essays from a radically Volkist point of view.
Schwaner was also a leader in the Volkserzieher, an organization which
played an active role in the famous Wandervogel convention at the Hohe
Meissner in October, 1913. Called on the centenary of the Napoleonic wars
in
In yet
another sensitive area, the Jewish question, one may detect the influence of Haeckel
and the Monists. In his attitude towards the Jews, Haeckel once again revealed
the radical nature of his thinking and demonstrated agreement with the
prevalent anti-Semitism
of many of his Volkist colleagues. Haeckel was one of the most vociferous opponents
of the Jews, and his importance for the history of anti-Semitism in
In 1893,
the novelist, essayist, and journalist Hermann Bahr, himself a Monist,
conducted a series of interviews among outstanding German personalities in
order to ascertain their attitude towards the Jews and anti-Semitism.48
Haeckel was among those interviewed and his response, as we might expect,
betrayed strong feelings of anti-Semitism.
In a
callous and at times flippant response, Haeckel charged the Jews themselves
with generating anti-Semitism. Shrugging off all responsibility on the part of
the non-Jewish world, Haeckel told Bahr that the very durability of
anti-Semitism throughout history led one to the inescapable conclusion that the
Jews were in fact the source of their own misfortune and were themselves to
blame for the sentiments that were often expressed against them. 'I cannot
believe,' Haeckel said, 'that such a powerful, enduring, and great movement
could have been possible without adequate cause.'49 He found,
rather, that anti- Semitism arose from an inner justification and was not to be
considered
In
offering further observations on the Jewish question, Haeckel asserted that he
considered anti-Semitism to be a 'national' and 'racial' problem rather than a
religious one. And evoking the spectre of intrinsic Jewish cosmopolitanism,
Haeckel contended that the Jews were alienated from German life and society and
that the Germans therefore felt ill at ease among the Jews. In addition, the
problem, he explained, was exacerbated by the fact that
A possible
way of resolving the conflict between the Germans and the Jews, however, was
total assimilation into German life and culture. Assimilation, Haeckel
contended, had to be demanded of the Jews, even compelled if necessary. 'It
must be understood that the [German] people will no longer tolerate the strange
ways ofJewish life, and their desire is to deprive the Jews of all that is
specifically Jewish and to convert them to German habits and customs so that
they will resemble the people among whom they live in al1 respects.'51
As far as
the anti-Semitic movement itself was concemed, Haeckel expressed the belief
that its continued existence was needed because
it performed the necessary function of compelling the Jews to assimilate. It
served to make them aware of their own condition and was therefore a healthy
social movement. ' Anti-Semitism is a justifiable idea because it [seeks
to] free the Jews from their separatist behavior, and desires that they
assimilate with us completely .' And only by disappearing as a separate group
could the Jews demonstrate their patriotism and at the same time serve the
national interests of
Hermann Bahr also asked Haeckel if anti-Semitism might not in reality have the
opposite effect and encourage the
Jews to isolate themselves from
the Germans, Haeckel replied by saying that
every social movement had its successes and also its dangers. As for
himself, he felt that, on the whole, the anti-Semitic movement had served to
awaken the Jews and the Germans to the existence of a Jewish question. It had
helped to show that the continued emigration to Germany of Jews from
eastem
As far as
the Monist League was concerned, although it was not officially anti-Semitic
and even though some Jews were to be found in its ranks,54 there
were frequent expressions of uneasiness about the 'Jewish question.'55
The problem of the Jews, they wrote, was 'one of the most difficult'56
that Germany had to face. It was their feeling that the Jews had to renounce
all ties to Judaism and to world Jewry so that they could cease to exist as a
separate group.57With the renunciation of Judaism, they wrote, the
Jews would happily 'disappear for all time as an individual nation.'58
But beyond
anti-Semitism and the other links that have been established, certainly the
most significant and heretofore largely unnoticed and unrecognized influence of
Haeckel and the Monists on the development of National Socialism is to be found
in Hitler himself. It has only relatively recently been observed that a
relationship appears to exist between, on the one hand, the general outlook of
Hitler and the framework in which he cast his ideas and, on the other hand, the
social Darwinism of Haeckel and the Monists.59 However, these
insights have thus far not been developed or elaborated upon to any great
extent. More intensive probing into the ideological framework of Hitler's
thinking, especially as intimately recorded in his Tischgespräche, reveals
a critical, general and also a specific relationship with the ideas of Haeckel.
Indeed, rightly considered, a number of Hitler's conversations and the content
of some of his writings emerge as an extended paraphrase and at times even plagiarism of Haeckel's Natiirliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte and the Welträtsel. The first question
that should be answered, therefore, is whether or not it is
likely that Hitler read the works of Haeckel or was in a position to know of
his ideas or the beliefs of any of the Monists.
There
appears to be at least two significant contacts that can be established between
Hitler and members of the Monist League. Hitler was familiar with the ideas
ofWilhelm Boelsche, the literary critic and guiding spirit of the
Friedrichshagen literary circle, who was,as we have already
noted, also a close disciple and biographer of Haeckel and a co-founder of
the Monist League. Boelsche did much to popularize the ideas of Haeckel
in
In the
decade and a half prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Hitler was in
his late teens and early twenties. As part vagrant,part bohemian artist in
Hitler's
indebtedness to Haeckel lies in the underlying ideology at the heart of
significant parts of his conversations, speeches, and writings. They show a
basic kinship with the principles and even with some of the formulations of
Haeckelian social Darwinism and with Monism. Hitler' s views on history,
politics, religion, Christianity, nature, eugenics, science, art, and
evolution, however eclectic, and despite the plurality of their sources,
coincide for the most part with those of Haeckel and are more than occasionally
expressed in very much the same language. Naturally, this is not to deny the
influence on Hitler of many other writers and Volkish intellectuals, for it is
apparent, that Hitler's views were far too heterogeneous a compilation to be
limited to a single source. Yet, the evidence does seem to show parallels and
affinities between Hitler and Haeckel that so far have not been satisfactorily
explored and determined. In the thought of Hitler, as in that of Haeckel,
social Darwinism was brought together under the rubric of
evolutionary religion and it is this common feature of their thought which
indissolubly binds them together and makes them part of one intellectual
tradition. Both Hitler and Haeckel shared a common sense of mission in regard
to man and to his relationship to nature. In his general outlook on the world
Hitler protested as much as Haeckel did that the great defect of modern Western
society was that man was in constant violation of nature. As Ernst Nolte has
expressed it, Hitler was in 'dread' of the forces of 'antinature.' He believed
that there were 'certain basic structures of social existence' which were
'threatened' by the 'transcendence' in man, by his quest for freedom and
equality, and by his uncalled for rebellion against the dictates of nature. In
his Weltanschauung, therefore, Hitler was 'afraid of man for man'
and defended human culture as he understood it against the Western tradition.
Like Haeckel he sought to curb the 'germs of disintegration' within society by
returning to the paths marked out by nature. For Hitler, therefore, social
Darwinism was not simply the idea of struggle. It was the holy conception of
nature and understood in this way his idea of the world was indistinguishable
from that of Haeckel.67
had urged
deference to the 'great eternal iron laws'71 of the universe, Hitler
spoke of the necessity of becoming familiar with the laws of nature which he
was certain would 'guide us on the path of progress.'72 He urged
that it was 'useful to know the laws of nature-for that enables us to obey
them. To act otherwise would be to rise in revolt against heaven.'73
Hitler
applied his belief in nature to the world of man in the same resolute and
literal way that had been characteristic of Haeckel. He argued that in human
affairs 'as in everything, nature is the best instructor.'74 He
insisted, as Haeckel had, that 'one must start by accepting the principle that
nature herself gives all the necessary indications, and that therefore one must
follow the rules that she has laid down.'75 And for Hitler, as for
Haeckel, this was especially true in regard to the laws of society. Hitler,
like Haeckel, lamented the tragedy that 'man, alone amongst the living
creatures, tries to deny the laws of nature.'76 It was nature that
had to provide absolute guidelines for the total organization and direction
of society.
Like
Haeckel, Hitler conceived of man's lot on earth as 'characterized by an eternal
struggle... against beasts and against men themselves.'77 History
was nothing less than 'an eternal struggle for existence,' and politics had to
be based therefore upon the direct application of the laws of nature and
struggle. 'The earth continues to go round, whether it's the man who kills the
tiger or the tiger which eats the man. The strongest asserts his will, it's the
law of nature.'78 One must recognize the radical bond which united
man and society with nature. It was true that 'men know as little why they live
as does any other creature of the world.'79 But they were subjected
to the conditions of life whether they liked it or not. 'Nothing that is made
of flesh and blood can escape the laws which determine its coming into being.
As soon as the human mind believes itself to be superior to them, it destroys
the real substance which is the bearer of the mind.'80
Like the Monists, Hitler was concerned with preserving and maintaining the biological prowess of Germany: just as weaker animals were weeded out by natural selection or struggle so too must weaker human beings be eliminated. And he evoked the memory and tradition of the eugenic practices of the ancient Spartans in language virtually identical to Haeckel's. It is to be recalled that Haeckel had written:
'Among the
Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination and
selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity
, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to
live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.'81 Similarly
Hitler wrote: 'Sparta must be regarded as the first folkish state. The exposure
of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more
decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of
our day which preserves the most pathological subject.'82
...Highly
revealing is the fact that Hitler not only conceived of social problems in
general in the light of biology but also treated the special Jewish question in
the same way. For this, too, there was a tradition in Monism. As we have noted
above, Haeckel regarded the Jews as a race with unenviable characteristics and
described them in biological terms. And other Monists had on various occasions
repeated an idea which was gaining popularity in
...After
1933, many prominent Nazis who apparently were more aware than Hitler of their
intellectual predecessors had no hesitation in expressing their deep debt to
Haeckel and freely described him as a major prophet of National Socialism. In
February, 1934, to commemorate the Centenary of Haeckel's birth, celebrations
were held at the
Among Haeckel's
closest followers in the Monist League, National Socialism was openly and
enthusiastically welcomed as the ideology which they had been espousing for
years. In 1933, the Monist League was dissolved and a new cultural organization
came into existence in its place, the Ernst Haeckel GeseI1schaft. It was
sponsored by the well-known Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, who was to
be tried and condemned to death at the
One question remains to be answered, however. Haeckel was clearly accorded recognition by some Nazi intellectuals and by his followers as a forerunner of the Third Reich. Yet at the same time, it is also apparent that Haeckel did not figure in Nazi propaganda as a major prophet of National Socialism. He never attained the status of Lagarde or of Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the annals of Nazi history. And the reason is clear. While Darwinism was part of the Nazi educational curriculum in biology, official National Socialist ideology was suspicious of the idea of human evolution and, while not outrightly denying it, tended to play down the theory of the animal origin of man. It must be remembered that the Nazis had assigned a heroic and eternally superior character and racial constitution to the Aryans. It was therefore hardly ideologically admissible at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning. This dilemma of the Nazis, however, in regard to the complete acceptance of the idea of evolution was in fact an Haeckelian dilemma...
Evolutionary Paradigm as a Basis for Eugenics, Genocide and Infanticide -
Public Understanding of Science (PUS) Weighted and Found Wanting
For a shorter, printed version of the article, see
Haeckelian legacy of popularization and the Survival of the Fakest in Ojala PJ (2004) "Challenges for Bioethics from Asia". Fifth Asian Bioethics Conference, ABC (5):391-412.
Summary
A study of the history of science is vital for the natural scientists to gain self-criticism, when biology is being transformed from a descriptive and passive discipline to an active one. Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) biased drawings of vertebrate embryos that claim identity from fish to man in a controversial "phylotypic stage" of development seems to have been the most recycled figure in the Finnish textbooks of biology in the 20th century. Prior to Haeckel, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) set the stage by confessing that the similarity of the embryos was his strongest single class of facts in favor of evolution. After the popularization of the vulgar form of evolution in the bestselling science-books of Haeckel, these relics were established in the support of the "Biogenetic Law", memorized by generations of uncomprehending schoolchildren by the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Human embryo was supposed to pass through stages like invertebrate, fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal, primate, ape, and man in the womb. According to Yrjö Reenpää –prized Stephen Gould (1941-2002), recapitulation became a cross-scientific paradigm from palaentology to psychoanalysis, exceeded only by the natural selection itself. After a “reproduction” by Richardson et al (1997), university-level textbooks (Alberts et al (2002), Gilbert (2000) etc.) are now abandoning these figures as unauthentic. In the popularization, however, economic utilization of human embryos is being lobbyed without references to the brutal fraud at the culmination points of bioethics. I claim that the fraudulency of the Haeckelian legacy is systematic, evident in the racist themes outrooted from the textbooks already in the 1950's by anthropologists. Embryology has been transformed into “developmental biology”, but this should not distract an analogous responsibility. Haeckel drew one of the first phylogenetic trees, named the first prehistoric man before it was found. Haeckel doctored evidence for spontaneous generation from inorganic material ("monera") over 50 years after Louis Pasteur's (1822-1895) sterilization experiments. Haeckel coined the terms phyla, phylogeny, ontogeny, heterochrony, protista, gastrula, blastula, morula, and ecology - but also claimed that human babies do not sense pain upon birth, and preached e.g. the concepts of Judenfrage and Finnenfrage (regarding authors own "Mongolian" race). Monist League cultured on Haeckelian legacy of popularization and Fascism socialized Haeckel's slogan "politics is applied biology". Haeckel's was the first total program of Judenfrage: To exclude all Jews from their chairs, despite the fact that his mentor Rudolf Virchow was one of them. How much did Virchow's empirical criticism of the doctrine of common descent contribute to the hatred? I consider the 8.9.2001 White House Paper's outcry to search stem cells apart from human embryos a singularity of bioethics. The "gill slits", "fins", "furrows" and "tails" of human embryos justify the "importance of being earnest". Is there an indirect price for the society for utilizing human embryos and their stem cells? Taking the current declassification of the World War II files into account, could George Walker Bush be the man to judge the present in the past context?
Haeckelian embryo relics
The art of embryology used to be called Entwicklungsgeschicte, the developmental history of the organism. This history, according to the received wisdom, can be seen repeating itself during the development of every new individual. Until recently, Ernst Haeckel's (1834-1919) drawings of the external morphology of vertebrate embryos remained the most comprehensive comparative data displaying their conserved stage. Molecular Biology of the Cell, authored by the president of the National Academy of Science Bruce Alberts and others (1994, p. 33), as an indicator, referred to Haeckel's Anthropogenie from the year 1874 in its 1994 edition (Fig. 1A).
When a group of zoologists from six universities reproduced the old figures (Richardson et al 1997), it lead to a popular claim that the topic is “turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology” (commentary in Science 277, p. 1435, 1997). On the basis of the correct appearance from over 40 different embryos, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) - the last scholar with a type writer and proofreading in the footnotes, for whom I dedicate my thesis – wrote in his monthly Natural History before his untimely death: "But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!"(Gould 2000.)
The reductionist paradigm framing the Haeckelian embryos was not a model, but a universal law. Johann Friedrich Meckel the Younger (1781-1833) and Etienne R.A. Serres (1786–1868) had earlier, but more limited statements of the same idea. The "Meckel-Serres law" asserted that the embryo passed stages corresponding to the adults of lower forms. Ernst Haeckel seized upon these generalizations and he is remembered especially due to his Biogenetic Law ("Biogenetische Grundgesetz") aka recapitulation and his Gastraea Theory.
Both of the theories had to do with the developmental biology, but especially the Biogenetic Law had fatal components to it (Gould 1977a). The law of correspondence meant correspondence between fertilized egg and amoeba, the gastrula and the coelenterates, the pharyngula and the fish etc. The law of terminal addition meant evolution by linear addition on terminal stages. The law of truncation meant the recapitulation in normal time of gestation. The main expression of Haeckel declared that organisms retrace their evolution as embryos when they "climb their own family tree”.
In essence, there is a chain of circular reasoning from Ernst Haeckel's ontologically validated belief of an evolutionary bond of physical forces that linked the ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes, to the popularization of his deductions as a proof of evolution.
Haeckel nailed down the implications of his "causal nexus" in five theses (according to the translation of Haeckel's General Morphology (1866) by Russell (1916) in Churchill (1991)):
1. Ontogeny or the development of the organic individual, being the series of changes in form through which every individual organism passes during the entire span of its individual existence, is directly determined by the phylogeny or development of the organic lineage(Phlon) to which it belongs.
2. Ontogeny is the short and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (propagation) and adaptation (nourishment).
3. The organic individual (as a morphological individual of the first through sixth order) repeats during the quick and short course of its individual development the most important of those changes in form, which its ancestors traversed during the slow and long course of its paleontological development according to the laws of heredity and adaptation.
4. As ontogeny takes an ever shorter path, the complete and accurate repetition of phyletic by ontogenetic development is falsified and abbreviated by secondary contractions; therefore the more complete the repetition is, the longer is the series of successively transversed juvenile stages.
5. Since the organism during its individual development becomes adapted to new circumstances, the complete and accurate repetition of phyletic by ontogenetic development is falsified and altered by secondary adaptations; therefore the more accurate the repetition is, the more similar are the conditions of existence under which the organism and its ancestors have developed.
Stephen Jay Gould refuted the dogmatic use of the Haeckelian paradigm "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in his first technical book Ontogeny and phylogeny in 1977. Another influential writer who assessed the poor scientific value of Gastraea Theory and Biogenetic Law had been de Beer (1930). In his more popular Ever Since Darwin, Gould had written:
"Recapitulation was Haeckel's favorie argument… He used it to attack nobility's claim to special status - are we not all fish as embryos? - and to ridicule the soul's immortality - for where could the soul be in our embryonic, wormlike condition?" (Gould 1977b, p. 217.)
The breakthrough or at least the most recent round of correspondence over the level of fabrication and "phylotypic stage" of "hour-glass" theory of resemblance has taken place as correspondence to technical journals like TREE 12, pp. 461-3 (1997); TREE 13, p. 158 (1998); Science 279, p. 1288 (1998); Science 280, pp. 983, 985-6 (1998); Science 281, p. 349 (1998); Science 281, p. 1289 (1998); Nature 406, p. 225 (2000); Nature 410, p. 144 (2001) etc.According to Richardson et al (1997) (see Fig. 1B), the distortions include omissions and insertions of embryo features, which can neither be explained by the quality of the day's microscopes (the Zeiss company was founded in Haeckel’s city of Jena, Eastern Germany), nor hand motorics (Haeckel published even art books). It is hard to find a scale bar to make a judgment on the embryonic "gill slits", which, I think, is inexcusable in such a volume of popularization. The difference in size across the species is about 0,7-9,25 mm, and hidden is also the actual age of the embryos. The first of the three embryo lanes the earliest phase of ontogenesis is not, as was originally implied. The differences are most evident before the disputed phylotypic stage.
Figure 1. Putatively the most recycled topic in the textbooks of the 20th century biology, compared to its empirical reproduction. A) Haeckel's view of a conserved state in the embryonic development of (from left to right) a fish, an amphibian (salamander), a reptile (turtle), a bird (chicken), and a selection of mammals (pig, cow, rabbit, human). From Alberts, B.; Bray, D.; Lewis, J; Raff, M.; Roberts, K.; Watson, J.D. (1994) Molecular biology of the cell. 3rd ed Garland Publishing, Inc. New York & London, p.33. Originally from E. Haeckel, Anthropogenie, oder Entwickelungsgeschicte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1874. B) A sample of the actual outlook of the corresponding embryos (the fish, the salamander, the turtle, the chicken, the rabbit and the human embryo). Adapted and modified from the reproduction by Richardson, M.K.; Hanken, J.; Gooneratne, M.L.; Pieau, C.; Raynaud, A.; Selwood, L.; Wright, G.M. (1997) There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development. Anat. Embryol. 196: 91-106. Copyright Springer-Verlag.
Of the seven classes of vertebrates, five at most are included (apparently because the taxonomic level of greatest resemblance among vertebrate embryos seems to be below the subphylum). After omissions of common species, even the nomenclature of the selectively chosen ones (like salamander as a representative instead of a frog) are sometimes skewed. The original and the replicas alike typically fail to give scientific names, stages or source of the specimens illustrated. The number of units in repeating series such as spine somites is claimed to be practically invariant, although it ranges from 11 to over 60 (and to over 500 apart from these examples in the case of snakes).
The infamous visceral or pharyngeal pouches (referred to by more professional authors; grotesquely as gill slits or functional gills) at the tailbud stage look strikingly different in Richardson's sample of schemes, and range from 1 to 6 in number. Furthermore, there seems to be changes in pattern (allometry) and timing (heterechrony) of growth in limbs or paired fin buds, lens buds, liver tubes, or heart in the mid-stage of the Haeckel's concept of phylum ("phylotypic" stage). In reality, the "gills" (as originally discussed) develop into structures in inner ear, jaw, throat, some glands etc. The first detailed reference to the correct organs I have found in Finnish dates back to the anthropologist Yrjö Kajava (1919, p. 36-38).
Gould described how the predecessor in his chair (Louis Agassiz, 1807-1873) disliked Haeckel for "his haughty dismissal of earlier work which he often shamelessly 'borrowed' without attribution" (2000). Richardson and Keuck wrote in one of the above mentioned prestigious correspondences:
"We can make a persuasive case with Haeckel because we have identified some of his sources… he removed the limbs. The cut was selective, applying only to the young stage. It was also systematic because he did it to other species in the picture… The altered drawings support theories which the originals did not. Therefore, these are not legitimate schematic figures." (Nature 410, 2001, p. 144.)
Haeckel never listed the sources of his simplified pictures. Simplified pictures whose further simplified modifications of the first lane of embryos might be the most recycled ones in the history of biology. Filling the gaps in the embryonic series by speculation is one thing, but concealing a mere hypothesis from observations is something else.
Richardson and Keuck (2002) have compiled the most thorough list I have seen on the possible sources of the drawings, together with the list of detailed charges on the fabricated embryo panels (Rütimeyer 1868, His 1874, Balfour 1876, Brab 1909, Keibel 1909, Richardson 1995, Richardson et al 1997, and Gould 2000 for Louis Agassiz in unpublished marginalia; I do not have access to all of the references). The consensus seems to be, that the recapitulationary concept of Haeckel is dead thanks to developmental physiology and genetics. It is hastily added, however, that it has its value as a descriptive statement. Haeckel himself used puzzling phrase "labyrinth of ontogenesis" in his most popular Weltraethsel or Riddle (1899 p. 79).
As an example of the Haeckelian deduction, a university textbook Cell, Embryos and Evolution - Toward a Cellular and Developmental Understanding of Phenotypic Variation and Evolutionary Adaptability by Gerhart and Kirschner (1997, p. 329) elaborate a new concept of "evolvability". After an excellent survey through a wealth of biochemical and cellular details, the authors seem to conclude in the last chapter by modifying the old paradigm of "unipolar Haeckel" by "bipolar Haeckel", "two-dimensional Haeckel", and "three-dimensional Haeckel" -models. Sound criticism of the deductive Haeckelian reductionism has been rare in the narrative thread of Ariadne, until recently.
In a sense the situation resembles the paradigm change from the "tree of life" to the "bush of life" or "agnostic tree of life" at the emergence of the genome projects and popularization of the lateral gene transfer. Likewise, the Biogenetic Law is still supported by several recent studies – if applied to single characters only like in Richardson & Keuck (2002). Popperian habits would wellcome not only verification, but also falsification in order to earn the epithet "scientific" for a theory. Biogenetic Law was a straitjacket for a paradigm, and there must be a place for criticism before adopting it as a heuristic principle.
Reflections of the discourse has led to the dismissal of the Haeckelian relics from the most recent editions of major textbooks such as the aforementioned The Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts et al 2002) or Developmental Biology (Gilbert 2000). Scott Gilbert is the author of the most extensively used book of developmental biology, whose most recent 6th edition (2000) became freely available in PubMed in the autumn 2002. It is somewhat embarrassing, that even Gilbert used the forgery in the 5th edition of the Developmental Biology (1997). Gilbert has been open-minded enough to give attention to his error, although not in the printed version of the book. In an Internet-appendix to the last chapter, he writes: "However, even though von Baer and others had discredited the recapitulation notion, it became one of the most popular notions in biology. Gould (1977a, b) has shown that while recapitulation has a limited value in looking at in formation of related species, it is not a general phenomenon. However, recapitulationism became one of the central paradigms of biology." (http://devbio.com/chap22/link2201a.shtml).[1]
As another example of the consensus, another text-book entitled Developmental Biology (Muller 1997) discussed Haeckel's "serious mistakes", but modified the biogenetic law in the context of conserved body plan, and concluded: "Therefore, the biogenetic law is valid if it is modified by stating that all vertebrates recapitulate certain embryonic traits of their ancestors… in particular, a common phylotypic stage." (Muller 1997, pp.124-5).
As to its causalities for today's research, it is often boldly stated that the Haeckelian embryos are paramount to the importance of clothing of Madonna in a medieval painting to Christian doctrines. I think the relevance and the level of fabrication in the Haeckelian legacy of popularization can be prooved only with a historical perspective, apart from hair-splitting. Was Ernst Haeckel a deliberate propagandist and a fraud? Did the Haeckelian popularization brutalize the western society cross-disciplinary? How did the laymen embrace the rhetorics of the human “gill slits”?
Haeckel on genocide and infanticide
Haeckel considered human thought as a mere physiological process and stressed the physical similarity of humans and animals. Haeckel used his comparative embryology to cheapen human beings from special creation to animal kingdom.
In the Wonders of Life - A popular study of biological philosophy (1904), Haeckel declared that the newborn human infant is deaf and without consciousness, from which he reasons that there is no soul or spirit even by birth. Haeckel advocated the destruction of abnormal new born infants' and argued that it cannot rationally be classed as murder.[2]
Eventually, Haeckel recapitulated convincing statistics to persue "an act of kindness" and "redemption from evil". The "wise old genius of Jena", whose name was to become "a shining symbol that will arise", despite the fact that "nations will fall [and] thrones will topple" and who was to "outlast all" (epithets from the contemporary folks, Gould 1977a, p. 77) concluded by the exhortation to liquidate the invalids by a dose of morphia.[3]
Daniel Gasman's pioneering study The Scientific Origins of National Socialism - Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971) was a study long overdue. He challenged earlier portraits of Haeckel as a socialist or a liberal, and argued that Haeckel defended racism, German nationalism instead. In this classic, Gasman elaborates: "It is to be recalled that Haeckel had written: 'Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination and selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.' [The History of Creation, 1883, I, p. 170.]
In the light of the following comments, is Haeckel “guilt by association” to Hitler only?
'Sparta must be regarded as the first folkish state. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.'[Hitler's Secret Book, p. 18] (1971 p. 164)?
Let us remember that premature infants have been even operated without local anesthesia or analgesic drugs almost until our times. Western countries, generally, have broadly embraced the fact that a new-born child can feel pain only at the late 1980'ies.
Haeckel ascended from infanticide also to genocide:
"…the morphological differences between two generally recognized species - for example sheep and goats - are much less important than those… between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race" (The History of Creation 1876, p. 434).
He categorized human beings into "Woolly-haired" and "Straight-haired" classes. The Woolly-haired people were "incapable of a true inner culture or of a higher mental development" (The History of Creation, 1876, p. 310). Only among the Aryans was there that
"symmetry of all parts, and that equal development, which we call the type of perfect human beauty" (The History of Creation, 1876, p. 321).
"The mental life of savages rises little above that of the higher mammals, especially the apes, with which they are genealogically connected. Their whole interest is restricteed to the physiological functions of nutrition and reproduction, or the satisfaction of hunger and thirst in the crudest animal fashion… one can no more (or no less) speak of their reason than of that of the more intelligent animals." (The wonders of life, 1905, p. 56-7).
Finally, since "the lower races - such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes - are psychologically nearer to the mammals - apes and dogs - than to the civilized European, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives… Their only interest are food and reproduction… many of the higher animals, especially monogamous mammals and birds, have reached a higher stage than the lower savages" (The wonders of life, 1905, p. 390, 393). See figures 2-3 as reality bites of the Haeckelian legacy of popularization. How on Earth is it possible, that the most celebrated figure in modern times has been mongered from a book like these? It is offensive not only to the ethics, but to the common sense.
[1] Gilberts defends his own, earlier usage of the figures, by stating:
"But Haeckel's drawings are wrong… the picture can be used (as it has been in several developmental biology books, including my own [Gilbert, 1997, p. 254]) to illustrate von Baer's principles rather than Haeckel's biogenetic law. K.E. von Baer had noted that the general features of a large group of animals appear earlier in the embryo than do the specialized features… The concept of homology enables one to celebrate the differences or the similarities between two structures. Whether one emphasizes the similarities between our forelimb and a bird's wing or the differences between them depends on what you are describing. Comparative anatomy--with its Aristotelian and Cuverian interest in relating structure to function--usually emphasizes the differences. Morphology--with its Platonic and Geoffroyan interest in the underlying unities of structure--usually focuses on the similarities." (HYPERLINK http://devbio.com/chap22/link2201b.shtml).
[2] "…It is on the ground of these experiences that I have adopted the views on the nature of the human mind which are expounded in the second part of The Riddle of the Universe (chapters vi.-xi.). The following are the chief points: 1. The soul of a man is - objectively considered - essentially similar to that of all other vertebrates; it is the physiological action or function of the brain. 2. Like the functions of all other organs, those of the brain are effected by the cells, which make up the organ. 3. These brain-cells, which are also known as soul-cells, ganglionic cells, or neurona, are real nucleated cells of a very elaborate structure-- In any case, the fundamental fact is now empirically established that the phronema (the real organ of the soul) forms a definite part of the cortex of the brain, and that without it there can be no reason, no mental life, no thought, and no knowledge… I examine and appreciate the physiological work of the phroneta just as impartially as I deal with the organs of sense or the muscles. I find that the one is just as much subject as the other to the law of substance... Very striking examples of this are afforded in the case of idiots and microcephali, the unfortunate beings whose cerebrum is more or less stunted, and who have accordingly to remain throughout life at a low stage of mental capacity… They are like vertebrates from which the cerebrum has been partly or wholly removed in the laboratory. These may live for a long time, be artificially fed, and execute automatic or reflex (and in part purposive) motions, without our perceiving a trace of consciousness, reason, or other mental function in them… The embryology of the child-soul… Taken together, they convince us that the phronema is undeveloped in the new-born infant; and so we can no more speak in this case of a "seat of the soul" than of a "human spirit" as a centre of thought, knowledge, and consciousness. Hence the destruction of abnormal newborn infants - as the Spartans practised it, for instance, in selecting the bravest - cannot rationally be classed as "murder", as is done in even modern legal works. We ought rather to look upon it as a practise of advantage both to the infants destroyed and to the community. As the whole course of embryology is, according to our biogenetic law, an abbreviated repetition of the history of the race, we must say the same of psychogenesis, or the development of the "soul" and its organ - the phronema. Comparative psychology comes next in importance to embryology as a means of studying the ancestral history of the soul." (Haeckel, Wonders of Life, 1904, 11-12, 18-21.)
[3] "We must class as a traditional dogma the widespread belief that man is bound under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life, even when it has become utterly useless - a source of pain to the incurable and of endless trouble to his friends. Hundreds of thousands of incurables - lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc. are artificially kept alive in our modern communities, and their sufferings are carefully prolonged, without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body… What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and publix expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!" (Haeckel, Wonders of Life, 1904, p. 118).
Figure 2. When is a 'schematic' illustration a fraud? Apart from the embryos, the celebrated Anthropogenie or The Evolution of Man (1874 edition) contained also this Haeckelian illustration of evolution.
The life and deeds of Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel was a scientist and a storyteller. He was not only the first professor of Zoology at Jena, Germany, but committed to "social Darwinism" (or Spencerism) as a social, political and de facto religious ideology. The unifying name for his system of ideas is recalled by the name of Monism.
Haeckel inherited his chair In Jena from his lifelong friend Carl Gegenbaur (1826-1903), who withdraw from the chair in 1862 and got a professorship in anatomy in 1873 in Heidelberg. During his professorship from 1862 to 1909, Haeckel became an institution, who introduced e.g. the terms phylum, phylogeny, ontogeny, palingenesis, cenogenesis, gastrula, blastula and morula. Heterochrony (evolutionary changes in the sequence of developmental events) is Haeckel's term at the culmination point of his biased representation of observations of embryos. Haeckel solved Gordions knots by defining new terms. When certain lower organisms were difficult to categorize both to the animal and plant kingdom, the invention was to christen them protists. Ecology, again, was coined to refer to "the relation of the animal both to its organic as well as to its inorganic environment" (Goldschmidt 1956, p. 33).
Year 1859 meant not only the spreading of the 24 canines to Australia by the way of Thomas Austin. In the critical years (1859-1866) after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel worked on invertebrate goups such as radiolarians, sponges and segmented worms. Totally, he described more than 3500 radiolarian species (Sander 2002).
Figure 3. The frontispiece drawing to the English edition of Evolution of Man (trans. 1903) presents a skull labelled "Australian Negro" as an intervening evolutionary stage between the "mediterranean" skull and those of the lower primates (from the 1891 ed. of the Anthropogenie).
Figure 4. One of the first drawn genealogical/phylogenetic trees. Note the Monera, the surviving (and fabricated) link between inorganic and living matter on the foundations of the tree. From the 5th ed. of The Evolution of Man, 1910.
It was Haeckel, who is given the honour of drawing the first gnarled phylogenetic tree covering the whole animal kingdom (Hillis 1997) (see figure 4). It was Haeckel who postulated that an extinct organism Gastraea is the ancestor of all metazoan species with gastrula-stage (Scott Gilbert in http://devbio.com/chap22/link2201a.shtml). It was Haeckel, who gave the Linnaen binomial classification name Pithecanthropus alalus ('ape-man without speech') for the first "forefather" of man - before it was even dug up (Richard Milner's Encyclopedia of evolution, 1990, pp. 147-8; 205-7). The Java-Man was a discovery of Eugene Dubois, a disciple of Haeckel. The connection to Haeckel was covered first by changing the name to Pithecanthropus erectus, and finally to the present Homo erectus. Appropriate to say that in 1935 the aged Dubois grieved over and criticized his own finding, although he was not given authority anymore by then (Milner 1990, p. 148). Haeckel had another artist, Gabriel Max, to draw the imagined forefather (see figure 5), but he only superficially referred to Dubois actual evidence.
Figure 5. The appearance of the Pithecantropus alalus alias Pithecantropus erectus alias Homo erectus - before found by Eugene Dubois, a disciple of Haeckel. Drawn by Gabriel Max, from the 1898 ed. of the Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschicte.
Figure 6. Haeckel’s drawings of the eating habit and reproductive cycle of an alleged Moneron (plural: Monera). "Details" on spontaneous generation of living organisms from inorganic material. Ernst Haeckel (1882) Naturlig Skapelsehistoria, p. 127. Öfversättning från originalets sjunde upplaga af A.F. Åkerberg. Stocholm. A.W.Björcks Förlag.
It was Haeckel, who left a mystical connotation to biological proteins, a theory based on the amorphous gypsum precipitated in the bottom of seas. This was years after Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) began shaking hands wearing gloaves while coining the "virus" and "bacteria" and emptying the last corner of spontaneous generation in his sterilization experiments in 1859-1862.
It was Haeckel, who invented and drew a series of miniscule protoplasmic organisms and named them "Moneron/Monera" (see figure 6). These were to be
"not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simple homogeneous matter… nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combination of carbon." (The History of Creation, 3rd ed. in 1883, p. 184.)
Haeckel had presented his Moneron in 1866, and Thomas Henry Huxley from the British Empire confirmed the statement in 1868 and named the discovery Bathybius haeckelii. Huxley, however, rejected the discovery immediately upon its refutation as silica pasta (Leikola 1987, p. 320). As a resounding contrast, Haeckel's reprints of The History of Creation (1876) remained unrevised until the final edition in 1923. Detailed descriptions and elaborate drawings on 'life particles' that were entirely nonexistent is a heinous deceit. The article in 1868 in a medical journal of Jena contained over 70 pages of speculations and 30 drawings alone (Haeckel 1868b). Omne vivum ex ovo (vivo) said William Harvey already back in 1651.
Let us remind, that spontaneous (non-informational) creation was widely accepted even in the case of worms, mice, scorpions etc. until the seventeenth century. Darwin actually abstrahized his "warm, little pond" before Louis Pasteur, who gave the mortal blow to the belief by the way of Redi and Spallanzani. Cellular level, the black box of the time, was the final citadel that had to yield itself. Grieviously few students, I think, are aware of the link of the original concept of "plastitudes" to the inheritance of acquired characteristics (“lamarckism”, according to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, 1744-1829). These "molecules of memory" predated the term of "genes" introduced as late as in 1909. Haeckel was not a consistent materialist: for him, the evolutionary process was guided by mystical forces within matter. Spontaneous (non-informational) creation was widely accepted even in the case of worms, mice, scorpions etc. until the 1800'ies. Darwin abstrahized his "warm, little pond" before Pasteur gave the mortal blow to the belief by the way of Redi and Spallanzani. Darwin's black box – the cells - was the final citadel to yield itself.
Gregor Mendel (1823-1884; Johann before joining the monastery) was from the continent, too, and I think the dismissal of his over ten thousand experimental repetitions and his "dishonesty" should be discussed in relation to Haeckel rather than to Darwin. New characteristics did not pop up ex nihilo in peas – and the work could not be reproduced with the asexual and apomictic hawkweed by the exhortion of the referees. (The work still could not be reproduced with the apomictic hawkweed according to the referees!) As a striking contrast to Mendel, Haeckel embraced the common "knowledge" that the environment acted directly on organisms, producing new races.
In the supplementary volume to the bestselling Riddle of the Universe (1899) - that is, in The Wonders of Life (1904) – Haeckel considered Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired modifications as a presupposition of Darwin's theory of natural selection. He defended this ideology, predating the disastrous Trofim Lysenko and the Soviet ”lysenkoism”, by writing: "I cannot yet see how heredity can be explained without this assumption! The very word 'reproduction', which is common to both processes, expressed the common character of psychic memory (as a function of the brain). By plastitudes I understand simple molecules; the homogenous nature of the plasm in the monera (both chromacea and bacteria and rhizomonera) and the primitive simplicity of their life-functions do not dispose us to think that special groups of molecules are to be distinguished in these cases… If we do not restrict the term 'life' to organisms properly so-called, and take it only as a function of plasm, we may speak in a broader sense of the life of crystals. This is seen especially in their growth, the phenomenon which Baer regarded as the chief character of all individual development."
Haeckel tried to annihilate Immanuel Kant's ways of thought already in his "Cell-souls and soul-cells" (1878), where Haeckel sold the "foundation" of his "oneness" (monism) based on plastitudes - the invisible, homogenous, elementary molecules of protoplasm. Haeckel's last published work was entitled "Die Kristallsehen" (1917). In it, even the last conditionals have been dropped out amongst the terminology such as "descriptive crystallography" or "physiology" of the "psychomatic" crystals. "Atom-souls" meant merely attraction, repulsion and crystallization. Life differed from inorganic matter just in its degree of organization. The "theory" of entropy had been rejected by Haeckel already in the bestseller[1]. The apparent contradiction of evolution and entropy was too difficult a riddle for Haeckel. Even The Second Law (of thermodynamics; the "theory" of entropy of the day) contra evolution was rejected by Haeckel in the popular Riddle of the Universe (1899, pp. 202-203). Life had differed from inorganic matter just in its degree of organization. Memory was a general function of organized matter. When the liquid crystals, such as the protein albumin, were found, the man was delighted at the extreme view that all matter is living and that the electrons are the most elementary animals.
In the zenith of a Monist conference in Hamburg, Harry Federley, Haeckel's Finnish disciple and the fatrher of Finnish eugenics was charmed especially by the artistic drawings of Svante Arrhenius from Sweden. (Federleys outstanding teacher in the New Swedish high school of Helsinki had been Axel Arrhenius.) "The evolution of the worlds" (Maailmojen kehitys) by Svante Arrhenius - a notorious chemist and a correspondent of Haeckel – had been translated to Finnish among the first ten books popularizing the common descent, in 1907. What is noteworthy is the fact that the empiricist devotes lengthy chapters dilly-dallying describing life in other planets and space. Arrhenius developed the concept of panspermia further after Thompson (alias Lord Kelvin) and Helmholtz. His Lehrbuch der Kosmischen Physik (1903) was used as a university-level textbook for the students of Physics in the one and only Finnish university. (It is still awkward, how the money for the Mars projects can be lobbied by sensational claims on life in Mars, and how the NASA agents awake presidents at the small hours all of a sudden, after an Antarctica meteorite has been studied for fourteen years.)
As a contrast, Federley views with disfavour “German-Jewish-American” Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), a German émigré to the United States from 1891, who lectured in the Monist conference on ‘Das Leben’ (that is, on his experiments on the chemical stimulation of the fertilization of egg cells). Loeb is considered as a pioneer in the colloid science that applied the reductionist materialism to the study of the structure of cells. (Loeb once called a phototropic insect a "photochemical machine enslaved to light", Allen 1984.) Harry Federley was still 35 year later irritated by Loebs claim that the question of fertilization was solved by mere chemistry and physics in his memoirs (1946a). Loeb had been a closely associated friend to Federley's competitor Thomas Hunt Morgan, who had got the Nobel Prize by the time (in 1933).
Nevertheless, Federley should have been more anxious in contributing to the definition of life in terms of information. The Greek word cosmos refers to order and stands in opposition for another word, chaos. Even in 1960’s and 1970’s, cellular compartments were widely held as mere reaction vessels containing complex chemical mixtures held at constant temperature and pressure. As data on metabolical pathways accumulated, it was still believed that cellular processes could be described as complex series of second-order random collisions brought about by the diffusion of reactants in restricted spaces.
In one generation, this black
box view of the living cell has changed dramatically. Bruce Alberts, the
president of the National Academy of Science, wrote as a beginning to his
Cell-commentary (1998): "We have always underestimated cells. Undoubtedly we
still do today. But at least we are no longer as naive as we were when I was a
graduate student in the 1960s". Alberts’ article was entitled "The Cell as a
Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular
Biologists" and the whole issue was dedicated to the topic of the “molecular
machines”. We are talking about a growing list of ribosomes, chromosomes,
spliceosomes, proteosomes, cyclosomes, replisomes, acrosomes, primosomes,
desmosomes, centrosomes, kinetosomes, apoptosomes etc. Reality bites come from
the flagella of Vibrio alginolyticus bacteria that utilize sodium gradients
instead of protons, and have a maximum velocity of 1,700 rps or 100,000 rpm (Magariyma
et al 1994). President Alberts writes that he is "sometimes reminded of the many
irrational complexities of a Rube Goldberg cartoon". It must be emphasized,
however, that the aroused perspective above the reductionist approach does not
by any means imply retirement of naturalistic origins, or an official seat given
to the modern versions of natural teleology in the undenominational, yet
ridiculed, Intelligent Design -movement. It should be evident that cells are
polar structures, whose interior is neither homogeneous nor isotropic. To carry
out directional processes, cells have to subdue randomizing effect of Brownian
motion and possess proteins operating as tiny machine-like devices. These units
can function even as molecular motors, which convert chemical energy into
mechanical work. Thus, a novel paradigm of “solid phase biochemistry” is being
introduced to life sciences despite the fact that the teleological or even the
more agnostic teleonomical phraseology has not been kept alive in the scientific
literature.
Needless to say, there existed no free will for the determinist. Man and nature
were one, and survival required conformation to the "ecological" totality
(Gasman 2002). Haeckel's plastitudes and gemmules dwelt on the
inheritance of acquired characteristics and here Federley clearly rejected
Haeckel’s preaching. Haeckel’s "molecules of memory" had predated the "genes" (since
1909 a'la Wilhelm Johannsen) and was completely old-fashioned for Federley.
Federley, actually, emphasized that environment had a minor effect even on the
social misconduct and extreme behavioural. The emphasis on genotype made not
only Federley's academic position firm, but also justified his authority in the
political sector.
The abiogenesis controversy is a good indicator of the dilemma. In the West, the
quasi-scientific theories of chemical evolution (abiogenesis) hold to the
DNA/RNA first, whereas in the socialist countries of the Eastern block the
proteins-first dogma seems to have been more popular. Federley had a Western
mind prior the disastrous agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Does the victory of the
DNA-camp contribute to the caveat of the genetic determinism? Garland Allen
(2002) has evaluated the interference of politics to the embryology and biology
in general in the West. Red Army and the Soviet mode of super-evolution never
invaded Finland. It has been easier to laugh at the outright inheritance of
acquired characteristics and to single out Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist:
"'Comrade Stalin found time even for detailed examination of the most important
problems of biology,' Lysenko declared in his eulogy for Stalin in Pravda [Truth]
(1953). 'He directly edited the plan of my paper, 'On the Situation in
Biological Science,' in detail, explained to me his corrections, and provided me
with directions as to how to write certain passages in the paper.'" (Milner
1993, p. 288.)
George Uschmann ridiculed the similar personalities of Haeckel and Lamarck as unlikely empirists (1979): "Mistakes, premature generalizations, persistance in error, polemics against colleagues, and insistence on his own achievements become explainable if Haeckel is understood as an artistic character. This may also explain the romantic and in travels, partly poetic, descriptions, as well as the fact that Haeckel was often swayed, not by clear scientific reasons, but by emotions. Also here the comparison with Lamarck is obvious. When they were nearly the same age (about 25 years), Lamarck dallied with the idea of becoming a musician, whereas Haeckel felt inclined become a landscape-painter."
It seems that the two great characters simply were too multitalented to stay as mere observators and spectators of nature. Inheritance of acquired characteristics is sweet a doctrine for a man with a great authority and multiple intellectual offsprings. "It is not poetry, science, or philosophy, but a still-born bastard of all three", complained Chamberlain the son-in-law to Richard Wagner. Chamberlain the prime minister had less time to react when the tide came to him.
The cross-scientific impact and pseudoscientific status of the Biogenetic Law
I am a mere graduate student of biochemistry, and I therefore request for a license to quote more authoritative post World War II historians of science on the impact and status of the "gill slit" –heritage. I am indexing a quotation depot, whose present status can be viewed in http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Sitaatit.html. Currently the site contains about 150 quotes on the cross-scientific impact, social impetus, and flaws of the recapitulation, besides biographical insights into Ernst Haeckelism. (Unfortunately, my German skills are limited, and I have to lean mainly on English literature.) My goal is to extend the site into an referable archive, and below is a sample of this on-going (if not everlasting) project:
"The present generation cannot imagine the role he played in his time, far beyond his actual scientific performance… Haeckel's easy hand at drawing made him improve on nature and put more into the illustrations than he saw. His medusae assumed romantic movements… radiolaria were too perfect all over. One had the impression that he first made a sketch from nature and then drew an ideal pictures he saw it in his mind… The present generation can hardly understand the influence…" (Goldschmidt 1956, pp. 31-33.)
"Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny---You may well ask why we bother you with the principles that turned out to be wrong. There are two reasons. In the first place, belief in recapitulation became so widespread that it is still evident in some writings about biology and evolution. You should know therefore what recapitulation is supposed to be, and you should know that it does not really occur”. (Simpson & Beck 1965, p. 241, 273).
“The so-called basic law of biogenetics is wrong. No buts or ifs can mitigate this fact. It is not even a tiny bit correct or correct in a different form. It is totally wrong.” (Blechschmidt 1977, p. 32).
"The result became known as Haeckel's 'Biogenetic Law': Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That famous phrase, memorized by generations of uncomprehending schoolchildren, means that the fetal development of an individual (ontogeny) is a speeded-up replay of millions of years of species evolution (phylogeny). In other words, a human embryo passes through various stages during its nine months in the womb: invertebrate; fish; amphibian; reptile; mammal; primate; ape; man. A fascinating concept, but the 'law' is untrue and was rejected by biologists around 1900. Nevertheless, it has become embedded in many school courses and textbooks and continues to be taught." (Milner 1990, p. 44.)
"Haeckel's forceful, eminently comprehensible, if not always accurate, books appeared in all major languages and surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin and Huxley (by Huxley's own frank admission), in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution… recapitulation - an evolutionary notion exceeded only by natural selection itself for impact upon popular culture…To cut to the quick of this drama: Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases - in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent - simply copied the same figure over and over again." (Gould 2000.)
"We grasp the importance of recapitulation only when we understand that it served as the organizing idea for generations of work in comparative embryology, physiology, and morphology… It is no exaggeration to say that the theory of recapitulation has had more effect upon paleontologic thought than has any doctrine aside from that of organic evolution itself… subjects strongly influenced by recapitulation: criminal anthropology, racism, child development, primary education, and psychoanalysis. Many other areas would have furnished equally impressive proof of influence... Piaget was trained as a paleontologist during the day of Haeckelian recapitulation... he believes that children provide the only access to a more interesting question with no direct answer: how, historically, did we learn to think and reason?... Piaget believes in parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny, but he denies Haeckelian recapitulation as their mechanism... Sigmund Freud had two strong reasons for a favorable predisposition towards Haeckel’s doctrine. He was, first of all, trained as a biologist during the era of its domination. Secondly, he was a devout Lamarckian and remained so throughout his long life... In his last work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud held fast even though evolutionary biology had abandoned his favored belief: ‘This state of affairs is made more difficult, it is true, by the present attitude of biological science, which rejects the idea of acquired qualities being transmitted to descendants. I admit, in all modesty, that in spite of this I cannot picture biological development proceeding without taking this factor into account’…Freud’s general theory of neurosis and psychoanalysis relies upon this view of mental recapitulation.” (Gould 1977a, p. 116-117, 156; see figure 7).
[1] "Entropy is untenable in the light of our monistic and consistent theory of the eternal cosmogenetic process… There is neither beginning nor end of the world. The university si infinite and eternally in motion." The Riddle of the Universe (1899), pp. 202-203.
Figure 7. How tight is the link between the Haeckelian legacy and the psychoanalysis or sexual revolution? The pansexual drawing was planned as an illustration number 100 in Artforms in Nature. When the model declined from the publication, the image was used finally in Wanderbilder in 1904. Frontispiece a’la Haeckel, from George J. Stein (1988), Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism. American Scientist 76, 50-58.
"Nonetheless, recapitulation did not become the basis for curricula in primary schools until the triumph of evolutionary theory and the introduction of Haeckel's powerful arguments. In Haeckel's version of recapitulation, a child literally was a small savage… If modern society would not allow him to behave like one, it could at least inspire his interest in school by teaching him the tales of ancestral stages appropriate to his age… The idea of basing primary school curricula upon recapitulation arose within an educational movement that invoked the name of Johann Friedrich Herbart... Herbart was a philosophical empiricist of the tabula rasa school. It is hard to imagine how he could have supported the biogenetic law with its necessary consequence of inherited racial memory." (Gould 1977a, p. 149, footnote in p. 426; tabula rasa literally means "empty (black)board", implying the ultimate absurdity of the cross-disciplinary syn-thesis.)
Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, and the origin of ideas
Prior to Haeckel's mystified doctrines, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) himself acknowledged in his letter to his intimate Asa Gray (1810-1888) and Joseph Hooker, that "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of" his theory was the similarity of vertebrate embryos in their earliest stages (Francis Darwin 1896 p. 131; Churchill 1991 pp. 1-29). Darwin complained that his reviewers and his friends had not paid attention to his embryological arguments despite of this. In the Origin, namey, Darwin had listed five set of facts in embryology, that could not be explained satisfactorily without the idea of descent with modification. "The leading facts in embryology" were "second in importance to none in natural history" (Origin, p. 450; Mayr 1982 p. 470).
Darwin referred mainly to the outlook, not to the recapitulation per se. In his autobiography, Darwin stated:
"Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class. No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the Origin" (Darwin 1987, p. 125).
Later on, this subject was siezed, indeed. In Darwin's Origin (p. 333-346), a phrase "second to none in importance" was used of the phenomenon - and in later editions the following phrase for its young investigator:
“[Haeckel]…brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters.”
Could the name of Darwin be one of the contributions why the misleading Haeckelian the embryo cavalcade had the authority to stay in the books despite the later criticism?
It might be, that Darwin also quoted a wrong authority regarding the topic, originally. The references in the relatively short bibliography of the Origin seem to have been fixed from Louis Agassiz to Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) only in the third edition. Jane Oppenheimer considered it "an embryological enigma", that Charles Darwin did not understand the implications of von Baer's comparative embryology, and writes: "In 1881, the year before he died, he still did not even own von Baer's works" (Løvtrup 1987, p. 160).
Richardson & Keuck write (2002):
"The Biogenetic Law and recapitulation are perhaps the sources of more confusion than any other ideas in evolutionary biology. It is not uncommon for the Biogenetic Law to be completely misattributed – to von Baer, for example. (e.g. Simpson & Beck, 1965: p. 240). A more common and significant problem is failure to distinguish recapitulation from mere embryonic similarity (the latter is more easily encompassed by von Baer's laws than by Haeckel's)."
Parodically, a common denominator of the Swiss professor of Harvard (Agassiz), and the father of developmental biology and discoverer of mammalian egg cell (von Baer) was the valiant criticism of "Darwins lehre" (Gould 2000). (In Agassiz' chair, the multi-language scholar had an access to the handwritten margins by his predecessor on the old classics!)
The laws of von Baer (special characters appear only later during the development) should be apprehended in the light of the old opinion prior to him and Caspar Wolff (1733-1794). Not only was a child considered a small-sized adult, but even the germ was considered like a miniatyr individual. Although Agassiz was persuaded to believe technical details even to the level of functioning human embryo gills despite his opposition to evolution, Von Baer was the nestor who protested Darwin for taking his name in vain to his death (Über Darwin's Lehre in 1874).[1] (I find it confusing, that the cliché of von Baer's unidentifiable vertebrate embryos in ether without labels is being recycled without an original reference.) Darwin did not apply his revolutionary theory to the human beings until his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. Although this was after the young and ambitious Haeckel had firmly stepped in the print, the humility by which the old Darwin paid hommage in his introduction is tragicomical:
"The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species… is not in any degree new… maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers… and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work 'Generelle Morphologie' (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his 'Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,' in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine."
One has the intuition, that Charles Darwin admired Haeckel's early official positions and discipline. I have faced great difficulties to find a record of any academic degree of Darwin, but sometimes he is referred to as a Master of Arts. It is well known, however, that in his youth, Darwin was sent down for spending too much time hunting, shooting, fishing and socialising. A nasty way to put it: Darwin ate most of his specimens when he was young.
Not so with Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel's theoretical magnum opus General Morphology (1866) aimed at a systematization of all biology in the light of Darwin's theory. In Jenensian tradition, his famous trees now covered all life forms (protists, mushrooms, plants and animals) and included the human being, explicitly. Taken into account the fact, that the young Haeckel wrote his major work in one year, his writing speed looks like an opposite to the aged and sick Charles Darwin. Darwin wrote three hours a day. Haeckel claimed he hardly slept three hours a day.[2]
In fact, when Haeckel sent a copy of his book to Darwin, the latter was flattered but confessed in a letter that the German book was too large for him to read it all. The editors of Darwin's letters give less praise:
"As a book, the General Morphology suffers a good deal from the arid, schematic, almost scholastic manner of exposition adopted. Haeckel's Prussian mania for organisation, for absolute distinctions, for iron-bound formalism, is here given a full scope. A treatment less adequate to the variety, fluidity, and changeableness of living things could hardly be imagined." (Løvtrup 1987 p. 234)
Both Darwin and Haeckel were married to their cousins. If Emma Darwin hindered Charles' publication of his studies, the death of Anna (Sethe) on Ernst' thirtieth birthday (!) triggered the outbreak of Haeckels publications. Generelle Morphologie was the outburst of a grieve stricken heart that could not even attend the funerals. Haeckel did not suffer from a mental breakdown, like von Baer. He channeled the pain to a publication speed of nearly three pages a day during this year.
After his first wife died in a young age, the happiest years of Ernst' life were all but gone. Haeckel stated in one of his very first letters to Charles Darwin (The Darwin Correspondence Online Database, document 4555 from July 1864) that because of this loss, he has grown indifferent to any criticism. The man became ontological naturalist who rejected any dualism having a trace of separation of material and spirit. This is where the ardent desire for the materialistic "Monism" (mono) came from. (See Holt 1971 for an indepth description of the tenets of Monism, comforting as a "religion" as called even by Haeckel himself.)
And so Darwin elaborated in his Descent of Man (1871, p. 203):
"In attempting to trace the genealogy of the Mammalia, and therefore of man, lower down in the series, we become involved in greater and greater obscurity. He who wishes to see what ingenuity and knowledge can effect, may consult Prof. Haeckel's works." [Footnote: "Elaborate tables are given in his 'Generelle Morphologie' (B. ii. s. cliii. and s. 425); and with more especial reference to man in his 'Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,' 1868. Prof. Huxley, in reviewing this latter work ('The Academy,' 1869, p. 42) says, that he considers the phylum or lines of descent of the Vertebrata to be admirably discussed by Haeckel, although he differs on some points. He expresses, also, his high estimate of the general tenor and spirit of the whole work."]
The correspondence between Huxley and Haeckel, where Darwin referred, seems to have been an excellent indication of the differing "zeitgeist" between the British Isles and the continent. The English edition of the Generelle Morphologie did not contain the main arguments on the descent of man or his 'system of monism'. Huxley cancelled entire chapters from Haeckel's main work despite the fact that he was a fervent defender of Darwinism. Huxley remained an adherent of agnosticism – a word that Huxley coined by himself for himself! (Uschman 1979, p. 116).
Haeckel did not have his cousin to advice in the experiences like that of Darwin regarding the two visits in the islands of southern Pacific, John G. Patton, London Missionary Society, and the impact of environment over the heritage. Was the phrase agnostism directed only against the churches, neither? What if it also meant divergence from the more vulgar evolutionary indoctrination in the continent?
I think this great difference in the legacy of popularization in the British Isles and the continent could have contributed to the ideological resistance of the England against the race hygieny and, finally, against the coalition or armistice with the Nazi Germany after it had assumed power by conspiracies behind democratic elections.
Referring to both Huxley and Haeckel, Darwin wrote in the first chapter of the Descent of Man: “The [human] embryo itself at a very early period can hardly be distinguished from that of other members of the vertebrate kingdom… It may, however, be added that the human embryo likewise resembles in various points of structure certain low forms when adult… os coccyx projects like a true -- we ought frankly to admit their community of descent.” (p. 14-17.)
The academic myth of recapitulation rests on a set of 24 Haeckelian figures first published in 1866 in Generalle Morphologie der Organismen, recycled first and foremost by Haeckel himself. There was only one illustration in the Origin, but many of them in the Descent of Man. In the case of the first drawing in Darwin's Descent, an appropriate albeit absolutely absurd confession was honestly added by the more sincere Darwin to the footnote of the embryo drawings: "… This drawing is five times magnified, the embryo being 25 days old. The internal viscera have been omitted, and the uterine appendages in both drawings removed. I was directed to these figures by Prof. Huxley, from whose work, 'Man's place in Nature', the idea of giving them was taken. Häckel has also given analogous drawings in his 'Schöpfungsgeschichte.'" (p. 16.)
Haeckel reinforced the human genealogy, where Darwin had referred in his most exposing work, by Anthropogeny. This is the book usually recalled by the title The Evolution of Man, and it reached almost a thousand pages in later editions. This is also the book whose drawings are recycled (or further modified) by Alberts et al (1994) and the countless others. (The same embryonic cavalcade, indeed, were found already in the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1868a.) Yet already at face of the 3rd edition to the Anthropogenie, however, something had come up: The long history of fierce accusation against Haeckelian manipulation of observations had begun.[3]In one of the recent correspondences, Richardson writes: "…Haeckel's drawings of 1874 are substantially fabricated. In support of this view, I note that this oldest 'fish' image is made up of bits and pieces from different animals - some of them mythical. It is not unreasonable to characterize this as 'faking'. Later editions of Haeckel's drawings were somewhat more accurate, and showed significant variations among embryos of different species. Sadly, it is the discredited 1874 drawings that are used in so many British and American biology textbooks today." (Science 281, 1998, p. 1289.)
In a later and much minor work Die Natur als Künstlerin (1913), Haeckel had to defend the drawings of even his most highly appreciated empirical observations of even more trivial subjects.[4]
Olaf Breidbach, the director of the Haeckel Haus in Jena, underlines the essential methodological differences of Haeckel's typology and Darwinian phylogenesis (Breidbach 2002). Haeckel did not adopt a Darwinian morphological method, but gave a new and inconsistent status to the more categorical orientation of naturalists such as Cuvier. Goethe had coined the term of morphology and Haeckel's creation was a syn-thesis of ahistorical ideas of Goethe and the radical scheme of Darwin. As a contrast to Darwin's gradualism, Haeckel described a preformed 'ontogeny' to uncover the real system of nature. Darwin's was a history of nature, Haeckel's was a natural history.
I think that in his Brave New World (1932) Aldous Huxley catched more of the anxieties of his grandfather than his brother Julian Huxley (the president of Unesco). Who is afraid of the "bulldogging" of evolution?
"Politics is applied biology"
Haeckel wrote many bestselling science books, but especially Die Weltraethsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1899; Maailmanarvotukset, scanned and retrievable in Finnish by me in http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/weltraethsel_finnisch/index.html ) was one of the most incredible publishing successes of all times.
During the first year after its appearance, Weltraethsel sold more than a hundred thousand copies in Germany alone. It went through ten editions by 1919, and was translated into all “civilized” languages (30 of them, Sander 2002) although its science was already outdated. By the strategical election year of 1933, almost half a million copies had been bought in Germany (Milner 1990, p. 206; Gasman 1971 p. 14). No technical details or illustrations were needed in this work, anymore. The book included 20 chapters, and its arrogant extrapolations reached chapters like "The embryology of the soul", or "The phylogeny of the soul" posing as on a factual basis.
The quote from the Riddle or Weltraethsel comes from its preface (1900, p. xiii): “The one point that I can claim for it, and which, indeed, I must ask of my strongest opponents, is that my Monistic Philosophy is sincere from beginning to end - it is the complete expression of the conviction that has come to me, after many years of ardent research into Nature and unceasing reflection, as to the true basis of its phenomena."
In essence, Haeckel insisted that honesty was his only excuse. This apologia raises precisely the opposite doubt, in the heart of the topic: What if Haeckel was deceiving his eager audience by purpose? The first association occurring to me is the propaganda perfected by the Nazi regime during the Third Reich under Adolf Schicklgruber, Hittle, Hidle, Hiedler, Huttler or, as best known, Hitler. "The bigger the lie, the more likely one would be to believe it", stated Führer himself in Mein Kampf. See figure 8 as an anecdote of relevant Haeckelian parameter at the turning points in the world history!
[1] "Darwin's Lehre": The ethymology for the word evolution came from the latin evolvere which was synonymous for the greek apocalypsis, to wrap open, as for a book. Charles Darwin took the name only in the third edition of the Origin. Ethymology is one way to see through the biased outlines in the books of history.
[2] Ruth G. Ginard (1981) described the writing circumstances:
"The conditions under which this book were written are of interest. Upon the publication of his Radiolarien, Haeckel felt professionally secure enough to marry. On august 18, 1863, he married his cousin Anna Sethe, to whom he had been engaged for several years. For a year and a half he enjoyed the married life he had long looked forward to. The on February 16, 1864, his thirtieth birthday, his wife suddenly died. Haeckel was so overwhelmed with grief that he could not even attend the funeral. For comfort he turned to the beautiful Mediterranean seacoast he remembered so fondly from his stay in Italy. In a desperate attempt to assauge his sorrow, Haeckel threw himself into his work. The result was the Generelle Morphologie. Recalling this period later, Haeckel said, 'It was written and printed in less than a year. I lived the life of a hermit, gave myself merely three or four hours sleep a day, and worked all day and half of the night. My habits were so ascetic that I really wonder I am alive.' Unlike the technical monograph on Radiolaria, the Generelle Morphologie was written as an antidote to despair; it contained little new material or additional research. It was simply a synthesis or systematization…".
[3] And Ernst Haeckel wrote in the preface for the third edition of the renowned and celebrated Anthropogenie:
"Many naturalists have especially blamed the diagrammatic figures given in the Anthropogeny [The Evolution of Man]. Certain technical embryologists have brought most severe accusations against me on this account, and have advised me to substitute a larger number of the elaborated figures, as accurate as possible. I, however, consider that diagrams are much more instructive than such figures, especially in popular scientific works. For each simple diagrammatic figure gives only those essential form-features which it is intended to explain, and omits all those unessential details which in finished, exact figures, generally rather disturbed and confuse than instruct and explain. The more complex are the form-features, the more do simple diagrams help to make them intelligible. For this reason, the few diagrammatic figures, simple and rough as they were, with which Baer half a century ago accompanied his well-known-known "History of the Evolution of Animals," have been more serviceable in rendering the matter intelligible than all the numerous and very careful figures, elaborated with the aid of camera lucida, which now adorn the splendid and costly atlases of His, Goette, and others. If it is said it that my diagrammatic figures are "Inaccurate," and a charge of "falsifying science" is brought against me, this is equally true of all the very numerous diagrams which are daily used in teaching. All diagrammatic figures are 'inaccurate.'" (Haeckel 1876, p. xxxiv-xxxv)
[4] “Everybody who knows the corresponding literature and the sources from which I faithfully copied my figures can easily convince himself that I have strictly adhered to that principle of objective representation. This fact has been questioned some years ago. It was asserted that my drawings were stylised and that the forms I reproduced did not occur in nature… A trained eye would notice especially the unartistic appearance of the real forms [of Radiolaria and other protists]… Everybody who has even a little training in working with the microscope will recognise that these claims are totally erroneous… and if one would undertake the effort to compare Radiolaria preparations under the microscope with the drawings published by me, one would recognise without difficulty that the latter are objective reproductions of the real forms and there can be no question of reconstruction, trimming, schematisation or falsification.” (In Richardson & Keuck 2002, referring to Die Natur als Künstlerin (1913, pp. 13-14).
Figure 8. Ears look more different than early embryos in Ernst Haeckel's drawings. Let us recall, that Adolf Hitler ordered the Ribbentropp's delegation to make observations on the ear of Josef Stalin during their negotiations in Moscow to make the judgement, whether Stalin was a Jew or not. From the 5th ed. of The Evolution of Man, 1910.
Chancellor Adolf Hitler only knew Austria and Germany, spoke only German, and had never been a representative in the parliament nor a minister. Haeckel, instead, was praised as a scholar and even an explorer. How should we then live?
Jonathan Wells is a popular writer, whose exposure of the Haeckelian embryos seems to have gotten unusually much attention in the public in the current controversy. Actually, Wells tried to criticize ten of the most recycled pieces of evidences for macroevolution used in US schoolbooks of biology more systematically. Figure 9 displays Wells' alternative as embryo drawings, in their earliest stages.
Figure 9. Earliest stages of vertebrate embryos by the way of Jonathan Wells. The fertilized eggs in the upper panel are drawn to scale relative to each other, while the succeeding stages are normalized. The embryos are (left to right): bony fish (zebrafish), amphibian (frog), reptile (turtle), bird (chick), and mammal (human). Reproduced from the most controversial, Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, p. 95. Copyright Jody Sjogren.
To put it modestly, Wells' Icons of Evolution has been overdriven in the official reviews of scientific books. Titles of the book review -articles are self-explaining: "The creationist abuse of evo-devo" (Rudolf Raff in Evolution & Development 3, 373-4, 2001; the journal was inaugurated at the new millennium), "Fatally flawed iconoclasm" (Eugenie C. Scott, Science 292, 2257-8, 2001), "Creationism by stealth" (Jeery Coyne, Nature, 410, 745-6, 2001), and the most vicious "The talented Mr. Wells" (Padian & Gishlick, The Quarterly Review of Biology 77, 33-7).
There are certainly factual errors in the Icons, but the critics should have appreciated the resources of a solitary researcher when they made a public display of him in prominent journals. The contradiction between a public and educated opinion has rarely been so divergent in so popular biological topic. I think the controversy is doing serious harm for the public confidence in the progress of science.
A common denominator of the reviewers is the fact that they all attack both Wells with his two doctorates (especially the one from embryology from Berkeley), as well as his current Discovery-institute, with a fierce ad hominem -argument. According to this cardinal example of a defense, Wells belongs to a moralistic “Moonist” denomination known for their mass-weddings. Wells is a pacifist, whose hopes as a teacher were relinquished as he was sentenced to prison for protesting the Vietnam War. Now Wells is rebuked for not telling his commitments plainly in the preface of the book.
The irony is breathtaking. A group whose members were devoted to Haeckelian naturalism were not called "Moonists" but “Monists”. They certainly did tell their goals plainly - and drowned their surroundings in the indoctrination, finally. The one thing in common between the two was a personality cult.
Among others, Gould (in 1977a and 2000), Milner (1993, p. 207), and Gilbert in his Internet appendix, refer to Daniel Gasman's most admonishing book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism - Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971).
Prior to Hitler, Haeckel proclaimed the gospel fo evolution with evangelistic fervor, to catch the old mouthfull. His audience was not only the university intelligentsia, but also the common people. The working classes could read Haeckel in his popular books or listen to Haeckel in the lectures in rented halls. Daniel Gasman describes that by 1914 Haeckel had been granted membership in almost a hundred professional and scientific societies all over the world (Gasman 1998, p. 11).
Three years before his retirement, in 1906, Haeckel founded the International Monist League (Monistebund) in Jena. Within five years, it grew to about six thousand members and maintained local group meetings in 42 places of Germany and Austria. In contrast to a popular claim, however, Haeckel did not cast his authority on a membership of the most radical Thule Gesellschaft (Gasman 1971, p. 22), but his namesake. Thule, in turn, was founded as a public cover in Weimar republic for aristicratic order Germanenorden, a secret organ of mixed themes of Völkisch-movement and Antisemitism (Kuparinen 1999 p. 215).
An article by Reginald Phelps "Before Hitler came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden" (scanned for an open access in http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Thule.html) describes the organization and the very small number of its active members. Phelps claimed that the link of the "national renewal" to the conspiratory and occult circles of Thule was neglected mainly due to the denial of the leading national socialists themselves. A book describing the connection with its swastika symbols appeared in Germany in the end of the year that Hitler assumed power (1933), and was banned when its second edition appeared in 1934. Occult society is an odd conclusion for an authority who declared extreme materialism throughout his life.
Am I now politicizing science? - It was done a long before! When one faces a fraud, the exposure of its motivation is the most rational approach. Eventually, Haeckel's phrase "politics is applied biology" ended up being a standard Nazi slogan (Milner 1993, p. 207). World War I was a war of nations. World War II was a war of races. Haeckel's book entitled Ewigkeit: Weltkriegsgedanken über Leben und Tot, Religion und Entwicklungslehre (Eternity: World War thoughts on life and death, religion and evolutionary theory, 1915) was ahead of its time.
The Haeckelian applications included elimination of unfit and “insensitive” infants in a Spartian admiration and racial hygieny, all in the name of ethics and progress of science. I have been granted a permission to reproduce the final chapter of professor Gasman’s Scientific Origins’ as an open access (http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm).
There were many reasons, apart from Haeckelism, to the Nazi-movement and Fascism. These include events such as the First World War, Versailles Treaty and the October Revolution, as well as trends in philosophies and political theories. Nevertheless, the decisive inspiration of the all-embracing Haeckel's Monism seem to have incorporated an omnipresent incitement of science so called. As an indicator, Haeckel had the authority for the first consistent and total program for the Judenfrage. That is: to exclude all of the Jews from their chairs at the universities. My question is, how much did the opposition of the Rudolf Virchow contribute to the issue? After all, Virchow the critic was a Jew and haeckel's old mentor. Heil Haeckel, incognito.[1]
Paradoxically, the idea of man's animality and materialism in the Haeckelian legacy seems to have been absorbed from National Socialism to Marxism, from psychoanalysis to Free-Thought Movement and theosophism. Gasman has released a more recent and extensive "testament" entitled Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (1998). In it, he extends his evidence and ends up in stating that Haeckel’s nature books were crucial inspiration to much of modern art, including symbolist poetry, Art Nouveau and aesthetics of avant-garde modernism. Gasman goes on to argue that a complex, and not necessarily strictly opposing relationship evolved between fascism, modernism and positivism. Haeckel's riddles provided for criticism of many values of conventional civilization.
After Gasman's classic in 1971, academic writing has been converging towards a consensus on the significance of Haeckel for the rise of Nazism in the chaos of the post WWI Germany. Fascism, however, was also inter-nationalist. The recent volume marches forth overwhelming evidence of Haeckel's equally significant and parallel contribution to the birth of Italian and French fascism that has, oddly enough, not been recognized by the mainstream scholars. Etruscans were ranked higher than Aryans by the demagogical anthropologists in Italy, and Razza was moulded with broader cultural, political, and spiritual meaning. What is merely external political and cultural history and what is the most salient ideological substance of the non-German fascism?
Haeckel argued that Western culture in general, specifically Christianity with its dogmas of submission and weakness, was an intruder into the operation of nature. As a consequence, it disturbed the evolutionary balance fatally (Gasman 2002). (The slave trades etc. in the bosom of the Christian Europe does not seem to get appraisal of Haeckel, however.)
"Nietzschism" may resound like "Nazism", but what if Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was only a curiosity? Nietzsches rebellion against Western Civilization has been decorated like frames in the savage painting. But what if Haeckel's tantamount rebellion gave the colours? "Nietzsche was not a fascist generally and certainly not a Nazi specifically", writes Stanley Payne in his History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (1995). Nietzsche did not kill God. It was not done by belles lettres but by the popular nonfiction.
Another branch of study that makes no mention of Haeckel at all in this context is Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997). In George L. Mosse's Toward the Final Solution (1985), Haeckel is dealt with in four pages. Eero Kuparinen is a Finnish historian and neither does he mention Haeckel in his recent and broad, otherwise excellent work on the roots of anti-Semitism.
We have a need for chairs on history of science in Finland in general - and research on Haeckel in particular. Kuparinen does maintain that the Russian pogroms did not yet have a scientific reason to it (1999 p. 198), and does describe the later biologization of the symptomatic antisemitism (my translation from Finnish). "A Jew was not a human being, but was created as a buffer between a man and an ape. A Jew was a fossil without roots, who could not nourish himself. Therefore he was sentenced to be a social paracite - a sponger living in the flesh of the host nation… Cancer, bloodsucker, fungus…" (1999 p. 112.)
But antisemitism was built-in for the Haeckelian Monism as it argued that the Jews (inventors of the monotheistic God and Christianity) were in charge for the introduction of transcendental dualism into the Western society in its accelerating decline. Jews were the explicit scapegoat, for Haeckel. Jews were the great symbol of man's rebellion against nature. Jews were the source of the decadence - and so haeckel sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary society. Haeckel did not speak openly of genocide in the case of the Jews, but justified antisemitism by charging the Jews themselves as overwhelmingly responsible for persecution's eternal return. Gasman shows, how close followers such as the French authors Jules Soury and George Vacher de Lapouge demanded destruction of the Jews. It was all in the name of science, and far more extreme and physically threatening than the the harangues of Houston Stewart Chamberlain with his program of Aryan Christianity (Gasman 1998 and 2002).
It seems to me that the consensus has been to underestimate the influence of the Hackelian legacy as a contributor to pseudoscience. And so the fakest of them all has survived the struggle for popularization.
Daniel Gasman's pioneering role in his classic The Scientific Origins of National Socialism - Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971) and in the more extensive Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (1998) can be seen in the way Haeckel is omitted in other studies.
The rise and fall of the third reich: A history of Nazi Germany by William Shirer (1960, 1964) was widely hailed as the definitive record of the era. In the 60-paged index of the encyclopaedia, there is no mention of Haeckel whatsoever. Robert C. Bannister mentions Haeckel in the context of socialism in three pages in his Social Darwinism - Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1979). In his The Nature of Fascism (1991), Roger Griffin defines the ideological substance of Fascism as based on a "Palingenetic myth", without associating this key word of Haeckel to his Biogenetic Law. "Häckel" is mentioned in two pages. Ann Harrington specifically neglects Haeckelian Monism in Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (1996). Gasman (2002) applies the same criticism also to Holton's The Rise of Postmodernism and the 'End of Science' (2000). I have scanned inserts regarding the evolutionary roots of antisemitism from the conclusive chapter of Daniel Gasman's The Scientific Origins of Socialism (1971) as an open access (http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm).
The enigma of the Nazi-movement is not beyond human comprehension, but only difficult to cover wholly. It includes events such as the World War I, Versailles Treaty and the October Revolution. Nevertheless, the decisive inspiration of the neglected yet all-embracing Haeckel's Monism seem to have incorporated an omnipresent incitement of science so called.
Markku Mattila’s dissertation, published in Finnish in 1999 meant the first systematic monograph on the early race hygiene in Finland. Markku Mattila’s study from 1999 covered the timespan until the sterilization law in 1935, and he does not refer to any of the Haeckel's best-selling books. Underestimation of the Haeckelian legacy is typical also for the literature on the eugenics in general.
Regarding the mutual relationship of genetics and race hygiene, Mattila refers to Ludmerer (1969, 1972), Allen (1975, 1976), Kevles (1981, 1986) and Baker (1989), who have studied the cases of United States and Britain. Harwood (1987), Propping & Heuer (1991) and Weindling (1988) have studied the relationship in Germany, and Roll-Hansen (1989) in Scandinavia. Garland Allen also refers to Diane Paul, Mark Adams, Pauline Mazumdar, Sheila Weiss, Robert Proctor, and Stefan Kühl as some of his other colleagues in the study of eugenics.
Another branch of study that omits Haeckel is Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997). In the Toward the Final Solution (Mosse 1985), Haeckel is mentioned in four pages. Eero Kuparinen is a Finnish historian who does not mention Haeckel in his recent and broad work on the roots of anti-Semitism. Kuparinen does maintain that the Russian pogroms did not yet have a scientific reason to it (1999 p. 198), and does describe the biologization of the symptomatic anti-Semitism.
Haeckel was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Jews and he did much to bring the "Judenfrage" into the realm of biology, claimed Daniel Gasman already back in 1971. Recently, Gasman (2002) has tried to prove, that Haeckel's was the first consistent and total program for the Jewish Question. That is: To expel all of the Jews from their chairs at the universities.
How much did the opposition of the Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) contribute to the issue? Virchow the critic was banned later on by hte Nazi regime for his philosemitic if not Jewish habitus and he was Haeckel's own mentor.
Main stream Monism argued that the weed called Judaism was in charge for the introduction of transcendental dualism into the Western society in its accelerating decline. Jews – the inventors of the monotheistic God and Christianity - were the explicit scapegoat. Jews were the great symbol of man's rebellion against nature. Jews were the source of the decadence. And the old Haeckel sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary society.
Genocide was not yet openly exhorted for the people of the book, but Haeckel justified anti-Semitism by charging Jews themselves for persecution's eternal return. Haeckel's close followers like French authors Jules Soiree and George Vacher de Lapouge did demand the destruction of the Jews more openly. It was all in the name of science, and far more extreme and physically threatening than the harangues of Houston Stewart Chamberlain with his program of Aryan Christianity (Gasman 1998, 2002).
Anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon. It was more kind of a price by which Germany sold its aggressions to the indifferent European countries. United States withdrew its ambassador from the Germany at the Kristallnacht unlike all the European countries. Prior to the well-known marriage laws of the Nazi-Germany, however, similar prohibitions were constituted even in the multicultural states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and short-lived hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between "white" and "coloured races" was self evident (Haller 1963, p. 52; Allen 1975).
In 1917, the immigration of "defective" groups was forbidden in the United States. The changing pattern of immigration from the 1880's onward had been particularly disturbing to many "natives", since it had produced a dramatic increase on Jewish immigrants and the restriction took also anti-Semitic overtone. Jews and Italians were blamed for increased union membership and trade strikes (Allen 1999). In 1921 immigration from the Europe was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census. In 1924, the Immigration Restriction Act based on the 1890 census diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born. This was the first immigration quota ever placed on Western Europe and took place in order to preserve the "Nordic" balance in the population. The law was maintained all the way through the World War II until 1965 (Hietala 1985, p. 132).
The New World was largely led by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and also the eugenicists themselves belong to the established order. "America for the Americans" - most of which were immigrants themselves in less than the ten generations demanded not only in the Mosaic Law but also in the forgotten ancient "Cambrian" Law of Albion.
I rebel against the anachronical phrase "Holocaust industry", since the people are not aware of the long history of the European anti-Semitism that encompasses also the feudal system, guild system, inquisition, even collective expulsion from nearly every European corner (also from Finland) at least once in the history, etc. Even the Hitler's regime did not make United States to change the refugee policy. Quite on the contrary, the ministry of the foreign affairs cut the refugee quotas and tried to dampen the news regarding the nihilism practised against the Jews. The Hollywood with its Jewish founders (like the Warner brothers, Goldwynn, Mayer, Fox, Laemmle, Loew, Zukor, Schenk, Kohn, Lasky, Katz, Schary, Thalberg, Mirisch and others) was kept silent at the time. United States took 240,000 Jewish refugees during the twelve years of rage, a number handled in 33 days in the queues of the Auschwitz-Birkenau only. Great Britain took 70,000 Jewish refugees and commanded in the "White Book" in 1939 that a maximum of 75,000 Jews were allowed to move to Palestine within the next five years. As a bitter epilogue, the word "Jew" was not used at all in the prosecution list at the Nürnberg trial, and the Western Allies started the Cold War by covering up the detail that the British intelligence had broken the German Enigma code already at the start of the Barbarossa. The destruction factories of the European civilians and even the railroads to them were not bombarded although the armaments industries nearby were destroyed (Kuparinen 2000 p. 309-312; Jokisipilä 2001).
Finnish emigrants (who were rather blonde) put the cross on the box reserved for the "yellow" group – and were extremely confused about the issue (Kemiläinen 1993, p. 1930). Newspapers in Finland were not prone to recycle the claim of the low racial esteem of the Finnish stock but for criticism.
According to the intelligence tests, only 53% of the US population had a mental age above 13 years. Were the alarming findings the result of a crackpot humbug or achievements of the latest science? The leftist Harvard sociologist Richard Lewontin has been one of the ardent critics of the “Wilsonian” sociobiology. Lewontin describes the earlier eugenic lobby: “The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family, and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the Russians to be feebleminded.” (1977, p. 13.)
Let us excuse the American Jewish Lewontin for putting the “Jews” first in the list, due to the fact that in the 20th century, 700 persons got the Nobel Prize, 150 of which had an ethnically Jewish heritage. This means 20% coverage by a population of 0,25%, numbering less than 20 million (Encyclopaedia Judaica, www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html; www.dorledor.org; www.science.co.il/Nobel.asp)[1].
The first Nobel Prize to the United States had already been given. The laureate had been a Jewish individual Albert Michelson, “The Lord of the Light” who determined the velocity of light with a ten dollar equipment and who died in depression for his more expensive and failured experiment to prove the existence of the ether. As a dogmatic materialist, Ernst Haeckel took the ether rather seriously and harnessed it for his pan-progressive naturalism, threatened by the man’s philanthropic, Christian etc. interventions.
Paradoxically, the idea of man's animality and materialism in the Haeckelian legacy seems to have been absorbed from National Socialism to Marxism, from psychoanalysis to Free-Thought Movement and theosophism.
Also Germany’s leading theosophist Rudolf Steiner, of course, built on the vulgar Haeckelian evolution: "Despite all other German culture, Haeckels phylogenetic thought is now the most significant achievement of German intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century". (Johannes Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner und Ernst Haeckel (1965), p. 165 in Gasman 1971 p. xxx).
Gasman Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (1998) describes how Haeckel’s graphics inspired symbolist poetry, Art Nouveau and aesthetics of avant-garde modernism. A complex relationship evolved between fascism, modernism and positivism. Haeckel's riddles provided ammunition against many values of the conservative Western civilization.
Nazism was also inter-nationalist. Gasman (1998) marches forth overwhelming evidence of Haeckel's contribution to the birth of Italian and French Fascism that has not been recognized by the mainstream scholars. Western culture, specifically Christianity with its dogmas of submission and weakness, was an intruder into the operation of nature in the Haeckelian legacy. As a consequence, it disturbed the evolutionary balance fatally (Gasman 2002). "Nietzschism" was not "Nazism". Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a curiosity. His rebellion against Western Civilization is tooted at the expense of understanding scholarly Haeckelianism. Nietzsche did not "kill God" by belles lettres.
During his last years, old Haeckel casted his authority on a membership of the Thule Gesellschaft (Gasman 1971, p. 22). Thule, in turn, was founded as a public cover for aristocratic order Germanenorden, a secret organ of mixed themes of Völkisch-movement and Anti-Semitism (Kuparinen 1999 p. 215) in the short era of the forced experiment of a British-style democracy that became the weak and divided Weimar Republic. The Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society) was founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorff in August 17, 1918. It used to be called Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity), but soon trned out as anti-republican and anti-Semitic scourge. It was instrumental in the foundation of the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (German Workers' Party; the NSDAP later on) and starred some top echelons of the Nazi Party (such as Rudolf Heß and Alfred Rosenberg). Its press organ was the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer) which later became the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer)[2].
The link of the "national renewal" to the conspiratory and elitist circles of Thule and Germanen Orden seems to have been neglected mainly due to the denial of the leading national socialists themselves. A book describing the connection appeared in Germany in the end of the year that Hitler assumed power (1933), and was banned when its second edition appeared in 1934 (Phelps 1963). Occult society is an odd conclusion after extreme materialism. I have scanned Reginald Phelps' Before Hitler came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden to http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Thule.html. Daniel Gasman gives details, however, how the National Socialists commemorated the Centenary of the birth of Ernst Haeckel himself in 1934 (1971, p. 170-1). The details of Haeckel’s reputation in Finland in the years 1919-1934 eludes from the author, unfortunately.
[1] Landsteiner developed two different blood categories, whence transfusions began. Wasserman tested antitoxins against cholera, tuberculosis, syfilis, tetanus, typhoid, and diphteria. Marmorek made discoveries for many epidemics. Haffkine vaccinated against cholera. Schick developed diphteria-diagnostics and vaccines, Ehrlich salvarsan for syphilis. Neisser and others found gonorrhea that cause gonococks. Traube's digitalis and Levine's therapies alleviated heart attacks. Typhoid fever was treated by Vidal and Weil. Woronan and Waksman found neomysin and streptomysin, and introduced the phrase “antibiotic“. Chain codiscovered penicillin. Funk invented the "vitamins" and studied until D, whereas Hess concentrated on the C-letter. Reichstein extracted cortison, cocaine was a painkiller tested by Koller to his friend Sigmund Freud (who faced 33 face surgeries). Minkowski studied diabetes. DNA contributors include Lederberg, Kornberg, Nirenberg etc. Sabin and Salk granted inactivated polio vaccine to the mankind. No patent, no patient.
[2] The online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
Haeckelian legacy of popularization: the case of Finland
My hypothesis is that there is much anacronism in the way the triumph of the evolutionary doctrine is presented in Finland. Finnish evolution is as old as the Finnish textbooks in biology. My hypothesis is that the Finnish Darwinism was virtually Haeckelism, at least in popularization. What is more controversial is whether also the Finnish academy cherished Haeckelism at the cost of the Darwinism. The ideology of evolutionary origins disembarked for the popularization in Finland de facto by the Haeckelian prints of vulgar science versus the more sophisticated Darwinism – despite the fact that Finns were maligned on a racist basis in the Haeckelian legacy of popularization. It is the more massive popularization and especially the Finnish language in the critical years of the ideological revolution, where the sovereign role of Haeckel has not been emphasized properly in the case of Finland.
The reception of Haeckelian legacy of popularization of evolution has been documented in many countries in continental Europe, but only recently has the first project been launched in Scandinavia. Lennart Olsson and Uwe Hobfeld investigate Haeckel's correspondence with Swedes, using the archives in the Ernst Haeckel House in Jena, and at the Center for History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. Alltogether 96 German letters from Swedish-speaking correspondents from 39 sources were found in the collection of nearly 40 000 letters in the Haeckel House, Jena, according to the first report of the project (Olsson & Hobfeld 2003). Most of these Swedish scientists were members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
I limit my literature survey to the Finnish text books and reviews of the early evolutionary biology. The first book on biology in Finnish appeared as late as in 1791[2], and this apologetic work by Juhana Frosterus was reprinted until 1850 before rivalling volumes had appeared. This indicates that it is possible to cover all of the early Finnish writings on evolution more easily than in the case of the English, German, French or Swedish literature.
The first Finnish lectures at the universities by August (Aukusti) Malmberg (Mela) and others referred more explicitly to Charles Darwin, of course. This was not, however, the case in the Haeckelian legacy of popularization -which has early on been briefly stated by many Finnish historians of science (Aro 1907, p. 13; Juva 1956, pp. 13, 21-22, 82-83, 172-174, 197-198; Lappalainen 1956, p. 92; Leikola 1977, pp. 184-190; Leikola 1982, p. 172; 1984, pp. 203-4). Besides, Lappalainen (1956, 1967), Leikola (1981), Voipio (1982) etc. have shown that the idea of transformation of nature was received, mainly through Swedish literature, very soon after Darwin's Origin in 1859, even from sources predating it (Darwin acknowledged 34 men in the Origin).
Aukusti Mela was known for his humorous polemics, but in the early Finnish schoolbooks of biology by Mela, he does not devote time from the curriculum to evolutionary theories. Mela simply compiled comprehensive lists of the Finnish flora and fauna with many figures.[3] Mela contributed to the inauguration of the leading Finnish nature journal Luonnon ystävä ("Friend of nature" or "Nature lover"), but it emerged as late as in 1895, in association with the new Vanamo society.
There were debates over Darwin's descendence theory after the publication of the Origin since the criticism of professor W. Mäklin 1864 even in the public newspapers or magazines, but these were constrained to the Swedish language and I eclude them from my study.
The first popular reviews in Finnish appeared in a periodical Kirjallinen Kuukauslehti that was later named Valvoja ("literature monthly", "guardian"). The first rare references mentioned the pigeon breeds of Charles Darwin and his "widely known" theory, and the first longer article was a lecture "On Darwin and Darwinism" by A. Almberg in 1872.
The first more extensive debate peaked in the newspapers in 1873. There were authoritative names attached to it, such as bishop Schauman or professor Granfelt, and the public turmoil meant more or less negative reactions against the doctrine. What stimulated this anger? According to Höm (1909), it is evident that the writers consider the descendence theory a generally known doctrine, that is also supported by many outside the professional circles. The key to understand the magnitude of the popularization and the corresponding protest was Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschicte, natural creation story, in 1868.
At the same time, even at the universities the idea of common descent spread in the spirit of Ernst Haeckel's work, that is, by the more scientific and earlier Generelle Morphologie. Johan Axel Palmén (1845-1919) was the envoy of the new wave, who challenged the earliest critic, professor Mäklin, and got many students along in the campaign. Palmén applied the common descent to his dissertation in 1874, after which he studied under the supervision of Carl Gegenbaur in 1875-1876 in Heidelberg. It would be important to know, whether Palmén or his associates such as A. J. Mela, J. P. Norrlin, Fr. Elfving, or O.M. Reuter had a correspondence with the statutes abroad.
Professor Mäklin seems to incline toward some kind of acceptance of common descent in his Finnish booklet (Mäklin 1882). What is typical in the declaration, is that its title refers to Darwin, but the content of the writing per se is reactionary to Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschicte. Now Mäklin merely resists the idea of monophylogenetic origin. Mäklin died the next year, and his chair was given to Palmén in 1884. After this, the doctrine of common descent began to gain an official status in the Finnish University.
When Charles Darwin died in 1882, the focus of the more popular memorials and reviews turned back on him, again.
It was Wilhelm Bölsche, a fervent Nazi adherent later on, who wrote the biography of Charles Darwin that was translated and published in Finnish in 1900. Bölsche was one of the founders of the Monistebund in 1906, and his title Descent of Man was published in Finnish at the same year (Ihmisen polveutuminen, 1906). Bölsche describes the universal Biogenetic Law and atavism using, by and large, man and primates as a proof (pp. 29-35, 48, 53-54, 59-61, 72-73). Bölsche states that the gill folds and finshapes of the human embryo are "as unshakeable a truth as is the theory of Copernicus, that the Earth goes around the Sun. No-one, who respects truth, cannot deny that. But there are many narrow-minded and zealous people to whom this embryological truth is not appealing and who label this scientific fact usually as a 'sinful' lie and a fraud. But whosoever, against his better knowledge or due to his religious narrow-mindedness, declares irrefutable scientific truths as deceit, lacks the ethical qualifications to understand that the scientific progress seeks the truth" (Bölsche 1906, p 61).
Bölsche defends Haeckel's gastraea-theory as aggressively, and also gathers circumstantial evidence for the spontaneous generation in Haeckel's flow of thoughts on crystals and the "sensitivity" of all materials (pp. 85-87). The ten first Finnish books on evolution include also "The Family Tree of Animals" (Eläinten sukupuu, 1906), and "In the blackcoal forest" (Kivihiilimetsässä, 1907) by Bölsche.
"The struggles of sciences" (Tieteiden taistelut) by A. D. White was translated by Mela and published by the Vanamo society in 1897. T. H. Järvi wrote the "On the struggle for life" in the Nature (Olemassaolon taistelusta luonnossa) in 1903. "The evolutionary history of the globe" (Maapallon kehityshistoria) by Viktor Madsen was translated in 1905 and focused on the geological periods of life. "The creation of the world" (Maailman luominen) by M. Wilh. Meyer was translated in 1905. "The breeding of the living organisms and the question of inheritance" (Elollisten olentojen lisääntyminen ja perinnöllisyyskysymys) by Ravn was published by the Vanamo society in 1906.
"The evolution of the worlds" (Maailmojen kehitys) by Svante Arrhenius from Sweden - a notorious chemist and a correspondent of Haeckel - was translated in 1907. The empirist devotes lenghty chapters dilly-dallying to describe life in other planets and space. Arrhenius developed the concept of panspermia further after Thompson alias Kelvin and Helmholtz. His Lehrbuch der Kosmischen Physik (1903) was used as a university-level textbook for the students of Physics in Finland.
Two important contributions in Finnish were "The doctrine of descendence and Darwinism" by Richard Hesse (Polveutumisoppi ja darwinismi, translated in 1907), and "Doctrine of descendence in its current contents" (Kehitysoppi nykyisellä kannallaan, 1907) by J. E. Aro. Hesse gathers evidence from systematics and comparative morphology, embryology, palaentology, and biogeography. He applies descendence also to the man, elaborates the Darwinian struggle for life and its criticism, and discusses the inheritance of characters, isolation and the origin of life's seed on the Earth. Hesse uses Haeckelian portraits in describing gill slits and tails of the human embryos, the Wedda-people of Ceylon, the gastraea-theory applied to man, etc., but he does not refer to Ernst Haeckel explicitly. (Meyer and two of the books by Bölsche were translated by a pseudonym "U. B.", who does not seem to have been a prominent practising scientist.)
J. E. Aro describes how the Darwinian natural selection and the Lamackian inheritance of acquired characteristics both apply and are correct simultaneously, pp. 87-102. This Finnish pedagogue also devotes space to Haeckel's view on the rise of the humankind at the sunk continent at the Indian Ocean. In describing the migrations of the peculiar human races such as the "black nations of negroes", or inuities, the otherwise temperate Aro does not bake the issue that also Finns were encompassed in the herds of the "yellow" and "slant-eyed" mongols (Aro 1907, pp- 134-136).
Benjamin Vetter was yet another advocate of Monism, who's popular work was translated to Finnish in the early 20th century, prior to Darwin's Origin. Vetter was one of the most promising disciples of Haeckel, and the Finnish print of his "Evolution and Man – six lectures on the modern worldview" (Kehitysoppi ja ihminen – kuusi esitelmää nykyaikaisesta maailmankatsomuksesta, 1907) has Haeckel's foreword for the memory of professor Vetter, who died soon after the sixth lecture in the title in 1892.
"The origin, evolution, and end of life" (Elämän synty, kehitys ja loppu, 1908) by Albert Daiber promulgated the universal message of Monism, too. A special astonishment was reserved on the fanatics, who attacked such a bright and evident conclusion (p. 8-9). Haeckel's Monera are described as a link in the continuous and uninterrupted chain of descendence. As truthfull and brilliant as this conclusive "moneron-theory" is, wrote Daiber, it has been challenged from many directions by alternative models (panspermia, protoplasm-theory of the melt core of the planet Earth, cyanotheory, and nitrogen-theory, pp. 28-33). The general genealogical tree is a brilliant theory attributed to Haeckel that has been proven by the modern morphological investigation, of course (pp. 38-42). The readers are warned not to discard the ether-theory merely on the basis that the evolution-potentiating ether cannot be measured or weighed (p. 89; Haeckel mentions the term ether, "eetteri", 46 times in the Finnish translation of his bestselling book The Riddle of the Universe). What I find especially insightfull in Daiber's review of the Haeckelian legacy is the mystified atom-theory: How can the materialism be such a terrifying concept, when the matter has been shown to be in a constant motion even in a cold stone? (pp. 12-16). The pioneering role of Ernst Haeckel is also emphasized in the "utterly significant" Biogenetic Law, that has been documented by so many excellent scientists etc. and that is inserted conclusively in the book (pp. 92-98).
Einar Fieandt was a Finnish author, whose "Descent of Man" (Ihmisen Polveutuminen) appeared in 1910 as the second item in the series of dialogues of the students of the University of Helsinki. Fieandt states that his intention is not to proove that man belongs to the evolutionary chain, but to write to the people who want to see the world in the unambiguous Monistic light. He hastens to add a footnote, however, that there are also other types of Monism apart from Haeckel (p. 7). Fieandts underestimation of the volume (960 cm3) and weight (872 g) of the brains of the Bushmans and Wedda's and the facial angle of negroes in contrast to the Europeans is an evident Haeckelian concept.
"Before Adam" by Jack London and "Cave men" by Stanley Waterloo seem to have been the first fictive evolutionary appraisals in Finnish, and both of them appeared in 1908. Edgar Rice Burroughs' racist evolution with their life in the planet Mars and communicating gorilla communities better organized that those of the Negro's appeared only later on.
Wilhelm Leche (1850-1927) was the first professor of Zoology at the University of Stockholm and the chairman of the Swedish Society for Eugenics. The correspondence between Leche, a politically radical left wing social democrat, and Haeckel presents a clear example of how the research programme started by Gegenbaur and Haeckel in Jena was brought into Sweden (Olsson & Hobfeld 2003). Leche's extensive textbook on the descent of man was translated to Finnish in 1914 – in two independent translations ("Human, his origins and evolution", Ihminen, hänen alkuperänsä ja kehityksensä, 276 pages; "The origin and evolution of human", Ihmisen alkuperä ja kehitys 156 pages).
Upon the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Origin and the 100th anniversary from the birth of Charles Darwin, the leading Finnish nature journal Luonnon ystävä reviewed the current status of the theory abroad (Vihola 1909) and in Finland (Höm 1909). Haeckel is reviewed second to Darwin, and he "will always gain a honorary place, because only through him did the Darwinism get its systematic form… Haeckel has been able to generalize the truths stated by Darwin to natural laws by his scientific far-sightedness. He has, for instance, shown how significant is the development of an individual in determining the descendence of the individual. The development of an individual is a short repetition of the evolution of the species. This is the so called biogenetic law. The embryonic development, however, is disturbed by the special requirements of adaptations, so that the organs often do not appear in the same sequence as in the evolution of the species. We can therefore distinguish the evolutionary stages of a species (palingenesis) and later changes due to the adaptations (caenogenesis), which cause the phenomenon that the ontogeny is not an uncorrupted picture of the phylogeny. Haeckel has possessed Darwin's theory as such, explaining the transformation of a species by a direct selection on the other hand, and by the direct effect of the external conditions on the organism on the other hand (the principle of Lamarck)" (Vihola 1909).
"Moses or Darwin – question of the comprehensive school" (Mooses vai Darwin – koulukysymys) was written in 1889 by A. Dodel but published in Finnish as late as in 1909. In a contrast to its name, Dodel was a Swiss advocate of Monism, and the book preaches Haeckelism with a strong emphasis on recapitulation. It is a polemic meant to propagate the Haeckelian type of evolutionism not only to the universities, but to the more elementery schools. The publication time of Dodel's work relates to the omnipresent exhortation of the Luonnon ystävä to increase the amount of teaching of the natural history to the secondary school curriculum. According to the printed lobby, none of 120 undergraduates seeking the entrance for a training as physicians or a teachers of natural history in 1912 could tell more on the mammalian development than that the "mammals give birth to living fetuses" (Ekman 1913, 1917).
These requests were fulfilled in 1917, when Finland received her independence. "The New zoology" (Uusi eläinoppi) written by K. E. Kivirikko (according to O. Schmeil) had been in use since 1910 in nearly all of the Finnish-speaking schools in the classes 1-6. The reform on the natural history came true in the re-formed Kivirikko's item "Biology" (Biologia oppikoulujemme ylempiä luokkia sekä itseopiskelua varten", 200 pages in 1917; 265 pages in 1923, 1925, and in 1929). The emphasis on the doctrine of descendence is underlined also in the authors preface. Mendelism receives only 1,5 pages, but the embryological drawings are extensive. It stays written that not only the larvae of amphicians, but also the embryos of the other vertebrates have gills (p. 76), although in other remarks the fetuses of amniots have gill slits, not actual gills. The early embryonic stages of the reptiles, birds and mammals – humans included - have "nearly no differences at all" ("…muistuttavat… niin täydellisesti toisiaan, että niissä tuskin mitään eroa huomaa", pp. 106-107). Kivirikko makes the appropriate distinction between Darwin's selection theory, and the more popular modes of haeckelism in the chapter nine of the book.
The first decade of the 20th century meant an outburst of publications on evolution, mostly as translations from German. What is typical for the reviews is the lack of comments. "Coloured races can be compared with higher apes in their horrible passion for alcohol, and Russians are at still lower level in this regard", could even anonymous reviewers write. "Simply current thought expressed on the continent were transferred to Finnish readers", as Kari Vepsäläinen (1982) put it.
I claim that an inconsistent exposure to the Haeckelian concepts took place decades before the more causal evolution and natural selection was given their official status in the Finnish textbooks and curriculum. Haeckelian concept of recapitulation and Monera-cells without a nucleus, namely, infiltrated even the earliest Finnish textbooks of zoology that predated any consistent representation of theories of common descent. A central piece of these are the conclusive paragraphs in "The elements of zoology" (Zoologian alkeet) by Birger Salonen in 1881 (p. 279; at least 5 reprints were taken from the book, until 1897)[1]. The peculiarity of the architecture of the Monera is, that they did not have any specific organs for special physiology. Almost every part of their body moved, received and spread nourishment, and was sensitive. Therefore, all the physiological tasks were performed poorly and Monera were the lowest stage of all the living forms.
[1] In Finnish, Monera are translated "alkulimaeläimet", and are contrasted to Amoeboidea, “tumalimaeläimet", that have a nucleus – Chaos chaos in latin.
In general, the early critical treatises, ecclesiastic in spirit, seem to adapt to an attitude of theistic evolution. Examples of the Hegelian synthesis' are "Natural sciences and christianity" (Luonnontiede ja kristinusko; Erkki Kaila 1908); "Christianity and the doctrine of descendence" (Kristinusko ja kehitysoppi; Virkkunen 1908); "Christ and our time" (Kristus ja nykyaika; Pfennigsdorf 1904); "The relationship between Christianity and natural sciences" (Kristinuskon suhde luonnontieteisiin; Loimaranta, 1906); "Christ and natural science" (Kristus ja luonnontiede; Dennert, 1906); and "Is the Christianity suitable for the modern world view" (Soveltuuko kristinsuko nykyaikaiseen maailmankuvaan; Erkki Kaila).
Haeckel's Monism is judged on these works together with Nietzsche's ethics, and the attack against Monism absorbs attention from the theories of common descent. The trend is, that the last corner where the compromise is hesitated is man's descent "from the apes". Let us remember, that Ernst Haeckel made this territorial conquest before Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man in 1871.
In practice, the most critical early works in Finnish tended to lean on ridicule, and on the easily dismissed message of "vitalism". The critics were not able to comprehend the idea of the biological information. Haeckel's Monism was more modern than the bare materialism of the older German authors such as Karl Vogt or Ludvig Büchner. Nevertheless, the Finnish criticism was mainly aimed at attacking Haeckel's atheism, rather than the details of his deduction on the embryos, moneron, or indoctrinating drawings on human races. A Finnish peculiarity is, that severe assaults against Monism (L. H. Sandelin, "Materialism or Monism", Materialismi eli monismi, 1909), against the person of Ernst Haeckel (E. Dennert, "Is God dead?" Onko Jumala kuollut?, 1909), or both (J. Reinke, "Lectures on natural sciences", Luonnontieteellisiä esitelmiä, 1908, 1909) appeared prior to the translation of Haeckel's actual works (in 1911 and 1912). In the last item, Haeckel is mentioned and maligned even by the translator in the explanation of the terminology at the end ("…his opinions are not based on scientific facts, but are only arguments based on illusions of a zealous materialist").
"Scientific Criticism" (Tieteellistä kritiikkiä) by Robert Tigerstedt, a professor of physiology in Finland, was a sound pamphlet ahead of its time in many aspects. It was originally published in Swedish in 1919, and is a good indicator on the repercussions that Haeckel's fraudulency had left in the country. Tigerstedt describes how Haeckel used the same clichee to print the embryos of a dog, a chicken and a turtle – but hastens to add that the whole series of drawings was unnecessary to proove the similarity: even Haeckel's drawing of the identity of the eggs would do. Haeckel's proposal that ontogeny repeats (adult) ancestral stages is described, but left unturned (Tigerstedt 1920, pp. 76-77).
And so it seems, that the most respected Finnish biologists critical to the doctrine of descendence were men such as Ludvig Kiljander, whose criticism is implicit merely in ignoring to handle the whole issue in their books. In Kiljander's case, the critical attitude was confessed in facing a review of his book, e.g. by referring to Rudolf Virchow (Kiljander 1901). Biologist John Sahlberg was the exception, who started as an evolutionist and ended as a critic.
Even the sceptics not in agreement with Haeckel found themselves challenged by his position, and the German embryologists Hans Speman and Richard Goldschmidt specifically mentioned the importance of Haeckel's influence (Ginard 1981). The Finnish embryology was developed, by and large, as a Speman school.
The dispute on the significance of the natural selection went unabated and the idea had withered away when Erik Nordenskiöld's made his syntheses of an astounding amount of received evolutionary wisdom to his infamous book on the history of biology in 1924. The Darwinian theory was pretty much discarded as old-fashioned, non-testable, and non-rigorous one. Kari Vepsäläinen (1982) described the situation:
"The weak points of Darwinism, the most severe of which was inability to tackle the problem of heredity, brought Darwinism into crisis in the early 20th century. Finnish biologists were active in reviewing news from abroad (from Germany), and scepticism toward Darwinism was spread among biologists even more rapidly than was Darwinism itself some decades earlier. Darwinism (especially the theory of natural selection, if it is agreed that it ever had colonised Finland) went extinct in Finland in the early 1920's.It took about 30 years for Darwinism to recolonize Finland, now in the form of the synthetic theory. The intermittent period could be described as the time of experimental biology, when Mendelian genetics, chromosome studies and 'Entwicklungsmechanik' developed rapidly. The early history of genetics is characterised by an opposing, even hostile, attitude against Darwinism. The attitude survived in Finland up to the 1940's. Students who were interested on evolution and speciation were taught in the spirit of mutationism and Johannsen's 'pure lines'. Population thinking was absent."
Hallowed be thy name: Although the established Finnish historians of biology have not stated it explicitly and publicly, even the consensus seems to be that Darwin’s name is kept in the flags merely for the sake of priority. It bears no significance what so ever to the question, who was the propagator that conquered Finland. Haeckels blatant extrapolations in word and picture were easy to absorb. The case Moneron displays the modus operandi, when even the absolutely heinous claims of spontaneous generation were never corrected in the History of Creation, reprinted until the final edition in 1923.
In essence, Finnish concept of evolution is about as old as the Finnish textbooks in biology, and Finnish Darwinism was virtually Haeckelism, in the level popularized to the common people. The Haeckelian popularization of the scientific world view, so called, was very much contributed by the workers institutes both in Finland and Sweden. In the afore mentioned milepost by J.E. Aro, the Finnish author described the arrival as early as in 1907 (before the publication of Haeckel's or Darwin's classics in Finnish):
"But even more zealous combatants were his [Darwin's] supporters, especially the aforementioned Huxley from England and Ernst Haeckel from Germany. Particularly the latter one has caused that so quick a spreading of 'darwinism' in the European continent. On the other hand, due to his extravagance, the struggle has been transformed unusually fierce and has often moved outside the main question. Without a doubt, it is explicitly Haeckel, by whom darwinism has been introduced also to our broader public." (Aro 1907, p. 13; translation from Finnish mine.)
In the same vein, Olsson and Hobfeld (2003) conclude by stating: "We never find severe criticism of Haeckel's ideas in the letters. Haeckel corresponded with many leading scientists and cultural figures in Sweden, and it is probably the case that not only the philosophical ideas like monism, but also Darwinism, largely entered Sweden via Haeckel's popular books".
The sophisticated darwinism as the modus operandi in the early 20th century popularization seems to be an anacronistic myth. Finland is a particularly excellent indicator of this, because in the very volumes of Ernst Haeckel, the scientific racist, Finns were slandered in a gross scale as I will show below.
The very first reviews on Darwin's common descent had been published only in a few liberal Swedish newspapers and the debates in Finnish broke out mainly after the turn of the century (Lappalainen 1966). K. M. Levander reviewed Haeckel's Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen in Finnish a year after the volume with 26 + 906 pages was published (1892). (Levander and Enzio Reuter were the reference names for Federley's professorship application.) The emphasis in the exalting tone is in the Haeckelian embryology and recapitulation from head to toe and Levander comes to an exhausting conclusion:
"It is probably impossible to find a better guide to the leading and modern evolutionary ideas than the Haeckel's 'Anthropogenie'".
At the same time, Otto Morannal Reuter (1882), the seventeen-year older half-bother of Harry Federley's mentor Enzio Reuter, wrote an introduction to the history of evolutionary idea entitled 'Darwin and Darwinism' in Finsk Tidskrift, three years after his first references on the common descent in the magazine. In 62 pages (sic!), Reuter reviewed a pair of new books: First and foremost the Swedish translation of the Natural History of Creation in 555 pages that articulated so eloquently the "antagonism" and causality of the Darwinism, so called. (Another book introduced was L.H. Åberg's implications of evolution to the religions.)
A 40-paged booklet on the evolution of man by Ernst Haeckel appeared in 1911 (Ihmisen kehityshistoria). The Finnish translation of the Welträtsel was published in 1912 - prior to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1913-1917, in eight booklets) despite the fact that it had been written 40 years later. The major (and only) Finnish journal of natural history gave a short note (35 words!) of the publication of the last issue of the Origin (Levander 1916), but the advertizement of Haeckel's volumes was the business of the Worker's movement. What is peculiar to the "evolutionary history of man", printed in 1911 in a series including even militant agitation, is that the translator and writer of the glossary merely used a pen name "V-i V".
The first time the name of "Häckel" was introduced to the Labour movement in Finnish was in 1904. A 112-paged book "Knowledge and Faith, Writings on the newer world view" (Tieto ja Usko, Kirjoituksia uudemmasta maailmankatsantokannasta) contained 10 essays, two of which were Haeckel's (entitled Science and Christianity & Knowledge and Faith). The editor used a pen-name "Monisti" and did not state, which booklets of Haeckel were abridged to the book. Haeckel's strategy was to transfer the battle of evolution to the enemy territory. He justified his polemics not only by Lamarck and Darwin, but harnessed also the theories of Newton, Kant, Laplace and Hemholz against the superstitions of Christianity. The unreasonable religion should not be taught in the compulsary schools. Haeckel was pedantic in analycing the contradictions of Christianity in different eras and he was meticulous to declare that the Christianity of the apostle Paul and Christ were very different. What was common, however, was the fact that the intelligence of the bastards was attributed to their illegitimate non-Jewish fathers. In the Welträtsel, Haeckel wrote: "The Characteristics which distinguish Christ's high and noble personality, and which give a distinct impress to his religion, are certainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian race" (Haeckel 1899, p. 328).
Daniel Gasman also put forward one of the most telling detail supporting the direct connection between Haeckel and Hitler: "Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionnaires and it's certain that Jesus was not a jew. The jews, by the way, regarded him as the son of a whore - of a whore and a Roman soldier." (Gasman 1971, p. 167, quoting Hitler.)
Haeckel wrote the last verses for Welträtsel in the Passover Sunday, 1899, and the work did not pass over Finland. Quite on the contrary, the Riddle stirred up the country already as soon as it was published. Haeckelian atomic theory boasted that reality and even "soul life" is only matter equipped with power. The difference between life and inorganic nature was only apparent. Only the "peculiar chemical-physical attributes of coal" constituted the mechanical reasons for the "peculiar motional phenomena" that was called “life”. Life, which was continuously being formed spontaneously by itself wherever the proper conditions were met. The evolutionary drive was within the substance itself. Pekka Lappalainen (1966) has described, how strongly this aggressive Haeckelian materialism appealed to the audience gathered to hear the public education of socialism. The Monist tide set aside the Christian wing of the labour movement as unsubstantiated conservatism, which I found its gravest consequence. The so called Theological Saturday Society, an association of a number of young Finnish theologians, surrendered to the idea of evolution in the name of pragmatism. But it was the quasi-scientific Haeckelian ranks that had surrounded the church and theologians did not have the skills to critically evaluate the ipso facto with bona fide.
Today, the Origin is available in reprints and is presented for the Finnish-speaking readership as the magnum opus of the time. Although Darwin is hailed, the Bible that solved all the riddles was Haeckel's Weltraethsel. I have scanned and made the Finnish translation available to Kurt Stueber’s online-library in Jena:http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/weltraethsel_finnisch/index.html.
Also letters from J.A. Palmén the older have been found by the personnel of the Ernst Haeckel House in Jena. Harry Federley and Gunnar Ekman were the first true experimentalists among the Finnish zoologists and both were students of Palmén. Anto Leikola – the grand old historian of the Finnish biology – has briefly described how J.A. Palmén tried to study the maturation of the instincts in young birds in order to draw recapitulationary conclusions about bird behaviour through developmental studies. After being appointed a docent in zoology in 1875, Palmén stayed over a year in Carl Gegenbaur’s laboratory in Heidelberg. In fact, Palmén had already travelled to Germany to study under Rudolf Leuckart in Leipzig but met with his inspirator Ernst Haeckel who persued him to study under Gegenbaur instead (Leikola 1980, 1982c).
In his memoirs, Federley describes how J.A. Palmén had polemically stood up for Haeckel, whose monumental character had been ridiculed by Guss Mattson. In his last letter from 14.2.1914, Federley had written:
“As a very young student I heard about you first indirectly through my teacher, professor Palmén, who was known to be your great admirer. Later on a living interest for the evolution and for the morphological research came directly from your works and writing. I still vividly remember how zoology stood in front of me in altogether new and wondrous light and got a much deeper implications, when I read your Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte.”
Today, Palmén is not “der bekanntlich ein grosser Verehrer von” Haeckel, but as the envoy of "Darwinism" to the Finnish University. Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte in 1968 was a decisive work that seems to have been the irritant (in addition to Büchner's Kraft und Stoff in 1969) that made bishop Schauman to express his protest and to launch the first campaign of the theologians against evolution in public (Lappalainen 1956, Leikola 1981, Voipio 1982).
In contrast to the anachronist phrases of Darwinism, even the Finnish academy seem to have absorbed the idea of common descent in the driving spirit of Ernst Haeckel's work, ever since Haeckel's credential in the more scientific and earlier Generelle Morphologie. Harry Federley (1951) wrote in the obituary of Enzio Rafael Reuter, at the same year he untimely died himself: "In 1868 Haeckel had given his first edition of the natural history of creation and this work, more than any other, made Darwinism to a generally accepted world view… Reuter’s dissertation carries a label of its time. It is a typical phylogenetic handling, inspired by Haeckel’s spirit that at the close of the century totally dominated the biological research."
The first Finnish lectures at the universities by August Johan Malmberg (Aukusti Juhana Mela after the Fennomania) and others referred more explicitly to Charles Darwin, of course. A. J. Mela was the forerunner of the Darwinian evolution in the Finnish speaking provinces, but also his celebrated initiation lecture in 1871 showed familiarity to Haeckels History of Creation (with its unsubstantiated claims of spontaneous generation etc. which were never corrected). Aukusti Mela was known for his humorous polemics, but in the early Finnish schoolbooks of biology by Mela, he does not devote time from the curriculum to evolutionary theories. Mela simply compiled comprehensive lists of the Finnish flora and fauna with many figures.[1] Mela contributed to the inauguration of the leading Finnish nature journal Luonnon ystävä ("Friend of nature" or "Nature lover"), but it emerged as late as in 1895, in association with the new Vanamo society. Mela was an important translator in the path of his grandfather (who had translated John Bunyan's works, though!) (Lappalainen 1956).
Johan Axel Palmén was another enthusiastic young evolutionist, who remained unmarried and dedicated his life for natural history. He was a close friend to Malmberg (Mela) from the youth and stayed as the spokesman of the new wave at the university. Palmén challenged the earliest critic of Darwinism, professor Mäklin, and got many students along in the campaign. Palmén was the first one to apply the common descent to a dissertation (in 1874), after which he studied under the supervision of Carl Gegenbaur the years 1875-1876 in Heidelberg.
Professor Mäklin seems to incline toward some kind of acceptance of common descent in his booklet. What is typical in the declaration is that its title refers to Darwin, but the content of the writing per se is reactionary to Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschicte. Now Mäklin merely resists the idea of monophylogenetic origin. Mäklin died the next year, and his chair was given to the victorious Palmén in 1884. Palmén was inspired to establish the first Zoological station in Finland (Leikola 1980). In the footsteps of Palmén, the doctrine of common descent began to gain an official status in the Finnish University. (The other gladiator was A. J. Malmberg/Mela, who vindicated the Finnish comprehensive schools to evolution. It is peculiar to these two friends, that they remained unmarried and had their apartments filled with exotic pets.)
The correspondence between Wilhelm Leche (1850-1927, a politically radical left wing social democrat, and Haeckel presents a clear example of how the research programme started by Gegenbaur and Haeckel in Jena was brought into Sweden (Olsson & Hobfeld 2003). Leche was the first professor of Zoology at the University of Stockholm and the chairman of the Swedish Society for Eugenics. Leche's extensive textbook on the descent of man was translated to Finnish in 1914 – in two independent translations ("Human, his origins and evolution", Ihminen, hänen alkuperänsä ja kehityksensä, 276 pages; "The origin and evolution of human", Ihmisen alkuperä ja kehitys 156 pages).
In 1900, Luonnon Ystävä contained news mentioning that Haeckel was given the Darwin award at the turn of the century. Wilhelm Bölsche, a fervent Nazi adherent later on, wrote the biography of Charles Darwin, published in Finnish as early as in 1900. Bölsche was among the founders of the Monistebund in 1906 in Jena, and his Descent of Man (Ihmisen polveutuminen) was published in Finnish in the same year. Bölsche describes the universal Biogenetic Law and atavism using, by and large, man and primates as a proof (pp. 29-35, 48, 53-54, 59-61, 72-73). Bölsche states that the gill folds and fin-shapes of the human embryo are…
"as unshakeable a truth as is the theory of Copernicus, that the Earth goes around the Sun. No-one, who respects truth, cannot deny that. But there are many narrow-minded and zealous people to whom this embryological truth is not appealing and who label this scientific fact usually as a 'sinful' lie and a fraud. But whosoever, against his better knowledge or due to his religious narrow-mindedness, declares irrefutable scientific truths as deceit, lacks the ethical qualifications to understand that the scientific progress seeks the truth" (Bölsche 1906, p 61).
Bölsche defends Haeckel's Gastraea-theory as aggressively, and also gathers circumstantial evidence for the spontaneous generation in Haeckel's flow of thoughts on crystals and the "sensitivity" of all materials (pp. 85-87). The first ten Finnish books on evolution include also "The Family Tree of Animals" (Eläinten sukupuu, 1906), and "In the blackcoal forest" (Kivihiilimetsässä, 1907) by Bölsche the combatant.
[1] In the case of the flora, the earlier treatise from 1860 had been compiled by the legendary Elias Lönnrot, compiler and editor of the tens of thousands of songs in the form of the Kalevala-epic.
I have contributed to the controversy by browsing and scanning recapitulationary relics and the texts associated from Finnish textbooks of biology from a timespan of the 20th century (http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Koulukirjat.html) As a result, I estimate that the drawings or their drawn replicas are certainly on the Top-3 list of the figures in Finnish school books on biology, most probably the celebrisity number one. The only exceptions I have found are special readings, rare recent books with more accurate photographs, and few books emphasizing the “genetic” era of biology. Basically, the anacronistic recycling is still going on at our postmodern millennium. Few are the men who still remember.
My impression is, that the schematic drawings in Finland were even more accurate at the beginning of the 20th century, than at the end of it. What is most regretable is that in none of the Finnish schoolbooks I have examined have I found a description of the possibility of a deceit - not to speak of apology for recycling in earlier editions. The main exception is the Evoluutio – Kriittinen Analyysi (2000) edited from Evolution - Ein kritisches Lehrbuch written by Scherer and Junker, that has occasionally been dismissed as "creationist", too. The Finnish university-level textbook by Sariola et al (2003) now uses Richardson’s photographs, fortunately, but neither does it recapitulate or mention the scandal explicitly.
Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868) was published in Finnish in 1911 (Ihmisen kehityshistoria). I have scanned the item as a text file in http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Ihmisen_kehityshistoria.html. Although Haeckel labelled us Finns as a “Mongolian race” in it in the infamous “Finnenfrage”, even the Finnish translation of Weltraethsel was published in 1912 prior to Darwin's Origin (Lajien Synty 1913-1917, in eight booklets). Other works by Charles Darwin that have been published in Finnish are merely the shortened version of the Journey around the world (1924), The next million years (1954), and Autobiography (1987). The name of Darwin might have been the Noah incarned, but the Bible that solved all the riddles was the Weltraethsel.
I have scanned the Finnish translation of Haeckel's extravacant book - hidden to the shadows of the more sophisticated Origin - to Kurt Stueber’s excellent online-library (www.biolib.de) on natural history: caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/weltraethsel_finnisch/index.html .
I am building up a web site to gather online-books of the early Finnish treatises of the natural history and general biology. The current address for the project is http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Biologia_online.html. All of the aforementioned books (plus others) are either scanned to the web, or obtainable from me by a request in the cases where the 70 years have not passed from the death of the author or the translator and the copyrights are reserved.
As a notorious example of a field researcher, Harry Federley is often considered as the father of Finnish genetics. It is interesting that his approach used not to be Mendelism and mutatsion-paradigm, but a study of Biogenetic Law in butterflies (or flutterby's, as they once were called). The results were
[1] Daniel Gasman began the last chapter of the Scientific Origins of National Socialism… (1971) by summarizing:
"If one surveys the origins of the Volkish movement in Germany during the three or four decades prior to the First World War it is apparent that Haeckel played an influential, significant, indeed a decisive role in its genesis and subsequent development. An impressive number of the most influential Volkish writers, propagandists, and spokesmen were influenced by or involved in some way with either Haeckel or his Monist followers. In the development of racism, racial eugenics, Germanic Christianity, nature worship,and anti-semitism, Haeckel and the monists were an important source and a major inspiration for many of the diverse streams of thought which came together later on under the banner of National Socialism. Probably the most important and far-reaching influence of Haeckel may be found among the leading racial anthropologists and eugenicists who lived and wrote in the decades around the turn of the century. Apart from such writers as Wilhelm Schallmayer, Heinrich Ziegler, and August Forel, whom we have already noted as active members of the Monist League, the fact is that nearly all other leading figures in the field of eugenics and racial science in Germany were deeply and consciously indebted to Haeckel for many, if not for most, of their ideas. It was this group of individuals, both within and outside of the Monist League, who as it were published the banns for the marriage of racism and eugenics which took place a few decades later on under the Nazis." (p. 147.)
[2] "Hyödyllinen Huvitus Luomisen Töistä, yxinkertaisille avuxi Jumalan Hyvyyden Tundoon ja palveluxeen. Frenckellin kirjan prändisä, Turusa."
[3] In the case of the flora, the earlier treatise from 1860 had been compiled by the legendary Elias Lönnrot, compiler and editor of the tens of thousands of songs in the form of the Kalevala-epic.
disappointing for recapitulation, but so interesting in technical quality, that the Finnish butterflies nearly got established as model organisms instead of the contemporary fruit flies (Leikola 1984 p. 186-7). According to Allen (1985, pp. 50-72) and Sapp (1987, xii, p 33), too, Mendelism outpowered biometrics by the aid of fruit fly genetics. A popular Finnish article shows, how Federley was about to withdraw from propagating the Biogenetic Law already in 1905 (Federley 1905). The eugenic career of Federley has been described in Finnish (Hietala 1985).
Haeckel himself expedition to Finland in 1897. He was exalted in a congratulative telegram in his 70th birthday by J. A. Palmén, followed by an address of 36 Finnish natural scientists (Luonnon Ystävä 1/1904, pp. 46-47). The address was decorated by a painting of the Finnish Albert Edelfelt, who was known for his immortalizing of Louis Pasteur with his sterile test tubes. The superlatives of the address consisted of 159 words when translated to Finnish. In his 80th birthday, the list of names had been shortened to J. A. Palmén, Schulman, E. Reuter, K. M. Levander, E. Nordenskiöld, H. Federley, G.Ekman and E. Westermarck (Luonnon Ystävä 2/1914, pp. 80-81). Haeckel himself used to refer to the latter representative of the Finnish Prometheus association in his bestsellers, regarding Westermarcks research on the evolution of marriage. The superlatives numbered 43 words now, but I still do not understand, what does it mean that "His Highness" had "once also begun to defend the preconditions of the civilization of our folk".
Haeckel's book entitled Ewigkeit: Weltkriegsgedanken über Leben und Tot, Religion und Entwicklungslehre (Eternity: World War thoughts on life and death, religion and evolutionary theory) appeared in 1915. Prior to the death of Ernst Haeckel in 1919 there was also a Civil War in Finland. When Charles Darwin died, money was gathered for a monument for him. I am confused by the fact that when Haeckel died, there was not even an obituary for him in the Luonnon Ystävä -journal. Neither was there any centennial anniversary in 1934. Sic transit gloria mundi.
World War I was a war of nations. World War II was a war of races. I wonder if the Finnish scientists had grown less benevolent towards the Haeckelian legacy already at the first round?
Finns as a degenerate Mongolian race
Already in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, admired by Darwin in the introduction to his Descent of Man, Haeckel had classified Finns as Mongolians or peoples who resembled them.[1] Finland was a country located at the bloody northern borders of the east and west, as versified by Uuno Kailas. Were the Finno-Ugrian people capable of establishing a state? See figure 11 for the place of Finns as the degenerate "mongolian" race in the Europe, in the linear model of the Haeckelian evolution.
[1] "An eigth species is formed by the mongolian or middleasian man, also called the yellow man or Turanian (Homo mongolicus or turanus). The major stem of the species are the inhabitants of northers or middle Asia, exept the polar people in the north and Kaukasians in the west. Also a greater part of the southern asians belong her and among the Europeans the Lapps, Finns and Hungarians. As the two major branches of this widespread groups of peoples, the southeastern branch (Chinese and Japanese) and a northeastern branch (Tatars, Turks, Finns, Magyars etc) can be separated. The color of the skin of this species has a yellow basic tone, sometimes ligther yellow like peas or even whitish, sometimes darker brown-yellow. The smooth hair is black. The skull form is definitely shortheaded in most cases (especially with the Calmucks, Baschkirs etc.), frequently also middleheaded (Tatars, Chinese etc.) In contrast real longheads do not exist among them. They probably originate from a southasiatic branch of the polynesans, that went northwards." (From Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, translation from Kurt Stueber.)
Figure 11. Haeckelian drawings of faces of "anthropods". Fom the 1898 ed. of the Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschicte.
The meticulous pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) was an adversary of evolution and appears as one of the main opponents in Ernst Haeckel's books. (In a personal level, Haeckel wonders in his correspondences whether Virchow had emotional life at all due to his discipline.) Franz Boas, another German Jew, was also a student of Virchow. I consider Boas, the maligned anthropologist of the time, as one the greatest dissidents, due to his unbelievable (but genuine) results on the complexity of the inuiti language etc. (Boas had to leave not only Germany but also United States.) Professor Aira Kemiläinen is the grand old lady studying Finns in the shadow of the Aryans and she mentions: “Virchow... travelled to Finland in the 1870’s in order to study the Finnish people and its roots. He was astonished when he saw that Finns were blond. His voyage was caused by the famous ‘Finnenfrage’ (‘question of the Finns’).” (1998 p. 69.)
In his popular Wonders of Life, Ernst Haeckel categorized Finns as "middle civilized race" which had 7 races below them and four races above them. Of the twelve races, these latter four were "higher civilized races", "lower cultured races", "middle cultured races" and "higher cultured races". Even the next stage from us Finns included the fifteenth century Italians, French, English, and Germans. Haeckel's evolutionary tree of the indoeuropean languages, naturally, did not include the Finns (figure 12).
Figure 12. Haeckelian semi-linear evolutionary tree of the Indo-Germanic and Aryan languages. It was, originally, the linguist August Schleicher who drew Haeckel's attention to the concept of "monism". From the 5th ed. of The Evolution of Man, 1910.
And Haeckel declared:
"The views on the subject of European nations which have large colonies in the tropics, and have been in touch with the natives for centuries, are very realistic, and quite different from the ideas that prevail in Germany. Our idealistic notions, strictly regulated by our academic wisdom and forced by our metaphysicians into the system of their abstract ideal-man, do not at all tally with the facts. Hence we can explain many of the errors of the idealistic philosophy and many of the practical mistakes that have been made in the recently acquired German colonies; these would have been avoided if we had had a better knowledge of the low psychic life of the natives (cf. the writings of Gobineau and Lubbock)." (The wonders of life, 1905, p. 390-1).
Let us quote this Goubineau, recommended by the scientifically more correct Haeckel, on Finns, then:
"…the common people who live in servitude or at least in a very depressed position. These last belong to a lower race which came about in the south through miscegenation with the Negroes and in the north with the Finns--- these archetypes of ugliness and insignificance, can not feel a greater joy than if a man from a higher race approaches their wives and daughters, so that a father or a husband may wish a racially more prominent hybrid to appear in their cottage." (Gobineau, Inequality of Races (1853-55, 1967).
In books concerning race theories and racism, the modus operandi is to pay attention to the opinions on coloured people in former colonnies or to anti-semitism. Gobineau had, however, more colours to his palette. He divided mankind in three races: the White, the Black, and the Yellow. In essence, this meant the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Finns were like "Nordic Niggers", as if it were.
The Yellow were extremely ugly, and the group included not only Finns, but also Mongols and Tartars. Kemiläinen explains the history of the low self esteem of the Finnish people:
"Finns were a primitive aboriginal people in Europe and in Asia. They were short of stature and deformed. Their limbs were feeble and they had protruding cheekbones and slanting eyes. They were more yellow than the Chinese, who had the blood of the White race. How else could the Chinese have created a high culture? Even the Hungarians were 'white Huns'; they had White ancestors… In an Aryan society at the top were Aryans, in the second class were the Celtic and Slavic peoples and men and women of mixed blood. The deformed Finns were lowest." (Kemiläinen 1998 p. 85).
Race theories did not start with Haeckel, and did not end with him. What was most unique in Haeckel was the volume and the scientific statute. The former race theories with the syndromatic Nordic admiration had only been formulated largely by men like Joseph Arthur "Comte" de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) – a Germanophile Frenchman once serving as a diplomat (!) in Stockholm, and an Englishman and son-in-law of Wagner living in Wien, respectively.
Finnenfrage, however, did not get the main attention but Judenfrage. Writes Gasman:
“…Haeckel was one of the most vociferous opponents of the jews and his importance for the history of anti-Semitism in Germany is that he did much to bring the Jewish question into the realm of biology." (1971, pp. xxii, 157).
In Nürnberg trials, the word "Jewish" was not used to supplement the phrase of "crimes against humanity". I think it was shameful when we remember that the extremism was let to proliferate precisely at the time of regulations targeted to the Jews that were numbering in hundreds, if not in thousands, finally. The very last word in the real school -educated corporal's written testament was “Judentum” (Kuparinen 1999).
Indeed, who has paid a thought on Hitler's formulation of the differences between the human races despite Führer's own outlook? It was all taken directly from the brilliant sky-blue eyed Haeckel, according to the Gasman (1971 p. xxii). At the top of the unilinear progression were usually the "Nordics", a tall race of blue-eyed blonds. Haeckel's position on the Jewish question was assimilation, not yet an open elimination. But was it different only in degree, rather than kind?
Charles Darwin had also another cousin. The sophisticated word eugenics (good genetics and good ethics) had been a phrase coined by another of them, Sir (Sirius) Francis Galton (1822-1911) in 1883 (see Galton’s Hereditary Genius from 1892). Galton was an early statistician, who invented e.g. the fingerprinting method, and was the first chairman of the Eugenics Education Society since 1908. At least Galton's infertile marriage has received attention (Reilly 1991, p. 2).
Nature or nurture? In Finland, the term was not the anglosaxon eugenics, but "race hygieny", as formulated by Alfred Ploetz, a physician. In 1936 Ploetz was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work on racial hygiene (Proctor 1988, pp. 15, 28). The first issue of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie in 1904 was dedicated to August Weismann and Ernst Haeckel, despite their absurd contradiction regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Weismann was also named honorary chairman of the Society for Racial Hygiene, when it was formed in 1905, along with Haeckel (Proctor 1988, p. 33).
Marriage laws were once erected not only in the Nazi Germany but also in the multicultural states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and shortlived hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between "white" and "colored races" was self evident (Hailer 1963, p. 52).
In 1917 the immigration of "defective" groups was forbidden in the United States of America by a law. In 1921 the European immigration was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census. Eventually, in the strategical year of 1924 the finest hour of US eugenics had come and the fatal law was passed by Congress. It diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born from each country based on the 1890 census in order to preserve the "nordic" balance in population, and was hold through World War II until 1965 (Hietala 1985, p. 132; Howard & Rifkin 1980 pp. 66-70).
Richard Lewontin writes:
“The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family, and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the the Russians to be feebleminded.” (1977, p. 13.)
Finnish emmigrants put the cross on the box reserved for the "yellow" group at least until 1958 (Kemiläinen 1993, p. 1930).
The first law on sterilization in US had been established in 1907 in Indiana, and 23 similar laws had been passed in 15 States and sterilization was practiced in 124 institutions in 1921 (Mattila 1996; Hietala 1985 p. 133; these were the times of IQ-tests under Gould's scrutiny in his Mismeasure of Man 1981). By 1931 thirty states had passed sterization laws in the US (Reilly 1991, p. 87).
If the American laws were pioneering endeavours, Denmark passed the first sterilization legislation in Europe (1929). Denmark was followed by other Nordic countries: Norway (1934), Sweden (1935), Finland (1935), and Iceland (1938) (Haller 1963, pp 21-57; 135-9; Proctor 1988, p. 97; Reilly 1991, p. 109).
Seldom is it mentioned in the popular Finnish media, that the first outright race biological institution in the world was not established in Germany but in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden (Hietala 1985, pp. 109). (I am not aware of the ethymology of the 'Up' of the ancient city from Plinius' Ultima Thule, however.)
In 1907 the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany had changed its name to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, and in 1910 Swedish Society for Eugenics (Sällskap för Rashygien) had become its first foreign affiliate (Proctor 1988, p. 17). Haeckel travelled to Sweden in 1897 and 1907, and several of his books were translated into Swedish. Haeckel was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1882. Haeckel invited top scientists to launch a Scientific society ethophysis in 1901. The only Scandinavian member of the first 24 members was Gustaf Retzius (1842-1919), professor of Anatomy at the Karolinska Institute (the medical school of Stockholm).
On the other hand, it was irritating for Haeckel that the humanist Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) from Jena got the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature, as Haeckel's materialism might have distracted the Nobel prize in literature from him (Nature 424, 875, 2003).
The shortcomings of Haeckel's recapitulationary Law or its relics in the embryo drawings do not mean the failure of evolutionary theory per se - but the shortcomings of its most popularized and robust form in Finland it does. As Finns, we simply spoke better German than English. As a parodic indication of the German admiral of the Finnish leaders at the emergence of our independence in 1917, Finland chose Herself a German king (Friedrich Karl, Prince of Hessen) the same day that German requested armistice from the allies (Rautkallio 1977). This was a common tradition to European monarchies, though. After a few absurd months of hesitation, Finland did not come up as a monarchy but a republic.
Finland had a brotherhood in arms with Germany in the latter part of both World Wars. In the repercussions of the Civil War in 1918, there was a preliminary annihilation trial of our own. Does the Finnish revolutionary attempt explain all the nyances of the concentration camps and executions of the "Mongolian" Finns, or did the Swedish over-representation in the management contribute to the issue?
According to the great world history of Otava, a Finnish encyclopedia, it is difficult to come up with any rational explanation for the annihilation carried out by the Nazis, apart from terrible and mad logics (Otava's Suuri Maailmanhistoria, 17, 1986, p. 278). I disagree. The Nazi phenomenon was no historical coincidence, but followed a rational course predating the First World War in the Haeckelian legacy.
In the 23th of June, 1941, the raid over the Soviet Union started from the Black Sea to the polar circle almost simultaneously. With the occupied Norway behind it, foreign interests for the Finnish nickel mines, and Soviet bombardments, however, Finland joined the Barbarossa the 25th of June with her national thesis for a "separate war". Finland remained an unoccupied democracy and the propaganda value of such an ally was appreciated in the Nazi-Germany.
Why did Hitler open a second front by attacking to East against all of the advices in his headquarters? The command for Barbarossa was undersigned only 5 months after the speech to the parliament, declaring invasion to the opposite direction (England) (Bullock 1958, p. 377). What if the failure of the Red Army (with its executed officers) to take over Finland in the Winter War - despite Ribbentrops' license from the Nazi-Germany - contributed to the issue?
Race biological reason was not only rhetoric, it was scientific. There is evidence, that In Ukraine and Baltic countries, the people wellcomed the German troops as redeemers. These illusions evaporated soon, when the SS (Schutzstaffel) and civilian administration followed the field-army. Hitler did not even try to separate the Russian people from the Soviet government. The Eastern Europeans Slavic people were born "slaves", indeed. For Hitler, they were "Untermenschen" (Bullock 1958 pp- 423-5). The ethymology for the Greek "barbaros" was in their uncomprehensible tongue, the word was onomatopoetic.
Stalin had stated in 1939 that the safety of Leningrad was the main reason for his territorial demands for Finland. Upon the 900 days long siege of Leningrad, the great command for the "struggle for life" (Kampf) to annihilate the whole city together with its 3 million inhabitants did not get a response from the Finnish leaders. They harassed the brotherhood of arms by trying to avoid the responsibility of closing the line of maintenance and supply (Skyttä 1971, pp. 136-141), in the Finnish record of the history. Finnish troops did participate in the siege in the north, but had critical reservedness.
In short, the ideal of race hygieny was not put to a final action in Finland. Isaksson (1996), Virolainen (1996) and Kemiläinen et al (1985) analyze the anthropologist "mismeasure" of Finnish Romanies, Lapps, and the Finns themselves.
Since 1998, new curiosities has been revealed, however. The dilemma of the ambitious political goals of the Suomalais-Saksalainen Seura (SSS, Finnish-German society) has been introduced publicly by investigating journalists in a national television broadcast. I believe the 8 heavy weight professors of Helsinki University in the SSS delegation aimed at serving their country in a difficult situation between two superpowers.
One is, however, compelled to ask, whether Stephen Jay Gould was aware of the irony when he received the 8th Yrjö Reenpää prize in 1999 from the testaments trusted and managed by the Finnish Cultural Fund. (I esteem Gould's personal cynicism on the basis that during the 12 years of reign by Hitler, the annihilation of Jews made a leader even in the most open New York Times only 9 times. A sample of his 400,000 Hungarian Jewish relatives were dismissed in 13 lanes in obscure pages.)
Yrjö Reenpää (1894-1976) is the Honorary President of the Finnish Cultural Fund. He seems to have been also the last chairman of the delegation of SSS. Although the reports of the proceedings in the meetings of SSS have been deliberately destroyed, the class of culture Reenpää had been associated within this context seem to have been pragmatic duties. As an indication, SSS recruited Finnish people as volunteers to SS-troops abroad, a symbolic unit of merely 600 men whose exposure was forbidden in Finnish media for a time.
What if Reenpää, on behalf of the country, was just compelled for the last chairmanship of the delegation of SSS 12.4.1944 onwards? It seems so late a timepoint of the war (doomed to end more or less catastrophically), that a scapegoat role seems to apply not only to president Risto Ryti but also to Reenpää.[1] Ryti has been described as a clear and analytical thinker, whereas Reenpää is often recalled as a more esoteric philosopher.
In December 1942 Reenpää was nominated by the Finnish Academy of Science to a membership in the committee preparing "practical measures" to establish a Race Biological Research Institute ("rotubiologinen tutkimuslaitos") in the middle of the war to Finland. The chairman for the latter committee was the professor of anatomy - post-war president of the National Board of Health - Niilo Pesonen (1902 - 1993) (Jokisipilä 1999 pp. 16, 34). It seems that the aim of the project was to file all the Finnish people. Nazi-Germany just happened to lose the war.
In his memoirs (1974), Reenpää does not comment or mention his involvement with the SSS or the race-biological research institute. Reenpää, who was in charge for testing of Finnish pilots, was a physiologist of senses. Only his collaborators or colleagues abroad were the "pathologists" as it were.
Jokisipilä (1999) describes, how the SSS was officially erected for cultural exchange, and how it nevertheless had ambitious political goals aside the diplomatic routes that reached undemocratic leaders like Göring and Himmler. Good relationships with a dictatorship underlined the personality of an individual even in the democratic Finland and Jokisipilä examines this collaboration as a bankruptcy of the post civil war politics.
Jokisipilä does not give data in support of the allegation that a pro-Nazi puppet government was planned on these academic scaffolds, but especially the overrepresentation of medical doctors is noteworthy. Likewise, over half of the members of the newly founded Svenskt Sällskap för Rashygien in Sweden were physicians already back in 1910 (Weindling 1989, pp 148-151).
Before the military drawbacks, the route by which the visits of Pesonen to Germany, or people like the main ideologist of NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) Alfred Rosenberg with his "rücksichtlos Kampf" to Finland, were being arranged went through the SSS and Nordische Gesellschaft (Jokisipilä p. 34). I recommend recapitulating the Robert Proctor's book Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1988). The attitudes towards race hygieny before the World War II in the Finnish-speaking Duodecim and in the Swedish-speaking Finska Läkaresällskapet could be distinguished, claims Mattila (1996).
German officials had to be persuaded to recruite other than Swedish Finns to the battallion of Waffen-SS from Finland due to the "mongolid" element. Fennomanic movement had exercised its influence for a century, and I would consider that inhibitory to the sympathy of Nordic or Aryan nationalism among the common people. Teutonic superiority akin to Nietzsche's 'super-man' was abhorrent to the commonwealth of Finland.
Finland concluded a separate armistice with the Soviet Union, which led into war operations between Germany and Finland in a few weeks’ time. In Finland this third war is called the Lapland War (1944-1945). The offensive pangermanic regime was certainly not the exclusive and isolated case, but followed the norm in the countries ranking high in the Haeckelian legacy. In Finland, National Socialism was never established. There were societies in that direction, but they did not enjoy large memberships. As a party, the Finnish Patriotic People's Movement (Isänmaallinen Kansanliike IKL) had fascist characteristics, but it had merely 8 representatives in the parliament in 1939.
I have conducted preliminary surveys on the topic at the lectures of Viikki bio-campus in the Helsinki University. When 136 students from 5 different lectures with an average of 1,25 years of backround in biology were asked in Finnish and in the scale from 1 to 5 whether they were aware of the drawings in question, the result was 4%, 6%, 22%, 40%, and 26% (from no to yes). Furthermore, 5%, 13%, 65%, 13%, and 5% (symmetrical distribution from 'absolutely true' to 'not true at all') thought the scientific establishment considered the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - after translating the foreign jargon to Finnish - as a relevant paradigm. Recapitulation was considered as a relevant paradigm by 7%, 18%, 55%, 16%, and 5% of the surveillants themselves (from 'absolutely true' to 'not true at all'). The anonymously written judgment was 6%, 18%, 55%, 14%, and 6% for the statement that the upper panel of 1A has been argued of being fraudulent (from 'not true at all' to 'certainly true'). Lastly, after the statement, that 'In addition to the cross-scientific impact of the law of recapitulation, it was applied directly to the society starting from the close of the 19th Century Germany', the result were 86%, 7%, 4%, 2%, and 1%. (From 'I have not even heard of this' to 'I was already aware of this'.)
It seems, that my recapitulation of the Haeckelian legacy of popularization is justified, if we do not want to skip the embryo scandal deliberately. To put the human genome project in any historical perspective, it's most important message in my opinion is this: There are no human races. Negrids, mongolids, euripids, whatever. Defamation such as figure 10, be gone!
[1] Soviet Union's major offensive begun in June 1944, when Finland's relations to Nazi-Germany were on trial because of attempts for a separate peace. Finland was in lack of food, weapons and ammunition, and the Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded guarantees that Finland would not seek a separate peace again. Ryti signed his personal guarantee that Finland under his presidency would restrain from peace. When the situation was stabilized, Ryti resigned and negotiations for peace could continue from a safer position for a neighbour of the Soviet regime.
Figure 13. Haeckelian drawings of mammalian brains. Fom the 5th ed. of The Evolution of Man, 1910.
Allelic variation or SNPs were found much lower frequency between human tribes than between ape populations throughout the genome in the extreme publications (Sachidanandam et al 2001, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/ ). Besides, there seems to have been a gross bias even in the popularization of human-chimpanzee annealing studies. The sharing was supposed to be 99% in the textbooks, but a reproduction from a 780 kb sample by the original author gave a different figure. Taking not only the 1.4% nucleotide substitution, but also the 3.4% indels into account, the human-chimp divergence was actually 5% (Britten 2002).
Yet, what were popularized in the press out of the human genome draft when it was first published were slogans such as the claim "Sex with bacteria!" The original report identified a set of 223 proteins as having “significant similarity to proteins from bacteria, but no comparable similarity to proteins from yeast, worm, fly and mustard weed…” (Lander et al 2001). It is somewhat unfortunate, that the collaborators of the commercial and rivalling Celera company at TIGR had the last say in the dilemma, when it shot down HGP’s claim almost immediately in HGP's prominent journal (Salzberg et al 2001; Andersson et al 2001).
The expectations for the horizontal gene transfer run wild since the uprooting of the Haeckelian Tree of Life in facing the contradictory evolutionary signals of the deep lineage protein phylogenies. The evolutionary literature is in turmoil, and phrases used for the phenomenon include "bush of life", "chaos of the gene-exchange pool", or "evolutionary fluid conditions" before the "Darwinian Thresholds" of speciation (Doolittle 2000; Woese 2002).
Harry Federley (1869-1951) is often called the founder of the Finnish genetics and he hold the first chair of genetics in Finland. His role as the main contributor to the early Finnish eugenics is emphasized less frequently. Federley had particularly broad connections to the international eugenics movement, and Finnish attempts did not occur in isolation.
Harry Federley enrolled in the University of Helsinki (the only university in the country at the time) in 1896 to study biology, and joined the Swedish section of the Uusimaa Student Nation. Federley's first published work had to do with botany, but later on he diverged into zoology. Federley proceeded to genetics when he tried to prove the Biogenetic Law aka recapitulation in the legacy of Ernst Haeckel, the father of Monism.
Harry Federley had a very impressive correspondence with a multitude of scientists particularly in Sweden and Germany, but also with the American bigwigs such as Charles Benedict Davenport. Professor Marjatta Hietala (1996, p. 252) has counted that Federley received at least thirty-eight letters from Fritz Lenz, twenty-one letters from Otto Mohr, sixteen letters from Herman Lundborg, fifteen letters from Alfred Mjöen, and three from Alfred Ploetz (Papers of Harry Federley, Helsinki University Library). Eventually Federley had to make 300 offprints of his articles, so he had to be writing to hundreds of colleagues. Eugenic mission had, however, only a minor role in Federleys more international communications (Hietala 1996 p. 214). Helsinki University stores letters and cards to Federley from over 400 senders, most of whom wrote from abroad.
Haeckel House in Jena has recently published a catalogue listing 40,000 letters to and from Ernst Haeckel. At least, Harry Federley, Edward Westermack, Johan Axel Palmén, Erik Nordenskiöld, Enzio Reuter, Otto Schulman[1], Alexander Luther, Nicolai Kaulbars, Valio Korvenkontio, Henrik Ramsay[2], Jacob Sederholm, Onni Toikka, and putatively also Olof Sievers are noteworthy Finnish correspondents. I consider this an important source discovery for the Finnish historians of science. Federley wrote five letters to Haeckel, between the years 1912-1914.
After receiving his PhD in zoology, Federley studied the year 1910-1911 under the famous German Zoologist and eugenicist Ludwig Plate (1862-1937) in Haeckel’s town, Jena. The reason for the excursion had been the need of help in order to finish Federley's primary research topic regarding the recapitulation or "Biogenetische Grundgesetz", a project long overdue. Recapitulation was becoming tainted with metaphysical odor.
Germany was the main country abroad for Finnish physicians to make excursions and post-doctoral studies, and Ludwig Plate was the successor of Ernst Haeckel, the nestor of evolution. Federley articulated in his memoirs in 1944 that Jena meant the same for him as the Mecca for a Moslem (Federley 1946a).
There was only little experimental biology in Finland, which probably caused the delay in the acceptance of modern Mendelian study of heredity. Mendel’s insights had been rediscovered in 1900 and Federley traded the blatant recapitulation from experimental settings, and projected his determinist and pessimist mindset to the iron laws of genetics.
Markku Mattila’s dissertation in 1999 meant the first systematic monograph on the early race hygiene in Finland. Mattila’s study covered the timespan until the sterilization law in 1935, but he does not refer to any of the Haeckel's best-selling books. Underestimation of the Haeckelian legacy is typical also for the literature on the scientific origins of Fascism.
The first outright race biological institution in the world was established in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden (Hietala 1985, pp. 109). (One is not aware of the etymology of the name of the ancient city from Plinius’ Ultima Thule, however.) Harry Federley lectured in this Herman Lundborg’s eugenics institute frequently and was the spokesman for an analogous institute in Finland. Federley was also one of the seven founder members of the International Committee on Human Heredity, and so forth.
A professorship in race hygiene had been established in 1923 in Germany (with Fritz Lenz in the chair), and a research institute in the field (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie menscliche Erblehre und Eugenik) had been dedicated in 1927. Markku Mattila (1999) has shown that in contrast to this international norm, Finland did not have a chair in eugenics and neither was there any outright race hygienic society whose undertakings could be followed.
In Finland, anthropology did not mix with race hygiene. It was not about a discourse on 'Lapps', 'Gypsies', 'Jews' etc. but on 'degenerate', 'feebleminded', 'lunatics', 'alcoholists' and 'criminals' (Mattila 1999). The notorious exceptions to the rule, however, are the Florin Commission (Florinska Kommissionen) and Society for Improving Public Health in Swedish Finland (Samfundet Folkhälsan i Svenska Finland) that dealt with eugenics and anthropology alike. Both were organizations where Harry Federley had a decisive role. The latter one was established in March 1921 described as a “Eugenic Society” by Charles Davenport.
In 1923, Federley was the self-evident authority for nomination as the first professor extraordinarius of genetics in Helsinki. The new discipline with its practical benefits in general, Harry Federley in particular, was recommended by professors Enzio Rafael Reuter and K. M. Levander, and Federley remained in the post almost until his death 1951 (Lagerspetz 2000, p. 230). Federley extrapolated and socialized the rules of genetics to the human welfare. Federley actively participated in the international eugenics movement as a self-proclaimed representative of a whole country.
Young Federley got acquainted with the world-owned Ernst Haeckel soon after Haeckel's retirement. Finally, also Federley grew up as a prominent national expert in eugenics. Parallel to Haeckel, Federley taught eugenics as an essential part of human heredity over quarter of a century (1923-1949). Federley kept race hygiene in the curriculum of the department of genetics. Every Finnish student studying genetics at least a year (cum laude approbatur), was introduced to the principles of race hygiene. The basic textbook was Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz (820 pages in two volumes). Those who had genetics as their major subject (laudatur-level) were examined also on the more thorough eugenics of the 2nd volume. Federley made initiatives as improvements for the book in his letters to Fritz Lenz [3] (Mattila 1999, p. 46-47).
Harry Federley retained his eugenic lecture course at least from 1923 to 1946. Despite the active participation in the course, race hygiene never got established as a separate discipline, and never diverged from Federley's control. It is also noteworthy, that the students did not specialize in eugenics, although Federley's large collection of books and contemporary journals were available. In 1923-1933 no student dealt with race hygiene in their laudatur-essays. Furthermore, Federley did not supervise any doctoral studies in eugenics – with one exception, executive to the momentous law permitting forced sterilization starting from 1935, as Mattila has shown (1999).
Federley’s more political role meant the maintenance of the public health of the Swedish-speaking Finland explicitly. To catch the old mouthful recycled in Samfundet pamphlets, “there must be no bad Swedish men and women in this country”. If the quantity was in decrease, the quality had to in increase. In the beginning, the Samfundet adopted a policy of purely positive eugenics (contra involuntary or annihilative measures).
Haeckel, instead, is given the honour of drawing the first gnarled phylogenetic tree covering the whole animal kingdom. By 1914 Haeckel had been granted membership in almost a hundred professional and scientific societies all over the world. Three years before his retirement, in 1906, Haeckel founded the International Monist League (Monistebund) in Jena. Before Harry Federley's year in Jena, it had grown to about six thousand members and maintained local group meetings in 42 places of Germany and Austria. Haeckel's audience had not only been the university intelligentsia, but the common people. The working classes could read Haeckel in his popular books or listen to Haeckel in the lectures in rented halls (Gasman 1971, 1998).
Ernst Haeckel's classic book The Riddle of the Universe (1899; Die Welträtsel) was one of the most incredible publishing successes of all times. During the first year after its appearance it sold more than hundred thousand copies in Germany. It went through ten editions by 1919, and was translated into 30 “civilised” languages (Sander 2002). By 1933, almost half a million copies had been bought in Germany alone. Stephen Jay Gould's estimated in his last review on the topic that Haeckel's books
"surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin and Huxley (by Huxley's own frank admission), in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution" (Gould 2000).
Olaf Breidbach, the director of the Haeckel House in Jena, has underlined the essential methodological differences of Haeckel's typology and Darwinian phylogenesis (Breidbach 2002). Goethe had coined the term of morphology and Haeckel's creation was a synthesis of ahistorical ideas of Goethe and the radical scheme of Darwin. As a contribution to Darwin's gradualism, Haeckel constructed a preformed 'ontogeny' to uncover the real system of nature. Haeckel thought that adopting the classification schemes of Cuvier and transferring them directly into a phylogenetical framework would be lineating Darwin's idea. Darwin's was a history of nature, Haeckel's was a natural history. If Darwin had a "dangerous idea", the methodological vagueness in the conceptual deduction of the Haeckelian morphology had more annihilative view on races and the handicapped than the "social Darwinists".
The “recapitulation of the souls” a'la Ernst Haeckel boosted racist sentiments. The strident Haeckelian legacy of popularization had a long shadow although it was scientifically outdated. Haeckel’s followers put his slogan "politics is applied biology" (Milner 1993, p. 207) to action in various countries, the phrase is not peculiar to Rudolf Hess. Harry Federley represents a Finnish case for this application.The five letters from Harry Federley to Ernst Haeckel have not been described before, and Federley belonged to the Leistungsmenschen: to the breed who accomplish. The Finnish genetics was born seizing the heel of its twin discipline, eugenics.
In 1910 Jena was the sacred city for the day's naturalist with its infamous empiricists. What appealed to Harry Federley particularly was the "prophet" of the all-embracing naturalism called Monism. The first professor of genetics in Finland called to mind his choice in 1944 in his memoirs entitled "A year in Jena" (published in 1946, translation from Swedish by the author/Ojala):
"There had anatomist Oscar Hertwig year 1875 by his examination of eggs of sea-urchins declared, that fertilisation consist of a union of the male and female core. There had short thereupon botanist Strassburger done an equivalent observation with plants, and thereby had the elucidation for one of the fundamental processes of life come closer. There had also anatomist Gegenbaur, as all Palmén pupils had learned to esteem, worked as young docent. But first and foremost, there had Ernst Haeckel effected his lifework, so vital for the breakthrough of evolution and for its popularisation for wider spheres. Haeckel had, by the time, drawn back from his activity as academic educator and had been superseded by Ludwig Plate. Also he was a man who had fought for evolution and Haeckel's Monistic world view, and who had written a very widely read and unquestioned work concerning Darwin's selection principle. The third edition of this work had appeared year 1908 and by myself I had studied it with a special interest, while it had a great importance for the research that then engrossed me." (Federley 1946a pp. 159-194).
The sophisticated word eugenics ("the right to be well-born"; 'eu' for better genetics) had been a phrase coined by Charles Darwin's another cousin Sir (Sirius) Francis Galton (1822-1911) in 1883 in Inquiries into Human Faculty. Galton's classic volume Hereditary Genius was published as early as in 1869. (The curiosity that Charlie's cousin viewed as hereditary "genius" had to do with his own family, having a family tree decorated with illustrious ancestry. The family tree of the Royal family of the time had a non-stop line of names to Adam and Eve exhibited for the visitors.)
Galton was an early statistician, who invented e.g. the fingerprinting method, and was the first chairman of the Eugenics Education Society since 1908. Galton's infertile marriage has received attention (Reilly 1991 p. 2), but Harry Federley had his family with him already during his year in Jena.
Federley became familiar with the eugenics enterprise during his year in Jena, and attended e.g. the meeting of eugenicists in Dresden in August 1911. At the same year, Federley was also approved as a member in the Internationale und Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene[4]. Officially, eugenics as a movement had existed in Germany since 1905 when this Society for Racial Hygiene was established in Berlin. If Adolf Hitler boasted that he was the member number seven in his party, Federley's host Ludwig Plate was the member number five in the Society (Weindling 1989, p. 128, 142). During the Weimar years, German eugenicists merely prepared ground for putting eugenic principles into effect. It was only when the Nazi's assumed power that the race hygiene became central to state policy (Allen 2002).
Federley’s host Ludwig Plate belong to the inner circles of the German eugenic movement and had promoted the constitution of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie in 1904. The first issue had been dedicated to August Weismann and Ernst Haeckel, despite their apparent contradiction regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie was the leading publication of the German-speaking eugenicists, which was digested also in the Nordic countries. Weismann was also named honorary chairman of the German Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, when it was formed in 1905 - along with Haeckel (Proctor 1988, p. 33) - indicating the scientific omnipotence of the political movement.
Plate helped Federley to begin a habit of publishing book reviews and moth-works in the Archiv. In the 14 letters from Plate to Federley from 1910 to 1937, the race hygiene, however, is not directly discussed. Mattila concludes in his dissertation (1999 p. 45), that there is no certainty, whether Federley was an official, registered, member of the German Society for Racial Hygiene. At least his missionary role, especially in Sweden, was presumed, however[5].
In 1911 Federley also travelled from Jena to Paris, where he lectured in the Conference internationale de Génétique –society (Hietala 1997).
Federley recalls in his memoirs that what casted dark clouds to his fortunate year in Jena, was the battle of authority that Ludwig Plate and Ernst Haeckel were having with each other before his arrival. Plate frequently tried to explain to him, why he had started the process that embittered the last decade of Ernst Haeckel, whereas Haeckel never brought the issue forth to him in the long conversations. As a result, Haeckel had been cast out of the rededicated museum bearing one of the names Haeckel had coined by himself (phylum, phyla) and which was meant as a monument for his life.
The portraits of Goethe, Lamarck, Darwin - and Haeckel - were on display in their natural size in the Phyletic Museum, and Plate could not help bowing to Haeckel’s direction with a sarcastic smile when introducing the building for Federley. Both of the authorities suffered from Ludwig Plates coercive means, when Plate got isolated in his experiments and Haeckel got depressed in the isolation that was the reverse side of his fame anyway. During his later visits in Jena, Federley always spent the nights in the place of his old host. After Plate’s death in 1937 Jena had lost its old glamour and the memory of Federley’s youth had waned (1946a p. 192).
It is surprising that in the second letter from Federley to Haeckel (dated the 13th of February 1912), Federley places himself as a co-victim beside Haeckel: "Es ist zuvor richtig, dass ich nicht durch Ihre Vermittlung den Arbeitsplatz im Phyletischen Museum bekam, da Sie ja formell nicht mehr Direktor des Museums sind." The letter seems to indicate that Harry Federley had even seeked a job from the Phyletic Museum of Jena, but in vain.
There had been no major theoretical or intellectual strife involved between Haeckel and Plate. The two men had the same intresses and aims, but seem to have possessed very opposite mentalities. (Federley does not understand, though, Plates bad name as a pedantic bureaucrat.) Federley had his discussions with Haeckel in Ernst' old working room that was now in his own use. This was one of the very rooms where Haeckel had been erecting his exhibition and that originally had so provoked Ludwig Plate, the prefect, due to the fact that he did not have the keys for them. In these circumstances Plate got infuriated after Haeckel had compared Plate, as his successor and professor of zoology, to Shakespeare's bloodsucking Jew, Shylock: “’Sie bestehen wohl nicht wie Shylock auf Ihren Schein’… that went too far for the strongly anti-Semitic Plate”, recalled Federley (1946a p. 188).[6]
Main stream Monism argued that the weed called Judaism was in charge for the introduction of transcendental dualism into the Western society in its accelerating decline. Jews – the inventors of the monotheistic God and Christianity - were the explicit scapegoat. Jews were the great symbol of man's rebellion against nature. Jews were the source of the decadence. And the old Haeckel sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary society.
Genocide was not yet openly exhorted for the people of the book, but Haeckel justified anti-Semitism by charging Jews themselves for persecution's eternal return. It was all in the name of science, and far more extreme and physically threatening than the harangues of Houston Stewart Chamberlain with his program of Aryan Christianity (Gasman 1998, 2002). Federley holds the record of the most active Finnish correspondent of Haeckel. He was not, however, such a zealot as a disciple than were the French authors Jules Soiree and George Vacher de Lapouge, who demanded the destruction of the Jews more openly. As a contrast, Federley was an admirer of the depressed Jewish author Felix Auerbach during his year in Jena (Federley 1946a).
In the Helsinki University central archive, one was introduced by the archivist-in-chief Eero Vallisaari (the leading investigator of J.A. Palmén) to 80 pages of unpublished interview material on Harry Federley. It was collected in the year 1951 by a young lady to provide for her studies and it was proofreaden by Harry Federley himself. Federley died, suddenly, in 1951 however, an the material never came out. The interview was done in multiple occasions and is full of anecdotes and sarcastic malign of the other academic operators both in Finland and abroad. Federley emphasizes that he never was an antisemite and describes his studies just prior to Hitler's assume of power in Harnack-Haus, Berlin, with Richard Goldschmidt and also his two Jewish assistents Stern and Mathild Herz, that fled from Germany, too. Federley goes on to describe also Albert Einstein's lectures in the Harnack-Haus. Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft invited Federley to work in Berlin, but it was Goldschmidt personally, who wanted Federley to run his own lab when he had his "sabattical" year in Japan. Federley openly confesses only his strict atheism and his dislike of socialism in this last of his memoirs. Federley says he became to know Goldschmidt in 1911 and states that his wife was still "religious" during their year in Jena in 1911.) Federley claims he was the first Finnish scientist to visit the Soviet Union after the revolution in a conference - and Goldschmidt was another of the two German men to take the challenge of the trip. It seems that this brave journey made the two men more close to each other. He claims that the Monism became a distaste for him while in Jena when he saw the poor attendance of professors to the Monist meetings. It was becoming too Volkish for the elitist.[7]
Federley outlines the conversations, for which Haeckel’s nervosity and fright of Plate’s sudden appearance was peculiar: "Later on I heard from Haeckel, that my working room was the one which he had prepared as a quiet shelter for the case he would start some new Zoological research. Part of Haeckel's library, as well as a great number of the paintings that Haeckel had drawn during his travels to Ceylon and Malay was stored in the room. Haeckel visited me a few times upstairs and told about these journeys, and first and foremost of his intresses in the history of religion…
My first expression on the great instructor of Darwin's doctrines and author of the natural history of creation was certainly a disappointment. The victorious debater I had looked forward to see was already one of the men the years had bowed down. Yes, he was a gaffer and there was nearly nothing left from his mighty bygone posture…”
Federley mentions that his emotional illusion from Haeckel’s adventurous books was shattered especially to the high peeping voice of Haeckel that sounded like a 76-year old man who had never made through the puberty. Haeckel was more interested on the evolution of religion than for biological questions and lamented that he was too old to write a book on the topic:
“I tried few time to lead the discussion to the biological problems but found little answers. Haeckel lived totally in the past times regarding biology. He was altogether opposed to new viewpoints and evaluations of the big questions caused e.g. by the rediscovered Mendelian law.” (Federley 1946a p. 167).
So in contrast to the praising letters, 30 years later Harry Federley insists that the old Ernst Haeckel was a major disappointment. Federley writes that Haeckel defended his strong Darwinism and Lamarckism (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived as early as in 1744-1829) merely by referring to his adventures and explorations in the tropic. The new generations had not been there and could not understand the richness of the plant and animal kingdom:
“He was completely captured in the theories that were generally accepted in the days of his strength and could not abandon the ideals of his youth.” (Federley 1946a p. 168).
Federley explains how Haeckel had withdrawn to solitude due to unlucky family circumstances at the time of his year in Jena. In contrast to the natural scientist, his humanist opponent, Jenian debater Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926), had recently (in 1908) been given the Nobel prize in literature and was at the height of his fame and vigour. Olsson and Hoßfeld (2003) show how a letter to his biographer Wilhelm Bölsche from 29.12.1908 indicates that Haeckel had mistakenly thought that there had been competition between him and Eucken for the Prize. French and Italian newspapers had announced that Haeckel was to be given the prize. (The daily enthusiastic letters of congratulations and telegrams had been particularly embarrassing.) And so by 1911, the lonesome Haeckel “never had any guests” visiting his “Villa Medusa”, but welcomed only his nearest friends.
Despite Federleys many acknowledgements to Haeckels support against the aggressions of the Russians in the letters, in the memoirs he describes how Haeckel’s lively opponent Rudolf Eucken had a much deeper insight to the actual contemporary politics and elections in Finland. Mr and Mrs Federley were also invited to the crowded Sunday meeting at the Eucken’s family, where also representatives of “the yellow race” were seen.
In 1930, the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations founded a special agency focused on human genetics. Charles Davenport, the director of the Federation, asked Federley personally to sign in to the International Committee on Human Heredity as one of its seven founder members[8]. Federley had acquainted with the Swedish Herman Nilsson-Ehle, one of the seven, during his year in Jena.
The letter from 14th March 1913 implies that Federley seems to have planned a new excursion to Jena prior to the outbreak of the First World War. His memoirs preserve the authentic emotions when confessing that he felt more pity for the bombardments of the idyllic Jena than at the destruction of the larger and more strategic cities.
Haeckel's Biogenetic Law was hailed as an unbounded source of evolutionary information in the attempt to trace back the early periods of evolutionary history. Even the insects were assumed to pass through a compressed series of stages of the family's descendence in its embryonic development.
The full name of Haeckel’s main expression in English was entitled The riddle of the universe at the close of the nineteenth century. The dismissal of Gregor Mendel (1823-1884; Johann before the monastery) with his thousands of experiments and "dishonesty" had been fatal. New characteristics do not pop up ex nihilo in peas. (The work still could not be reproduced with the apomictic hawkweed according to the referees.) The basic Mendelian riddles were hidden the same critical time span that Haeckel was out (from Generalle Morphologie der Organismen in 1866 and Welträtsel in 1899).
The first German works in genetics appeared at the time of Federley’s year in Jena. Both Erwin Baur's Einführung in die experimentelle Vererbungslehre, Richard Goldschmidts's Einführung in die Vererbungswissenschaft, and Valentin Haecker's Allgemeine Vererbungslehre were published in the early 1911. Federley's host Ludwig Plate had been excited on genetics, too. Plate made experiments with mice, and Federley inspired Plate to execute hybridizations with butterflies, after himself (Federley 1946a pp. 163-4).
The political climate in the early 20th century Finland was prone to intimidation in the light of the degenerative emphasis of the evolutionary theory. It is hard to find, however, clear definition of the degeneration. It was more like an axiom, that devoured also the Mendelian laws rediscovered by Carl Correns, Hugo de Vries and Erich v. Tschermak since the start of the bloody 20th century. The botanist A.K. Cajander, later on to become the prime minister of Finland just prior to the Winter War (slandered for unrealistic attitudes and neglection of armament), had reviewed the first part of Hugo de Vries's Der Mutations-Theorie (Leikola 1982b).
The "new trends" in evolutionism, as articulated by the Swedish Vilhelm Leche in the conference of the Nordic scientists in Helsinki in July 1902, had only a transient reference to Mendel (Leche 1903). The "rediscovery" did not draw much interest in the Haeckelian epoch even among practising Finnish biologists before the diligent Harry Federley, however. And Federley had adapted the pessimism built-in to Monism when he stepped in.
The first detailed presentation of Mendel's rule was brought to awareness among the Finnish students of nature by T.H. Järvi as late as in 1906. By the year 1906-1912 also a flood of the first popular presentations of the consistent descendence theory in Finnish emerged outside the mere newspapers. Harry Federley had lectured on genetics as early as in 1909, and during the first two decades of the century he was almost a solitary figure in the Finnish field.
As stated, Plate had fought for the Monism before the World War interrupted in its progress. Technically, however, Plate had emphasized the natural selection in the course of evolution (according to Federley in 1944). This is not self-evident, as the selection principle was under a heated dispute among biologist still half a century after Darwin’s Origin had appeared (in 1859). Usually Darwin’s name was hallowed for the suggestion of the common descent in general.
Natural selection was analogous to the “unifying” theory in the post-modern physics as an omnipotent mechanism. Yet, what sounds as the most sophisticated idea today, remained controversial and comparable to Darwin’s pangenesis by the time. Wilhelm Johannsen derived his term “gene” ('gen', in the Danish) from De Vries' pangen, which did refer to pangenesis.
Darwin's forgotten suggestion was de facto based on the Lamarckian view of inheritance of acquired characters. Pangenesis stated that all of the somatic gemmulae particles circulating freely in the organism directed the development and were liable to external factors. The descendants of man (and Darwin's dog, whose burned furrow was being observed) included a blend of the gemmulae of the parents. The older Darwin was, the more he was inclined to think that external conditions can directly exercise an effect on development. Darwin's theory of inheritance was absolute rubbish, as could easily be shown even by the contemporary mathematicians like Jenkins in 1967. Vepsäläinen (1982) describes:
"If the new adaptive feature were to be preserved, new gemmulae for that trait should be produced at the rate of dilution of gemmulae in the offspring. The idea is caught best my mixing 'new adaptive colour' (say, red) to colourless water 1:1 and hoping that the colour will be maintained 'generation after generation' of mixing."
Darwin ate most of his specimens. Even if the ”delicate arrangement” with Alfred Wallace (1823-1913) is excused, Darwin did not refer to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Darwin had difficulties in graduating from any discipline. Darwin’s fame rested on contribution of others (Gould) even in ”Darwin’s finches” recycled in almost every high school textbooks of biology.
It was Haeckel rather than the decorated Darwin who opened the Gordion knots by manufacturing new terms one after another. The father of Monism had established himself by coining the fundamental terms phylum, phylogeny, ontogeny, protist, ecology, palingenesis, cenogenesis, gastrula, blastula, morula etc.
The man not only arranged existing forms of animal kingdom in a series proceeding from the simple to the complex, inserting imaginary entities where discontinuity existed – but also gave embryonic phases names corresponding to the stages in his so-called evolutionary series. Heterochrony (evolutionary changes in the sequence of developmental events) was the term at the culmination points of the cherished and recycled - yet awkwardly biased – embryo drawings. When lower organisms were difficult to categorize both to the animal and plant kingdom, the protists were born (Federley 1914a). Ecology referred to "the relation of the animal both to its organic as well as to its inorganic environment". And so forth. It is a painful insight into the dynamics of the biological discipline that Haeckel's terms are the ones that stayed.
Federley continues in his memoirs:
“I travelled with my family to Jena in the autumn 1910. My meaning was to finish there a work, that had occupied me over a decade and which was originally meant to be published as licenciate specimen. This research had to do with studying the evolution of butterfly species from encysting and egg to the adulthood , and the goal was to show that Haeckel’s biogenetic basic-law was valid for the descendence of the stages of larvaea. This law postulates, as is known, that individual in its development in general, though also in brief, recapitulates species’ historical evolution. The different stages of butterfly species, sharply distinguished from each other in the variation of skin, were very different from each others. The work also dealt with describing, as carefully as possible, the colouring, warts, bristles, and fur of the developmental stages in order to make a comparison between these stages and the stepwise changes and events. If the Biogenetic law was correct, one could anticipate that the newly hatched larvaeae would be in all respect primitive and in every skin variation more and more specialized characters were presumed.”
Harry Federley, therefore, did not try to reproduce the identical morphology of the different vertebrate embryos, but tried to apply the Biogenetic Law to lepidopterology. And so he wandered in excursions in both homeland and abroad, hunting butterflies (or flutterbies, as once recalled!).
Federley worked by the assumption of recapitulation in moth larvae since his masters thesis and the turn of the century as Anto Leikola, the grand old historian of the Finnish biology, has described (Leikola 1982b). An extensive comparison of larvae of different stages could not provide any phylogenetic conclusions. In a frustration with the dogmatic paradigm per se, Federley investigated the mere impact of the ambient temperature to make full use of his large collection of living material. The young empiricist kept the cocoons in different temperatures and observed the impact to the colour and structure of the wing scales of the full-grown moths and gathered enormous amount of data for the time with different developmental stages of butterflies from egg-stage to capsule-stage. As a resounding result, Federley’s dissertation (“Lepidopterologische Temperatur-Experimente”) in 1905-6 was the first Finnish doctoral thesis, where purely experimental means were applied to a zoological problem (Leikola 1982b, 1983).
In many instances, Federley is displayed as unprejudiced and ambitious researcher. It is difficult to categorize him simply as a student of Plate, because of the facilities he envisioned already by his time in Jena. Haeckel had the role of an ideological inspirator for him, but Weissmans fame and even the anti-Lamarckian position in his experimental setups were free chase to challenge.
Luonnon ystävä ("Friend of nature" or "Nature lover"), the leading (that is, the only) Finnish nature journal of the time, was inaugurated in 1895 in association with the new Linnaean Vanamo society. Harry Federley had written his first article to it in 1905. The lengthy and technical article had to do with the butterfly experimentation and it acknowledged Weissman’s work on seasonal dimorphism since 1875. Federley belittled how Weissman could not apply a gradual temperature gradient to the larvae or shells, but used either a cellar or greenhouse, rather. Weissman had considered the developmental temperature merely a trigger, and Federley concludes by devoting room for Fischer’s controversial recapitulational trials claiming that the cold temperature inhibited the development to the post-glacial outlook. Evolutionary ideas had been tested with butterflies ever since Alfred Wallace, who had co-authored the selection principle with Darwin but was dismissed with his occult speculations in his old age. Besides, collecting butterflies was a very popular hobby among the Finns one hundred years ago and Federley had written to urge the readers to observe uncommon variants and to carefully write down the conditions where the modified specimens were found.
Leikola writes: "Federley stated that… [lepidopterology] had also tried to find answers to the question, whether acquired characters may become hereditary, in other words, solutions to the controversy between neo-darwinism and neo-lamarckism, which was quite actual at that time. Federley did not mention Mendelism in this article." (Leikola 1982b).
Federley's Jenian memoirs from 1944 seem to draw a somewhat anachronistic picture of his way of thinking at the time:
“The celebrated zoologist of Freiburg, August Weismann, had in his studies in 1880’s dedicated one of his descendence-theoretical studies to the evolution of the larvaea of cluster-butterflies and stated certain thesis’ regarding the appearance of colouring marks and their meaning. These thesis’ were considered as universally applicable for all caterpillars of the butterflies. As a convinced supporter of the Darwinian selection principle – the slogan “allmighty selection” was coined by him – he seeked to explain the different pigmentations as purely a product of selection but these were according to my observations from my large material not possible. Weismann had in my opinion, furthermore, ignorantly in his declarations declined to certain lamarckistic tendenses, that he of course wished to fight against with soul and heart. All of this was my aim in a thorough study with a numerous species, that belonged to a bigger and continuous family, to investigate and clarify.” (Federley 1946a p. 161-2).
Federleys endeavour with the Biogenetic Law (transforming itself to a cross-scientific myth from psychoanalysis to criminal anthropology and scout movement at the time!) ended up as a vain pursuit, but Federley did not say that aloud at the time. The work it was comparable to the usefulness of the alchemist: No gold was formed, but instruments and methodologies were advanced in the proceedings.
Federleys roads did not proceed via mutation-school or via fair Mendelism but through the “Entwicklungsgeschicte” (embryology or developmental biology). This was also the road taken by the American Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), who was over ten years older than the young Federley and who had had his academic year in excursion in Naples in 1895-96, near Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) and Hans Driesch (1867-1941) (Leikola 1982b, 1983; Allen 1984).
Federley's interest turned to genetics as he studied the new literature in the original language. Already before his departure, he had read Wilhelm Johannsen's volume Elementen der exakten Erblichkeitslehre (1909). Federley states that doubts regarding the universality of “the extreme Darwinism” were raised as he read Wilhelm Johannsens Elemente der exakten Erlibchkeitslehre, a classic from 1909. The more severe doubts regarding the Biogenetic Law were raised as Federley read Johannsens Falska analogier from 1914, a piece of harsh criticism against Haeckel’s universal law. Federley's review (1918) did not question the person of Haeckel, however. Mainly the person of Henri Bergson, the Jew selling his creative "élan vital", drew attention as a "false prophet". (Bergson is the forgotten rebel against the idea of chance in the course of evolution.)
There was not any major need for the selection to justify the claim of speciation and evolution. (Even Charles Darwin did refer to certain kinds of large-scale variations, calling them "sports"; Allen 1984.) Mutationism emphasized saltational changes and new species could be born by one mutation, in the dreams of de Vries. In 1907, Harry Federley sent a roaring letter as an assault to an article on mimicry, and expressed his hostility against the speculation of natural selection. There were much stronger horses to be harnessed for evolution. A century after the birth of Darwin and 50 years after the Origin, Federley placed his thumb on the sexual selection without any hesitation. Kari Vepsäläinen (1982) paid attention to the timing and explained: "The point is that the articles, instead of providing scientific critique, were written in a ridiculing style which, that is true, was at the time readily accepted among the geneticists."
Markku Mattila’s dissertation, published in Finnish in 1999, meant the first systematic monograph on the early race hygiene in Finland. Mattila describes how the most important discipline studying heredity prior to Mendelism had been biometry that was based on Francis Galton’s mathematical findings that operated on the level of statistics. Not until Mendelian results had empirical assays been possible. Harry Federley followed the path of Wilhelm Johannsen in critizising statistics: ”a lie, big lie – statistics” (Federley 1918a, p. 6).
Federley wrote in 1944, that he tried few times to change the topic with his private discussions with Haeckel to the newly found Mendelian concepts in vain. For Federley, environmental factors were secondary when compared to hereditary characteristics. Only thus could a permanent improvement be achieved in the struggle against degeneration.
If T. H. Huxley was the “Bulldog” of Darwinism, then Haeckel was its “Rotweiler”. Anto Leikola names Haeckel as the "apostle Paul" of Darwin, yet even Huxley was an optimistic advocate of saltational and discontinuous leaps. I think Aldous Huxley catched more of the anxieties of his grandfather in the sarcastic Brave New World (1932) than his brother Julian Huxley (the president of the UNESCO) in his Modern synthesis (1942).
The early Mendelism thought that evolution proceeds by discontinuous leaps, the early biometricians stressed natural selection operating on small variations. The A-B-O blood groups[9], hemophilia, varieties of eye colour etc. were found to be inherited in a Mendelian fashion by 1910. In excitement of the Mendelian heredity, also complex traits and even social behaviour like alcoholism, schizophrenia, manic depression, criminality, rebelliousness, artistic sense, pauperism, racial differences, inherited scholarship and its converse, feeble-mindedness were thought to be governed even by one or two genes. The attractive Mendelism was "experimental" and quantitative and its exaggeration outweighed the more cautious biometry. The recessivity and synergism of the genes was known, but it was not underlined to the public (Mattila 1999 p. 42). Likewise, the advertizements, boldly assessing that the problems could be done away with in a few generations, persisted although most biologists must have known that defective and recessive genes could not be eliminated even with the most intense artefactual selection. (Allen 1985, p. 42-46, 50-72; Sapp 1987, XII, 33; Leikola 1983; Vepsäläinen, 1982). In other words, most of the biologists were cowards with their doubts in the face of indoctrination and kept silent.
The Finnish evolution galloped ahead with dead horses in front of the carriage. Darwin merely gave the first causal and mechanistic excuse for consistent naturalism. Richard Dawkins is the professor for the public understanding of science at the Oxford University, UK. The blind watchmaker with its "biomorphs" drawn by Desmond Morris in its cover, held the number one position on the London Observers’ paperback non-fiction best-seller list for the first six months of 1988. Dawkins was referring to the historical controversy over natural theology between the arguments of William Paley (1743-1805) and David Hume (1711-1776) and confessed the liberation: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose… An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (Richard Dawkins 1986, p. 6; emphasis in the original).
Federley wrote in 1944, that he tried few times to change the topic with his private discussions with Haeckel to the newly found Mendelian concepts, but in vain. For Federley, environmental factors were secondary when compared to hereditary characteristics. Only thus could a permanent improvement be achieved in the struggle against degeneration.
Federley introduced himself especially to the British William Bateson's Mendel's Principles in Heredity (2nd ed. 1909) that he called a “goldmine for a geneticist”, while in Jena. And Harry Federley bears his witness (1946a p. 164): “My interest for the new discipline was stimulated more, when the first three German textbooks in genetics came out while I stayed in Jena. The first and even the best by a botanist and medicinist Erwin Baur, the other two by zoologists Goldschmidt and Haecker. Also Plate had begun extensive crossbreeding experiments with mice in Jena. My frequent visits in Plate’s ‘Mausoleum’, as he jokingly called the room, stimulated my interest in genetics to higher levels. Plate even started a trial with the butterflies, but he had neither time nor patience to finish these and so he abandoned the specimens shortly. So it happened, that during my visit in Jena, meant purely as an excursion on zoology, I published my first genetic investigation with the butterfly genus Pygaera…
From the Biogenetic work, however, nothing came out. I still store in my hiding places big packages of colourful, minute drawings and detailed descriptions of larvaeae; series from the first developmental stages to the last of them, which certainly possess value for descriptive zoology, but that come from a different planet to the general biology. These scrutinies never became public, but drifted as curiosities in a natural historical archive. There they serve the task of exhibiting, how can a man lavish his time in a hobby, that never leads to anything.”
With the advent of Mendelian genetics, Federley exploited the adult butterflies for crossbreeding experiments. The contribution to the Vererbungslehre began in 1907 by hybridization experiments on some Pygaera species, and the jargon of genetics was adopted by Federley already in the preliminary publication. The F1-generation did not differ much from one of the parents and also the rehybridizations were difficult to distinguish from the parent species (Leikola 1982b). The intermediate distribution of properties in the genera under Federleys microscope was disappointing in the light of the classic Mendelian rules (with the exception of a P. anachoreta -mutant bearing a white patch; Luther 1952).
It seems that in this phase, Enzio Reuter (1867-1951), entomologist, acarologist and the professor of zoology gave Federley a hint to study the chromosomes with his Jenian Zeiss-microscope. Reuter was another correspondent of Ernst Haeckel and a successor of J. A. Palmén (1845-1919), whose letters to Haeckel are also now being unearthed recently from the Haeckel House archives. Both mitosis and meiosis had been described already in 1870-1880, as well as the specificity of the chromosome count. Reuter had studied chromosomes in various insects and mites (Leikola 1982b, 1983). The individuality and permanence of the chromosomes still remained a salient mystery, however.
In the memoirs, Reuter is not mentioned. Federley just began the opening shot of genetics in Finland with the larvae of the Pygaera species which he had crossbred and which
“had yielded peculiar and interesting results that I could not neglect to ponder. These could not, namely, be harmonized with the Mendelian law. It did not work out before I discarded the Biogenetic law away and instead cast myself wholly to the many interesting problems of genetics.” (Federley 1946a p. 163-164).
Soon Federley came across to note some of the significance of chromosomes (Greek chroma, colour; soma, body) in heredity. This investigation of the chromosomes in the hybrids ("bastards") of the butterflies underlined the contribution of them to the inheritance. It could be even compared to the studies that elucidated the role of DNA as a carrier of genetic information: In Federley's "bastards" breeded from Pygaera anachoreta, curtula and pigra, all chromosomes of both of the parents continued their independent existence, and in the rehybridization one or another set of the chromosomes went into conjugation, depending on the parent species used for the backcrossing (Federley 1917; Leikola 1982b).
The data for the Federleys classic paper on Pygaera was harvested while he stayed in Jena although it was not published until 1913. The Danish botanist and geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen, who coined the term "gene" in 1909, and also other main heredital concepts with Bateson, praised Federley's "splendid achievement". Later on, it seems that mainly the Finnish historians such as Luther (1952), Leikola (1980, 1982b, 1983), Hietala (1996) justify the link between morphology and chromosomes in the Federley 1913 as a milepost, which opened the doors to Federleys well-earned reputation. Abroad, Federley the Finn seems to have been forgotten to obscurity. The fusion between the Mendelian theory and cytological findings about chromosomes per se is still acknowledged to bear enormous significance (Allen 1984).
The expansive study on the chromosomes of butterfly hybrids came out in an annual volume of the leading genetical journal Zeitschrift für induktive Abstammungs- und Vererbungslehre and gained many references.
The work could have gained even a more essential place in the history of genetics, if the "Morgan Raiders" (Calvin B. Bridges (1889-1938), Herman J. Muller (1890-1967), Alfred H. Sturtevant (1891-1970) and Thomas H. Morgan himself[10]), so despised by Trofim Lysenko, would not have reported as convincing proofs as Federley on the connection of chromosomes to heredity with their fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Morgan was after the macromutations by the way of Hugo de Vries, and also his approach was empirical. Morgan looked at contempt on speculations and his early Jacques Loeb, an experimental embryologist, introduced him to Drosophila at the same time that Federley began working with the Pygaera (Allen 1978).
If the coupled genes located in the same chromosome, it solved the regular exception to the Mendelian rule of free combination. Besides, the number of the coupled groups was the same as the haploid chromosome count of the given species. Morgan school also explained the gender-associated heredity such as the X-linked white colour of the eye by the XX versus XY –model. Six genes in the X-chromosome were even mapped to a linear order, and non-disjunction with the XXY and X0 –mutants verified the model.
Eventually, Drosophila but not Pygaera was established as the model organism of population genetics and the first geneticist to be awarded the Nobel Prize was not Harry Federley but Thomas Hunt Morgan, in 1933. So, as a conclusion, it can be stated that the centennial of the chromosome-theory of inheritance should be celebrated in 2004 with references to the Morgan school (Portin 2004).
Garland Allen's (1984) introduction to a quote from Morgan's speech from 1909 was: "With regard to Mendelism, Morgan felt that by postulating hereditary particles whose actual existence as well as precise nature were unknown, Mendelians fell into the same trap as Haeckel and Weismann: resorting to speculation (especially about ultimate particles) when they lacked concrete evidence…'In the modern interpretation of Mendelism, facts are being transformed into factors at a rapid rate. If one factor will not explain the facts, then two are invoked; if two prove insufficient, three will sometimes work out. The superior jugglery sometimes necessary to account for the results are often so excellently 'explained' because the explanation was invented to explain them and then, presto! explain the facts by the very factors that we invented to account for them… I realize how valuable it has been to us to be able to marshal our results under a few simple assumptions, yet I cannot but fear that we are rapidly developing a sort of Mendelian ritual by which to explain the extraordinary facts of alternative inheritance."
Morgan also showed that only few inherited traits were actually determined by single gene pairs, but were the production of interactive gene groups. In contrast, public spokesmen like davenport hold throughout their lives that many human behavioural traits were judged by single genes. While the experts were withdrawing from the eugenics movement, amateurs found their initiation to it in massive numbers. In 1914, 44 colleges were teaching courses on eugenics, and in 1928 the number was 376 covering 75% of all the US colleges and universities (Allen 1975).
In contrast to Federley, Morgan lost interest for the eugenics and resigned from C.B. Davenport's enterprise because of "unsubstantiated" and "reckless" use of genetics to support social and political conclusions. Morgan, however, made no public statements to express his dissent from the mainstream hype (Allen 1975; 1978).
When the classics of population genetics by Chetverikov, Fisher, Haldane and Wright were published, Federley hammered his own nails to the coffin of "old Darwinistic theories of suspect value" (Federley 1932). Now also Drosophila literature was used by Federley to argue for a sole series of orthogenetic mutations, fired by a sudden change of the environment, in explaining palaentological series (Vepsäläinen 1982). (Federley's last word against "mimicry" appeared in 1941, but I do not have the access to the article.)
In the letters discovered from the Haeckel House, Federley familiarizes Haeckel with his chromosome classic before its publication and underlines his compliments by stating that it was started in Jena:
“In the near future I hope I can send You a certain work that I began at the Phyletic museum and concluded here in Helsinki. It had to do with the chromosome relationships in the Pygaera-species and in some of their hybrids in spermatogenesis. I believe that the observations and discoveries made there are not without a significance to the conception of the stability of the transitions and bastards. No intermingling of the genotype is produced in them, in contrast to what has been generally assumed, but the genes maintain their perfect independency just as in the Mendelian inheritance. The chromosomes of the species, admittedly, conjugate before spermatogenesis. In the chromosomes alien to the species the chromosome count, as a contrast, becomes the sum of the reduction-divided[11] chromosome number of the parent species. Thus a stable intermediate is born.” (Federley to Haeckel, from 15th February 1913.)
Harry Federley is an example, how rarely can the sound Popperian habits (falsification in addition to verification) solve quasi-science. Bad science can be erected with a great attention, but it is rarely dismissed with equally large audience. Recapitulation was found wanting, but it did not receive the proper disgrace in the (de)popularization. Haeckel formulated natural laws, Federley just tried to apply the laws.
“Jena has become for me, what Mecca is for a Moslem, the holy place of natural sciences”, wrote Federley in his memoirs. Recapitulation and Haeckel’s embryos ought to have come pseudoscience, and Federley is a vivid example on how the brutalizing recapitulation got the platform to be transformed from a universal law of nature to a multidisciplinary myth generalized and disseminated from palaeontology to psychoanalysis and scout movement. The collegiality of the prestigious Monist materialists provided the prerequisites for the century of recycling of the faked drawings of the recapitulationary embryos.
In the light of these awkward old doctrines, race hygienist could boast their current opinion as something fundamentally precise for an as-a-matter-of-fact –popularization. Eugenicists seized the concept of one dominant and one recessive allele per variable characteristics. In genetics, the pleiothropic and multi-parameter functions of the phenotype was observed soon, but the eugenics usually cherished the simple Mendelism. Needless to say, that the simple Mendelian calculations for the colour of the eyes or for the curled hair have been used until the new millennium because of their straightforwardness in examinations.
One of the etymological Odysseias of the biosciences at the relevation of the low number of genes (that is, the great number of splice isoforms and the importance of genetic interactions) in the emerging genome initiatives, I think, is the phrase of "central dogma". (DNA makes RNA makes protein.) Richard Milner, in his Encyclopaedia of Evolution, referred to an interview of Francis Crick (codiscoverer of the structure of DNA) by Robert Shapiro in his Origins - A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth:
"Astoundingly, the great scientist cheerfully admitted that, at the time, he had not known what "dogma" meant. Later, a friend explained to him that a dogma must be accepted and believed on faith, without question. 'I didn't know it meant that,', said Crick. 'I thought it meant a hypothesis, some arbitrary thing which was laid down for no particularly good reason. Otherwise it would have been called the 'Central Hypothesis,', and then nobody would have made all this fuss.'" (Milner 1993, p. 77.)
I wonder, if this simplistic gene-from-the-box popularization poses a putative hindrance on understanding the extensiveness of RNA-splicing and has contributed to the hesitation of the public trust regarding cultivation of the GMO-plants (gene manipulated organism). Genes got a mythical nuance, although they are the prime example of something functioning in its interactive context.[12]
It was Harry Federley who eventually transported the original copy of Gregor (Johann) Mendel’s neglected study “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden” to Finland from a second-hand bookshop in European travels. As far as the urban campus legend goes.
After returning to Finland from Jena, Federley was invited to become the secretary of the Finnish Academy of Sciences (in 1912). Federley had already been appointed as a docent of zoology before the Jenian training, but due to his own petition, in 1915 the readership was changed into the novelty of genetics that had been introduced into Helsinki University's curriculum. From 1916 to 1919 Federley worked mainly in Stockholm (Hietala 1996 p. 212), and he could always insinuate that he went back to Sweden if not properly funded in Finland.
The Florin Commission was a spin off from the Swedish Literature Society and was established in December 1911 when Harry Federley was returning from Jena. It consisted of eight members, five of which were physicians, and its leading troika were Ossian Schauman (chairman, professor of internal medicine), Jarl Hagelstam (MD, lecturer in neurology) – and the young geneticist Harry Federley (secretary). Other Finnish predecessors or contemporaries as eugenicists who are worth mentioning had been e.g. Robert Ehrström, George von Wendt and Albert Palmberg.
The mission was to resolve once for all, whether the Finnish Swedes were degenerating or not. Behind the speculation was the fact, that the population was diminishing and the political, cultural and economic power were vanishing.
The notion of Finns as Mongols remained in Swedish encyclopaedias as late as to the 1950'ies (Hämäläinen 1985)! This despite the fact that the peculiar confusion with Laplanders began to be systematically refuted even in Germany soon after Finland gained her independence in 1917.
During the 13th century, Finland had been joined to the kingdom of Sweden. Between 1809 and 1917, Finland was annexed to the Russian Empire as an autonomous Grand Duchy. The administrations had not been radically transformed from the pre-1809 Swedish rule during the 19th century, however. The official language was Swedish, and also the cultural elite was Swedish-speaking. The majority of the schools were Swedish-speaking, and the debate about using Finnish in University teaching did not begin on a major scale until the 1920’ies.
Despite of this, in Sweden the 19th century meant the decline of the abstraction of the Finns towards the malign in the Gobinean - and Haeckelian – heritage. Finns have aroused interest among anthropologists and linguists since the 18th century. (Even today, the Finno-Ugric group of languages is spoken by only twenty-three million people.)
Swedish-speaking establishment had ruled two of the four ranks in the old estate based Diet of the Grand Duchy of Finland (the bourgeois and the gentry, apart from the clergy and the peasants). In 1906, the one citizen one vote -principle in the new unicameral Parliament diminished the power of the Swedish-speaking elite under the Czar to a mere 12%.
Finland gained independence on 6th of December 1917, in the repercussions of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Within a few months, a bloody Civil War between the right-wing and bilingual Whites and the socialist – and Finnish-speaking - Reds broke out. In the Finnish Constitution in 1919 and in a special law in 1922, both Finnish and Swedish were acknowledged as official languages in the country, yet the language conflict persisted.
Helsinki University was founded in 1640 in Turku, but was moved to Helsinki in 1828. It was joined by two new universities, the Swedish-language Åbo Akademi in Turku (since 1919) and the Finnish-language Turun Yliopisto in the same city (!) a year later. Romanticism caused a Fennomanic movement that demanded rights for the Finnish language, and the intensifying conflict divided the society into two factions. During the 1920’s Federley wrote to a friend in the Max Planck –institute: “If the Helsinki University will be Finnished, 1200 Swedish-speaking undergraduates are going to move to Sweden” (Hietala 1997).
At the individual level, sticking to the Swedish language was not always essential. Finnish identity was most important and many Swedish-speaking families changed their family names to Finnish ones and sent their children to Finnish-speaking schools. The division in the society, however, is usually discussed in the context of language. Harry Federley is a key figure manifesting its forgotten race hygienic aspect.
Harry Federley prompted publicly, that the Finnish franchise should be reduced on a scientific and social basis (1919), to the best of the emerging new nation. In practice this means that Federley demanded that Finland should give up democracy for the cause of biology. (Federley did not state explicitly, however, that the political power of the working-class should be diminished for the cause of Swedish speakers.)
In 1913, Finns were given an opportunity to follow a lecture of German Lundborg, then a docent of psychiatry, on trends in eugenics and in genealogical research. Eugenics began to be exhorted as a social duty. During the 1910’s the most active supporters of eugenics and sterilization were the chief medical officers of mental health, directors of reformatories, child welfare liables, and some representatives of the temperance movement, as professor Marjatta Hietala has shown (1996 p. 206).
About 23,000 Swedish-speaking individuals were examined before 1916. Data were accumulated on height, pigmentation (eyes, hair, skin etc.), health (with a focus on mental diseases and hereditary factors, tuberculosis, inability to breastfeeding, teeth etc.), housing, nutrition and emigration.
An equivalent project was launched by the Finnish Academy of Science in 1924, conducted by Finnish-speaking Yrjö Kajava (1884-1929). Kajava was a professor of anatomy and had suggested a broad research project already in 1914 to wipe out the malign regarding the mongolid association in the repercussions of the Finnenfrage. The research was carried out in all the provinces this time and reached also the Lapps and the Swedish-speaking population in Finland. The somatic characteristics collected embraced 15,000 people and the effort of about hundred students and candidates of medicine. It reflected the interest in the racial qualities in the repercussions of the awkward comprehension of the Finns abroad. Kajava, however, died before the project ended and the quality of the research remained disappointing. Mattila (1999 p. 209) has shown how Federley had knocked out Lundborg's suggestion to invite also Kajava to a joint Nordic anthropological enterprise in a letter[13].
Another Florin-campaign took place as a contribution to the Swedish National-Type Exhibition in 1919 in Uppsala. Herman Lundborg arranged this show and the Florin Commission sent photographs of the Swedish race in Finland. There was a plan to transfer the whole exhibition over to Finland, but the political heat in the language conflict did not permit the action. Federley was not pleased with the expensive photographical data on national servicemen, because the material had not been thoroughly "racially pure" (Mattila 1999). The dogmatic drawings of ears and faces of the races had a long shadow. The Mongols had had four levels of countenances above them in Haeckel's ideal figures.
The Society for Improving Public Health in Swedish Finland (Davenport’s “Eugenic Society”) was established in March 1921. It was larger than the Florins’ and took shape under the guidance of Schauman and Federley, whereas Hagelstam was only a minor contributor now. Besides, Ossian Schauman died soon afterwards in 1922. Florin Commission continued and was designated as a scientific section, but in Samfundet Harry Federley proceeded to take practical measures in race hygiene. Federley served as Samfundet's chairman from 1937 on (Hietala 1996 p. 213).
Federley’s more political role meant the maintenance of the public health in Finland, but it was explicit to the Swedish-speaking public. To catch the old mouthful recycled in Samfundet pamphlets, “there must be no bad Swedish men and women in this country”. If the quantity was in decrease, the quality had to in increase. In the beginning, the Samfundet adopted a policy of positive eugenics (contra involuntary measures).
The Samfundet had its publications, a number of branch offices, and eighteen district nurse’s posts in the country. It instructed and lectured on the significance of eugenics in matters related to personal, domestic, and school hygiene. The association also distributed 60,000 posters entitled "Our Ten Commandments" that raised racial awareness. Lessons took place in elementary schools, pupils were examined and their homes visited. Self-administered questionnaires were used to argue for a hereditarian basis for social traits. A special consultant clinic for heredity was founded in Helsinki (Federley 1930, 1932). Harry Federley was a scientist and a propagandist.
During the 1920’ies, the scientific section of the Folkhälsan made an attempt to fix scientific marks for the Swedish race by trying to assign blood groups with the aforementioned anthropological data. The outcome did not meet the expectations, however, and the result was negative. Despite the celebration of the general evidence for the evolutionary relationships between species on the basis of blood coagulation, no correspondence between distinctive racial characteristics and blood groups was found by the project led by Olof Sievers. (This did not restrain Federley to use Sievers' studies on the four blood groups as a parameter to discern the "svensk- och finsktalande befolkningen" apart; Federley 1940).
In the shortage of solid proof from the field research, institutional compensation was seeked for visibility. This was all upon the time when the monumental legislations (compulsory education, prohibition, freedom of religion, military service, land reforms etc.) were being made in the newborn republic. Also a campaign for a private Swedish institute for heredity research under the leadership of Harry Federley was launched.
Federley started his lectures in the Eugenics society of Sweden in 1917. Since the founding of the first eugenics institute in the world in 1921, Federley frequently gave lectures in Uppsala on criminality, alcoholism and the study of twins. The solid Nordic reputation was manifested when Federley was invited to be a member of the Academy of Science in Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen (Hietala 1996 p. 213-214; Hietala 1997). Federley was a doctor honoris causa in the universities of Copenhagen and Lund, and a honorary member of the genetic society of Japan (Mattila 1999 p. 45; Luther 1952 p. 10, 13)).
The admired Nordic race was also one of the topics at the International Congress of Eugenics held in New York in 1921. The third congress of Eugenics was attended by the Federley, whose membership was proposed by Herman Lundborg. In 1920 Federley had been invited as a representative member of Finland in the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations. In 1932 the U.S. Executive Committee of the Eugenics Research Association nominated Federley to represent Finland on an Advisory Board of the Eugenical News (Hietala 1996, p. 250).
Herman Lundborg and Harry Federley made an agreement to lobby each others intention to establish a race biological institute in the newspapers of the neighbouring country, which also happened[14]. The first outright race biological institution in the world was established in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden (Hietala 1985, pp. 109). (One is not aware of the etymology of the name of the ancient city from Ultima Thule, however.) In 1907 the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany had changed its name to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, and in 1910 Sweden's Sällskap för Rashygien had become its very first foreign affiliate (Proctor 1988, p. 17).
At the centenary of Harry Federley’s birth (in 1979), the department of genetics in the Helsinki University arranged a symposium. The seminar dealt with the chromosome research and plantbreeding, but the dark side of the golden age of the breeding hype was not handled at the occasion (Hietala 1997). This is unfortunate, because the lectures on race hygiene were the events that attracted the larger crowds in the past.
Harry Federley traded ideas and letters with the leading eugenicists in the Swedish Institute for Race Biology, The Eugenics Record Office in the USA, and the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Federley, however, did not get his own institute in this earlier stage. The time had come in the 1940s, when the activities of the Samfundet Folkhälsan i Svenska Finland expanded under the chairmanship of Harry Federley. An Institute for Research on Heredity was established together with Samfundet's institute for training children. Federley communicated to newspapers that the institute was ought to strengthen the links with Scandinavia, as Hietala and Mattila have investigated. (Huomio suomeksi: Miten instituutti liittyy Niilo Pesosen vetämään ja Yrjö Reenpään tähdittämään rotubiologiseen instituuttiin, jota lanseerattiin SSS:stä käsin Jatkosodan aikana?) On väitetty, että tarkoitus oli aloittaa vammaisten systemaattinen teloitus Suomessakin Saksan tapaan.
An investigation of the British Eugenic Society in the 1920s into the measures of sterilization under preparation in different countries found out that the Nordic countries, United States, and Switzerland were well ahead of the others[15]. Federley explained in popular magazines, how the first law on sterilization in US had been established in 1907 in Indiana, and 23 similar laws had been passed in 15 States and sterilization was practised in 124 institutions by the 1st of January 1921 (Federley 1924; by the time of writing, only 9 US states continued the legislation, though!). If the American laws were pioneering measures, European countries should follow the example. Eventually, one canton in Switzerland passed the first sterilization legislation in Europe (in 1928), and was followed by Denmark (1929), Norway (1934), Sweden (1935), Finland (1935)[16], Estonia (1936), and Iceland (1938) (Haller 1963, pp 21-57; 135-9; Proctor 1988, p. 97; Reilly 1991, p. 109; Mattila 1999, p. 69-70).The Nazi German law of 14th July 1933 ("the Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Sufferers from Hereditary Diseases") seem to have been an extension of the US "Model Sterilization Law" (Allen 2002, citing Stefan Kühl).
Jon Alfred Mjøen, a Norwegian, was an active member of the Permanent International Eugenics Committee that had been founded in 1912 in London. Mjøen asked Federley to organize a consultant race hygienic committee of Finland to contribute to the international proceedings. Mattila (1999 p. 47) elaborates how Federley replied that he was not capable of such a management, but he joined the international committee as an individual member in 1924. The movement turned into International Federation of Eugenic Organisations soon afterwards, and in 1928 the department of genetics in the Helsinki University was accepted as a member, by the recommendation of Herman Lundborg[17].
In 1930, the Federation founded a special agency focused on human genetics. Charles Davenport, the director of the Federation, asked Federley personally to sign in to the International Committee on Human Heredity as one of its seven founder members[18]. Federley had acquainted with the Swedish Herman Nilsson-Ehle, one of the seven, during his year in Jena.
As mentioned, Federley was appointed the first professor of genetics (and as the whole personnel of the Department of Genetics) in Finland in 1923. After Federley and his student and successor Esko Suomalainen successor as extraordinary professors, an ordinary chair in genetics was established in the university of Helsinki as late as in 1972 (Leikola 1982b). Chromosomes were the subject of the newly inaugurated department and Federley continued studying lepidopteran cytogenetics. When the far-famed Richard Goldschmidt travelled to study in Japan in 1929, Federley was invited to run his laboratory from September 1929 to January 1930 in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Biologie in Berlin (Mattila 1999 p. 45).
It was impossible to determine objectively to which race people in Finland belonged by the anthropological methods, and so the race hygienist had no other choice than to operate by propagandist education. As late as in 1940, however, Federley insisted that the Nordic element was more dominant in his own stock and that the purest form of the Nordic type could be found in the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands. The population of the islands wanted to be independent or to separate from Finland to join the country of Sweden. The demilitarization of Åland appears to remain the only actual measure that the League of Nation (forerunner of the United Nations) settled.
The East Baltic race had a lower height, more square facial features, often broad and slightly snub nose, fair but florid skin, and a chin that was not so prominent as that of the Nordic race. By this time, psychological characteristics were not longer classified, although the cultural development (so called) was manifested in the lowest infant mortality of the Swedes (Federley 1940).
Federley and his associates instituted a programme to give awards to healthy Swedish-speaking mothers. Regulations for the fitter family contest stressed both the phenotypic and genotypic quality and seem to have been more efficient than the instructional programs. In practise Federley had to admit, that the German race had lived in Finland so long that it had mixed with the natives:
“It is not possible to follow all regulations to the letter for it would require an anthropological study to be done beforehand. It is in any case obvious that because the East Baltic and Nordic races have lived next to each other for hundreds of years this must have resulted in racial mixtures which are now difficult to trace”. (Federley 1926 pp. 8-10, Federley 1946b, pp. 127-135).
What was left of the "Swedish tribe" when the intense pushing is ignored were merely linguistic and cultural rather than racial ties. Marriage law prohibiting intercourse between the Swedes and the Finns was an impossibility, but the choice of the spouse from a good breed was a grave mission for Federley. The civil servant did popularize the emerging Swedish marriage law in 1923 with enthusiasm, however. The awakening law prohibited marriages of those suffering from venereal diseases or epilepsy. Besides, also a motion on sterilization was presented to the Swedish Parliament at the time (Hietala 1996 p. 211).
In order to qualify for the Mothers award, the woman had to belong to the “Swedish tribe”. She and her husband had to be from healthy Swedish parents, and they had to have at least four children that were 4-17 in age, mentally and physically healthy, cultivated and vital. Between 1920 and 1939, a total of 629 mothers were awarded a diploma and 211 mothers received a monetary award. 1241 mothers had joined the contest (Hietala 1996, p. 209-211; Mattila 1999 p. 220). The education aside the events lobbied strict biological determinism, where the genotype judged the outward properties of an individual.
Genetic determinism ended up being the educated opinion of Federley, Lundborg and the more distant eugenic authorities. The methods were as flawed as the resounding Mendelian theory. Federley stated very clearly, that the goal behind the awards to mothers was eugenic (Federley 1930b). The social status did not matter, ideally, only the biological and social capacity was relevant.
Kalle Väänänen attended the early lectures on heredity of Harry Federley, and his book Heredity and Improving the Human Race (1916, Periytyminen ja ihmissuvun jalostaminen) was a classic model of eugenics treatise. Väänänen gave mass-lectures in Workers House in Finnish and did not acknowledge the more elitist Federley as his teacher. Instead, he mentioned his debt only to the authorities such as Charles Benedict Davenport, Caleb William Saleeby, Wilhelm Schallmayer and Herman Lundborg abroad. Mattila shows that the number of listeners was 700-900 at the beginning and 200-300 at the end of the course. Federley also lectured among the labour movement, but only within the realm of the more minor Swedish speaking branch of it (Mattila 1999, pp. 87-88).
In Finland, the mental testing distinguishing merely the social backround was not the main modus operandi. The literacy was at high level and education as a means for social mobility was accepted and not despised, as contributed by the Lutheran Church that intervened in the secular regiment. Finland was a forerunner e.g. in the right of the women to vote (since 1906 in election for parliament, a year so tragic to the Swedish-speaking rule), and in the early the public school system belittled the IQ-tests. In this phase predating the invention of autistic syndromes, the experts had a need to enlarge the scope in defining individuals as mental retarded. Some directors of the reformatories for the mentally handicapped, however, believed in the all-importance of the intelligence tests and declared that it was a fallacy to think that the mentally disabled could be educated. The "objective" tests contained many factual questions to which those with a limited or non-existent education were unable to find a correct answer. Also the message of various proverbs had to be explained (Hietala 1996, p. 224, 238).
A governmental committee on mental illness (predating Harry Federley's career) estimated in 1906, that there were 11,710 mentally ill and 8,785 feebleminded in the Finnish population of ca. 2.9 million. In the mid 1920'ies, some of the same experts referred to German studies and expressed their intimidation that the coverage could be as high as 10%, however! In 1931, the more official estimation was 29,000 or more. In 1936, the number had not been increased as dramatically as the warnings had stated. It followed the European average, and the raise was merely due to the more scientific methods in making the judgement.
Federley followed the footsteps of Sir Francis Galton himself in giving an alarm on the decrease in the birthrate of the upper social classes. The trend was greater in the Swedish-speaking areas, so what was lost in quantity needed to be compensated for by improved quality (1924b). Poorer strata had the largest families, which was an anathema. Criminals and idiots had the biggest families, emphasized Federley (1924a) in italics. The "seed of deficiency" was discussed with the clear-cut 1/4; 2/4; 1/4 Mendelian rules in Finnish.
Federley participated in the third international congress of the race hygienists in 1932 in New York. He belonged to the vice-presidency of the meeting and was the host in one of the six divisions with his titles "Physiology and reproduction" and "The relationship of health care and disease to eugenics". (During the same journey, Harry Federley also participated in the 6th international meeting of the geneticist that was arranged in a nearby town of Ithaca. Morgan was the President of the conference, whereas Davenport was the Finance Chairman and sent letters to Federley on the occasion.) Federley's wide correspondence reflects his intensive involvement in the international eugenics-movement during all of the 1930's (Mattila 1999 p. 48)[19].
In tragic year 1933 another committee was founded to fight the rising criminality. On the occasion entitled Criminality Prevention Week, in January 1935, the committee arranged public lecture series. The lectures were considered urgent enough to be given in the Helsinki's House of the Estates, in the former Hall of the Nobility, and there was full attendance. One of the main topics was criminality as a biological phenomenon and the display of the medical means to prevent it. Keynote lecturers in the long shadow of Cesare Lombroso’s ativism were Harry Federley and Brynolf Honkasalo, a lawyer, who later in the same year drafted the sterilization bill. Referring to the latest research with twins, Federley stressed that criminality derived in the first place on genotype and only secondarily on circumstances which could only amplify or attenuate the innate nature. (Federley came close to the tradition of natural born criminals, but on this time, he explained that there is no single gene producing the character.) The matter was discussed in the newspapers in 1933 also on the basis of visitation of two women’s delegates to the Finnish Minister of Justice and their demand for sterilization. What was demanded, in fact, was a castration law. For Federley, even castration was enough for the worst cases, which should have been sentenced to closed sanitaries (Hietala 1996 p. 226; Mattila 1999 p. 177).
Federley got his opportunity to act, when he was chosen as a member of the state committee on sterilization in 1927. Only by a law allowing compulsory sterilization could real results be achieved, in Federley's opinion. In the longer run, sterilization was not alien to the Western concept of justice, declared Federley in many occasions (Federley 1927, 1929, 1930, 1934, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c, in Hietala 1996 pp. 213-215). Federley's authority peaked at the height of the depression and he was after a biological New Deal. As a spokesman of the Swedish-speaking stock, Federley had to refute prejudices related to eugenics as a method of promoting the advance of one certain race, of course. Sterilization was preventive, not punitive.
The workings of the Finnish sterilization Act was discussed in detail by C.A. Borgström, who wrote his master's thesis under Federley and who also was a member of the committee on sterilization together with his supervisor. Borgström wrote his doctoral dissertation on the implementation of the act, and took a hard-line approach to the application of the law. Federley arranged contacts for Borgström with leading members of the German eugenics movement. When Borgström wrote an article for the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (ARGB), Federley persuaded Lenz and Rüdin to accept it (Hietala 1996 p. 234)[20].
Another very active member of the committee was Arne Johannes Palmén, then the editor of the professional Finnish medical journal, Duodecim. What is interesting is the fact that the collaborator was the grandson of the Johann Axel Palmén (1845-1919), who had been the first evolutionist in Finland to have a chair as a professor in zoology and comparative anatomy (from 1884 on).
Johann Axel Palmén (a nephew to E. J. Bonsdorff, the archiatry of Finland and an anatomist in the Cuverian fashion) had adapted the methodology of comparative anatomy when he studied under Gegenbaur after the Altmeister left to Heidelberg to make room for the young Haeckel. Palmén was the first one to apply the common descent in his dissertation in Finland (in 1874), after which he studied under the supervision of Carl Gegenbaur the years 1875-1876 in Heidelberg. In fact, Palmén had already travelled to Germany to study under Rudolf Leuckart in Leipzig when he met with his inspirator Ernst Haeckel who persued him to study under Gegenbaur instead (Leikola 1980, 1982c). Not only Federley, but also Palmén had started from the assumption of Haeckel's recapitulation. If ontogenesis was a recapitulation of phylogenesis, it could have been possible to draw phylogenetic conclusions about bird behaviour through developmental studies. Palmén wished to study the maturation of the instinct in young birds. Palmén had seen ornithology as a means of uniting patriotic and scientific interests when in 1912 he had distributed two thousand aluminium rings for marking (birds, not yet the human beings; Leikola 1982d). Gegenbaur's influence might have moderated Palmén's mind from the Haeckelian enthusiasm with its ahistorical ideas welding Darwin together with Goethe and Lamarck (Vallisaari 1982).
Johan Axel's step-brother Ernst Gustaf Palmén handled the "language organisms" like any other material, experimentally. Another even more important Finnish philologist was Johan Richard Danielsson (-Kalmari), who showed an intimate appreciation of the Haeckelian Monism already in his inauguration lecture in 1881 (Lappalainen 1965). Ernst Haeckel had derived the term "Monism", actually, from the linguists, and applied his linear and hierarchical view on evolution to the discovery of the Indo-European languages with India in the proximal parts and High German at the crown of the language tree.
The committee's report is said to be much more cautious in its tone than the subsequent 1935 Sterilization Act, and similar in nature to an equivalent report for Sweden. A stand was taken on the principle that the legislation should be based on voluntary action, and the measure should not be carried out before the individual had reached marrying age. The strategy was, however, to present not only dry statistics but individual case studies of degenerate people (women) with many children, which appealed to emotions. Yet Federley used strong words even in the committee report on 4th of May 1929: “It hardly needs to be said that human genetic inheritances are different in value. Idiots are nothing but a burden to society and cannot work in any way for its benefit, while the mentally handicapped and criminals can in certain circumstances even endanger society's existence and the development of its wealth. Thus caring for the progress of mankind remains the task of the gifted and diligent. Among the various races and nations these different groups are not, however, represented in equal proportions…"[21]
The emerging social legislation of the 1920-1930-‘ies Finland prepared ground for the social welfare. The great threat of the civilizations was the degeneration. Both in the Kampf for life and in Alice’s Wonderland one had to run faster and faster to stay in the current position. Ernst Haeckel died in 1919 at the age of 85, without the knowledge of the surgical solutions. But in 1935 the Finnish sterilization law of involuntary nature was enacted.
Only fourteen members of a Parliament of 200 voted against the Sterilization Act, and the press paid very little attention to the compulsory nature of the act that had become a law. A decision by the National Board of Health was required, however, for any operation (though only before 1951; Hietala 1996 p. 233).
Forced sterilizations with the quick new operation would have been less brutal way to achieve the same ends as the executions. Vasectomy was reliable, cheap, humane and swift, whereas salpingectomy was somewhat more risky and demanding operation. Federley (1924) stated that the operation was not more unpleasant than a tooth extraction. For Harry Federley “the chat about offending the freedom of an individual is idle talk” and comparable to conscription of men to the national service.
Despite the more difficult operation, over half of the Finnish citizens sterilized in the name of racial hygiene were females. There were 56,080 (54,128) sterilizations in Finland in 1935-1970, 5001 (7530) of which took place on the grounds of eugenic, 3445 (3373) on social reasons (according to Hietala 1996 and Mattila 1999, respectively; Between the years 1935 and 1950 the reasons were not articulated as explicitly.) The record of the annual number of race biological sterilizations was made in 1960 (514 cases). The Finnish operations peaked long after Federley's law was set in place, when the number in other Nordic countries was in decline, since 1950. Within a purely Finnish-speaking population the number of individuals sterilized per 100,000 was 28.0 and in communities with a largely Swedish-speaking population the figure was 15.5. In Åland, racially superior of all to Federley, the local authorities did not bring forward a single petition for sterilization. Small, poor communes were the first to take advantage of the Sterilization Act. There certainly was often a real anxiety about the financial ability of the commune to sustain the mentally retarded as well as apprehension at the increasing growth of their families (Hietala 1996 p. 235-6; Mattila 1999 p. 336-8).
Because of the strong criticism toward the Castration Act this measure was hardly applied. In the period 1951-1968 a total of 2,777 applications were made but the operation was carried out in only ninety cases (Hietala 1996 p. 242-243). In Sweden, the annual number of forced sterilization was at least 2000 in 1948-49, just after the Word War II (Reilly 1991 pp. xiii). (The populations of Finland and Sweden are 5 and 8 millions, respectively.) Garland Allen (1999, 2001) keeps on reminding in his concerns on the modern eugenic trends the US numbers (more than 60,000 sterilized for eugenic purposes by the 1960's when the old US laws were beginning to be repealed from the 35 states that passed them).
In 1951 the Central Association of Sterilized People in West Germany charged that 3,500,000 people were sterilized in Germany from the Nazi seizure of power (1933) to 1945, by the Sterilization Law of 1933 that was modelled on similar one in the United States. The actual number is not known because so many records were lost during the war (Reilly 1991, p. 109), and Haller stated that "at total of well over 200,000 persons" were sterilized "for political as well as medical reasons" (1963, p. 180). A coverage of more than 1% of the entire adult population (400,000) is the consensus of the estimations (Allen 2002, Proctor 1988), but Proctor states that the aim was 15,000,000 or more sterilizations (1988 pp. 7, 99, 108). The goal of 70,000 outright "euthanasia" eliminations was reached by August 1941 (Proctor 1988, p. 192).
Federley was a staunch believer in popular education, in the post-Haeckelian era. He was e.g. a member of the board of the Finnish Red Cross and editor of its journal, an administer in the commission for the first biological station of Finland in Tvärminne, involved in the work of Friends of Swedish elementary schools (Svenska Folkskolans vänner), cancer association, and the Delegation for Promoting Swedish Literature (Delegationen för Svenska Literaturens Främjande) (Luther 1952, Hietala 1996 p. 213). Federleys Law was upheld until the year 1970, when the public opinion projected the measures to abortion. After Federley, the first Finnish Abortion Law from 1950, abortion was allowed on medical, social, criminal - and eugenic grounds. The number of race hygienic abortions between the years 1950-1970 in Finland was about 4000 (Mattila 1999 p. 338, 403). That is also a very high number taking into account the putative discrimination of the ethnic minorities like the Finnish Romanies.
At the present time, the question is whether the people at the lowest social classes in the world are more secretly given drug coctails causing sterility as their side effects. Finally the eugenic endeavour established itself in the public schools of Finland. Another subject called public health was inaugurated at the time of Federley’s early “ministry”, but eugenics was officially stipulated in it only in 1941. The strongest measures on eugenics were given permission during the Continuation War. Finland still fought under the thesis of a separate war from the Nazi-Germany at the time, but the Zeitgeist had become more extreme also here. It is tragical that the Family Federation of Finland (Suomen Väestöliitto) was founded in 1941 with these nuances.
Positive eugenics was practised by the Swedish-speaking Finns beginning early in the 20th century. The more categorical negative measures did not gain wide support until the 1930s and then mainly among Finnish speakers, including only the supporters of the Agrarian Party but also supporters of the Social Democrats and the Conservatives (Hietala 1996 p. 246).
Mrs. E.H. Harriman, a widow for the railway magnate and business tycoon, was the number one benefactress who funded the Eugenics Record Office in the early years of the American progress (642,000 $ out of the total 1,217,000; Allen 1994, p. 179). Mrs. Harriman had probably never heard of eugenics until Charles Benedict Davenport proposed his proposal to her[22]. Rockefeller-, Carnegie- and Kellogg-philanthropies had similar interests than Harriman. Any of the foundations of these men, with their epithets like "human dynamo" and "dinosaur", did not grant money for the anti-eugenicist Franz Boas for his attempt for an African Museum, for some reasons (Allen 1975).
It is funny, that in Finland also the first capital stock was behind an old lady. Federley struggled to establish the early race biological institute to Finland, to fulfil the last will of Ossian Schauman in his testament. The biggest donation for the institute came from the same testament (comprehending the whole possession of Ossian Schauman). However, most of the annual profits of the fund had to be paid for the widow, Betsy Schauman, and the annual share of the Folkhälsan was not enough to set up the institute for "heredity". Extra funding for the Federley's institute was seeked from the above mentioned Rockefeller-institute by a Finnish colleague Alexander Luther (whose letters to Ernst Haeckel have also been preserved). Luther consulted Richard Goldschmidt and emphasized that the money should have been delegated directly to the eugenic institute and to the Swedish-speaking Finska Vetenskaps-Societeten (Suomen Tiedeseura) and not in any case through the Finnish Academy of Sciences (Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia), nor the government, which were open if not “primitive” in their Finnish nationalism. (Federley acted as a chairman of the section of natural history in the Finska Vetenskaps-Societen since 1920 and chairman in 1932-33 and in 1938-39, according to Federley's obituary written by Luther in 1952 for the society's journal.) The application was rejected in 1926 because Rockefeller-foundation was not about supporting small and special disciplines but larger units such as universities (Mattila 1999 pp. 213-4). So the plan did not materialise.
Finland had a brotherhood in arms with Germany in the latter part of both World Wars. According to the Great World History of Otava, a Finnish encyclopaedia, it is difficult to come up with any rational explanation for the annihilation carried out by the Nazis, apart from terrible and mad logics[23]. I disagree. The Nazi phenomenon was no historical coincidence, but followed a rational course in the Haeckelian legacy. Have we ready learned our lesson? How difficult it is to uproot dogmatic naturalism after its indoctrination to the populace?
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) - the last popular scholar with a type writer and proofreading in the footnotes – refuted the dogmatic use of the Haeckelian paradigm "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in his first technical book Ontogeny and phylogeny in 1977. I will recall the late Stephen Jay Gould for his laconic statement on the basis of the correct appearance from over 40 different Haeckelian vertebrate embryos:
"But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks! --- Tales of scientific fraud excite the imagination for good reason. Getting away with this academic equivalent of murder and then being outed a century after your misdeeds makes even a better copy." (Gould 2000).
Gould’s popular book Mismeasure of man (1981) was dedicated to his Hungarian Jewish "Papa Joe who is notwithstanding".
Finns spoke better German than English. As late as in 1935 a total of 46 out of 60 medical textbooks used in the medical faculty of Helsinki University were written in German. Some two-thirds of all the trips of Finnish surgeons were made to German universities (Hietala 1996 p. 201). Finnish doctors were aware of the main trends in medicine and related disciplines and keenly followed international trends. On the emotional level, the connection to Sweden was closest among Swedish speakers. Harry Federley employed terms "our Swedish people" ("Vårt svenska folk") and "the Swedish tribe" ("Den svenska stammen") to underline the link (Federley 1940). The patriotic Swedish enterprise race hygiene might be the only example, where a cultural, linguistic or ethnic minority has practised eugenics for the aim of the national survival of its own group. Elsewhere, an open race hygiene was carried out by the majority (Mattila 1999 p. 340). Even today, the Finnish universities use quotas for the minimum number of the Swedish-speaking minority, whereas in other countries the tragedy opposite to it can be seen.
In the 23rd of June, 1941, the raid over the Soviet Union started from the Black Sea to the Polar Circle almost simultaneously. With the occupied Norway behind her, foreign interests for the Finnish nickel mines in the North, and Soviet bombardments that had started again, Finland joined the Barbarossa the 25th of June with her national thesis for a "separate war". The onomatopoetic etymology for the Greek "barbarous" was in the incomprehensible tongue in the antiquity, but genetics was the excuse in the modern time. Finland remained an unoccupied democracy, but the propaganda value of such an ally was appreciated in the Nazi-Germany.
During Harry Federleys German training, Haeckel’s details were not popular anymore among the practising scientists in Jena. The ideological momentum of the Haeckelian Monistic movement in the grassroots, however, had been enormous. A prophet was not without honour, save in his own county, and in his own house. The name of the "wise old genius of Jena" was to become "a shining symbol that will arise" even if "nations will fall and thrones will topple" because the prophet of Monism was to "outlast all". These epithets from the contemporary folks (Gould 1977a, p. 77) came outside the Jena.
Federley’s first, congratulative, letter is dated near Haeckel’s 77th anniversary (16th of February, 1911). At the occasion, Mr. And Mrs. Federley were taking part in a big Monist feast arranged by the ‘Ortsgruppe Weimar’. Haeckel himself kept a very short speech for his congregation and did not seem to enjoy having his curriculum vitaea manifested publicly. Nevertheless, the impressive birthday celebration inspired Federley to start his habit of the annual correspondence. The timing of the letters set the scene for a bit unrequited tone.
In his second letter from 13th February 1912 from Helsinki, Federley recalls the Weimar-meeting. In contrast to the disappointment in the memoirs written in 1944, he portrays Haeckel’s speech as “begeisternde und geistvolle”.
In September 1911 Federley attended an international Monist conference in Hamburg and postponed his journey home in behalf of it. He claims in his memoirs that this was his first and last congress of the like (the First World War intervened in the affairs of the Monist progression). The arrangements were grandious, but the central figure of it all could not be present at all. Haeckel had tumbled off from ladders in his library and had broken his thighbone. In his letter from 15th February, 1913, Federley pities that Haeckel still had not recovered from the injury:
”Leider habe ich durch Frau Clara Thüla erfahren, dass Sie nach dem Hüft-Gelenkbruch im April 1911 nicht recht erholen können.”
In his memoirs, Federley assumes that “the congress certainly became the climax in the history of the Haeckelian Monism”. The Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald was the “high priest of Monism” in the absence of Haeckel at the time being for the thousand listeners, and Ostwald had begun to give regular “sunday sermons” on Monism the previous winter. (Ostwald's sermons were published in 1911-1913 in German, and in 1923 in Finnish by the Labour movement.) Federley comes to a conclusion, that the 1913 congress in Düsseldorf was minor in weight and that the First World War absorbed German interests so that one began to hear less and less about the Monism. Daniel Gasman, for all that, analyzes that “the German Monist League in the years before and during World War I, became vitally important clearing house for eugenic proposals and programs, and Haeckel, along with many of his followers, were instrumental in early attempts to foster a policy of racial eugenics” (Gasman 1998, p. 270). Also George Stein stresses the importance of the Haeckel's men in the advance of the core assumptions of the Nazism (Stein 1988).
In his memoirs, Federley writes: “His many writings targeted against the orthodox Christianity, especially against catholism with its most extreme forms, and his critic against the dogmas of the church had appeared justified and accosting to me. I had read the ‘Welthraetsel’ without any actual criticism. I was therefore eager to acquaint myself with the Monist League more closely and I enrolled as a member in the ’Ortsgruppe Jena’. I was convinced that there I would meet Jenian biologists and other broad-minded associates from the academic faculty. To my surprise, nevertheless, I found out that the members were exclusively simple bourgeoises from the town, honourable though, but without higher intellectual interests and often without higher culture. Only one academician, a professor in astronomy, was present at the meetings every now and then. The discourses all too often had a brand of skin-deep dilettantism and only rarely serious scientific character.” (Federley 1946a, pp. 182-3).
One of the most revealing sessions, claimed Federley in 1944 when detaching himself from Monism, was the one where an elementary school teacher lectured on the biogenetic law in the evolution of the psyche. According to the wanna-be-scientist, it was wrong to punish a child when he played with the matchsticks, because he could have been at the important crossroads of the recapitulation, where the fire was being re-invented from the wild. In this case, Federley did not get any comment from Haeckel, but only a smile and a shake of head.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the trend of declining birthrate was observed among the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. (The absolute birthrate of the whole Finnish population reached its highest peak in 1909.)
Federley estranges himself from Monism in his memoirs, but the letter discovery brings forth a totally different settings: “Finally, as a human I am indebted to you for that beautiful world view that you have granted for me. For us biologists Monism is a natural and self-evident worldview that not only fits together whit our science, but which can also be built upon the experimental results. Although Monism can not answer every question, it is only an incitement for me to contribute longer, so that through ongoing investigations the remnant of the unsolved riddles could be reduced and a broader clarity could be gained in the major questions. By this wish, the research gets a more noble goal and is not limited in solving small details.” (Federley to Haeckel from 12th February, 1914).
In the Finnish magazines, Federley wrote mainly in Swedish. In Finsk tidskrift, he corrected some misconceptions regarding Monism explicitly (Federley 1914a). His main debate before the World War I, however, was the juxtaposition of the Christian theology and natural science (Federley 1914b, 1915). Monism struggled only against the "intolerant" form of orthodox Christianity, Catholism and Protestantism alike, and against the "religious fanatics" casting doubts on the person of Ernst Haeckel (Federley 1914a).
Federley popularized recapitulation, the fish stage of the human embryos and the abiogenesis and protists a'la Haeckel with sophistication. He forgot to recapitulate his own failure to reproduce the Biogenetic Law to even Haeckel in the letters. Quite on the contrary, at the same time Federley still boasted:
"Mans embryonic development show that he is a typical mammal. Like the others, man passes through many stages, which would be complete riddles to us if we did not presume that man evolved from a fish-like forefather. This Haeckel's theory, the so called biogenetic basic law according to which each individual during its embryonic development in short recapitulates the desdendence history of its species, has bestowed clarification for many findings hard to understand" (Federley 1914a, p. 32)
Nya Argus was Federley's usual forum for discussion on the race politics, race biology and social selection (Federley 1919, 1922a, 1922b, 1935). Federley's more customary writings dealt with characters of the Swedish Folk-type and the sceptics of eugenics got the elegant reply from him. Mattila (1999) shed light to Federley's mission. His trumping card was the latent genotype that determined the gifts and abilities of the saplings and he underlined that there are enormous differences in it. The difference between Western statesman and Australian aboriginal was greater than the gap between ape and the native. Even among the nations with the flag of higher culture, there were individuals that did not rise above the men of the wild but were closer to the primates. The category of the adherents of Finnish socialism was evident between the lines. The industrialization happened in a sequence destined by the genotype, the worst scum of the earth surrending to the manufacturing institutions first. The proletariat mass was passive, collective and genetically unable so the general rights to vote was unnatural and even a danger to the society (although the tramps, wards, prostitutes and red rebels were already without that civil right!). The natural selection did not function under the artefactual industrialization and emerging welfare system. It was no surprise that the masses were vulnerable to the revolutionary agitation prior to the Civil War. The brains of a public servant weighted 1500 grams in average, whereas craftsman's brains weighted 1450 grams and hired men's 1400 grams. Mattila does not seem to apprehend, how evident is the link to Ernst Haeckel's biased (if not deliberately fraudulent) drawings of the brains of the unequal human races. Harry Federley pasted Haeckel's racist postulates systematically, also in the Finsk tidskrift. The gap from Haeckel's "Wedda's", "Acca's", or Australian aboriginals to Goethe or Darwin were "much wider" than to gorillas (1914a).
When Finsk tidskrift put an end to the debate on Monism between Rosenqvist (professor of theology) and Federley, his last word was a quote from Goethe: "Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, Hat auch Religion; Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, Der habe Religion". Rosenqvist had criticized Federley's habit of using Haeckel as his source not only for scientific but also for theological premisses (1915). It is a strong statement from the prominent theologian to make the compromise as a theistic evolutionist. What was common between the manifesto of the Finnish Social Democratic party from 1903 and Federley's interpretation of the Finnish Monist movement was the campaign for the separation of the church and state (the only aim of the party that has not been met).
The debate on Haeckel's scholastic vitalism, denial of entropy, phylogenetics of psychology and Monism in general was criticized in Nya Argus by more obscure writers not so tightly associated with the Lutheran church. Federley did not step into the defence in Nya Argus, however, although he is quoted many times having said e.g. that "the so called spiritual functions follow purely physical principles… soul is subject to the same laws as the body" (Torsten Nybergh, 1915).
In the discovered letters, Federley praises a new Finnish organ called “Prometheus-society” for free-thinkers as based on Monism, although the affiliation founded in 1905 does not belong to the Monist movement organisationally. In Nya Argus, Edward Westermarck had replied to Nybergh by demanding him to articulate, what he had meant by drawing a parallel between Prometheus (for which he was the chairman) and the Monist League.
Federley describes, how he gave lectures in the Prometheus on Monism upon the publication of the Finnish translation of the Welthraetsel despite a solitary adversary - a pastor. With his scholastic mindset, Haeckel was an unprobable critic of the medieval catholism after the enlightenment, but the letters did not see any threat just prior to the war of the nations.
The defence of Haeckel’s Welthraetsel took place side by side with Edward Aleksander Westermarck (1862-1939) and his English, Swedish, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese prints on the evolution of the marriage institution. Westermarck's The Origin of Human Marriage had appeared in 1889 and the most outstanding work The History of Human Marriage in 1891. Westermarck was a follower of Herbert Spencer and probably the most creative Finnish evolutionist of all times. Haeckel’s exhortation of a study of the evolution of religions got a feedback e.g. in Westermarck’s “The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas”.
Westermarck was a lecturer in sociology (1890-1906) and a professor of moral philosophy (1906-18) at the University of Helsinki. Besides, he also worked as a professor of sociology at the University of London (1907-30). Westermarck was appointed a rector to the Swedish speaking University of Turku (“Åbo Akademi") in 1918, soon after it was founded after the Civil War of Finland.
Federley fled the Civil War to Sweden. In the January and August 1918, Federley wrote from Stockholm a remarkable declaration on how biology should be taught in Westermarck's new private and Swedish-speaking University. The traditional zoology and botany was stressed, but a professorship in biology should have been directed to some special field of modern research:
"If we take only the scientific point of view into consideration, the choice could hardly fall on other disciplines but developmental physiology and genetics, with evolutionism included" (Federley 1918b).
Only one chair in biological sciences was established in Åbo Akademi, as late as in 1967, but Federley's own nomination to extraordinary professorship in genetics in 1923 could be seen in the light of the fulmination.
Haeckel's Monism is judged on the early Finnish criticisms together with Nietzsche's ethics. The attack against Monism in Finland absorbed the attention from the theories of common descent per se. The trend is, that the last corner where the compromise was hesitated was man's descent "from the apes". Let us remember, that Ernst Haeckel made this territorial conquest before Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man in 1871.
The more sophisticated Darwinism as the modus operandi in the early 20th century popularization is an anachronistic myth. Wilhelm Bölsche, a fervent Nazi adherent later on, wrote the biography of Charles Darwin, published in Finnish as early as in 1900. (The first decade of the 20th century meant an outburst of publications on evolution, mostly as translations from German.)
Bölsche was among the founders of the Monistebund in 1906 in Jena, and his Descent of Man was published in Finnish in the same year. Severe assaults against Monism and against the person of Haeckel appeared prior to translations (in 1911 and 1912). The critics referred to Rudolf Virchow the Jew also in Finland.
Monism enjoyed the height of its favour at the time of Federley's Jenian year. The case of Alfred Fried, a Jew and the Nobel laureate of peace from 1911, joined the ranks of the Monist League prior to the World War I. Fried tried to harmonize pacifism with Monism, but also he descended to defence the rights of the "higher culture" to defend itself. Conflict was not supposed to be done away with, but only in its crudest, physical form. Only conflict was the father of all things. Justice meant merely regulated power (Gasman 1971, p. xxxi).
Haeckel's popular and vulgar Biogenetic Law aka recapitulation served as a general paradigm of bio-political determinism. Inferior groups – races, sexes, as well as social classes - were compared with the children of white males. At the top of the unilinear progression were often the "Nordics", a tall race of blue-eyed blondes. It was a pleasant pro-Nordic, anti-everything else doctrine of Aryan supremacy. Swedes were brave and bright as they belong to the German race, whereas Finns were the cheerless, if not ugly, Mongols of low statute.
Federley used more moderate language, but he did not discard the ethos of Haeckel. He was impressively active in lobbying for genetic determinism, but during the Second World War he was not among the most opportunist importers of culture from the Nazi Germany. In a similar vein, the genetics for violence, manic depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, homosexuality and other social behaviour are afoot again. At the present time the "gene-card" is used often as a moral excuse, but the more grave economic context of the claims is in rise. Even the issue of "race" and IQ has re-emerged, as indicated by the comments on Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve of the 1990's. Yet the depression was only light at the time. Tatu Vanhanen, the father of the Prime Minister of Finland, is the co-author of the "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (2002), as a Finnish example of the academic genre.
After the second round of World War, Federley (1946a p. 186) wrote: “In the Germany of our days people have wanted to make Ernst Haeckel as a forerunner of National Socialism and thereby have pointed out his struggle for the Monist world view. It must be admitted, that his fervor to bestow wider and wider prevalence for Monism, and his battle against the adversaries of Monism, often made him guilty of overstatement. These could have gained the flavour of dogmatism, but he stressed always, that the foundation to a worldview has to be constructed in natural science and its perceptions. He never got tired to underline, that the world view must be firmly objective. How this could be allied with the modern National Socialism I leave others to account for.”
Haeckel’s bias and outright fraudulence seems so systematic today, that one cannot reconcile Harry Federleys defence of the Haeckelian “objectivity” what so ever. After the translation of the Welthraetsel (1912), Federley boldly stated that Haeckel was always been very grateful for all corrections, especially from a theologian in Jena, and that the scientific mistakes in the "Världsgåtor" (the Swedish name for the Riddle, translated in 1906) are only trivial (Federley 1914b). Even now, in the most recent round of criticism, the cherished Haeckelian embryo brutalization is defended on the grounds of schematizing and typology. Have the advocates never seen the war mongering in the other Haeckelian drawings? Federley (1946a p. 192) concluded:
“Jena lived early enough of its time and had anticipated the best of an ideal National Socialism…In many respects could Jena during the first years of the century stand as a social pattern for the rest of Germany.”
The letter says:
"So wünsche ich Ihnen, dass Sie die wohlerforderliche Ruhe nach dem langen und tatreichen Arbeitstag in vollen Zügen geniessen möchten und dabei fortwährend sehen, wie Ihre Samen überall kimen, wachsen und reiche Frucht tragen." (Federley to Haeckel from 12th February, 1914).
Great and numerous were the fruits of the Monist bloom, indeed. How come, that the most celebrated embryo figures in modern times have been mongered from books like these?
Haeckel House in Jena has recently published a catalogue listing 40,000 letters to and from Ernst Haeckel. At least Edward Westermack, Harry Federley, Johan Axel Palmén, Erik Nordenskiöld, Enzio Reuter, Otto Schulman[24], Alexander Luther, Nicolai Kaulbars, Valio Korvenkontio, Henrik Ramsay (1.12.1909), Jacob Sederholm, Onni Toikka, and putatively also Olof Sievers are noteworthy Finnish correspondents. I consider this an important source discovery for the Finnish historians of science. Federley wrote five letters to Haeckel between the years 1912-1914 after he spent an academic year in Jena.
The first project documenting the Haeckelian reception in Fennoscandinavia in the light of correspondence has been launched recently (Olsson & Hobfeld 2003). Most of the 39 Swedish correspondents behind the 96 letters, all written in German, were from the members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in this first report based on the archives in the Ernst Haeckel House in Jena, and at the Center for History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Judging the past in the present context is the basic error in the study of history. Nevertheless, the anathema is that none of the letters from Swedish scholars included major criticism against Haeckel’s systematically fraudulent drawings or polemic statements. It remains to be seen, whether any criticism is contained in the letters from the at least 11 Finnish correspondents (or whether the polemic letters were ever stored).
All but one of the five letters from Federley were sent at the occasion of Ernst Haeckel’s birthday. The first is sent from Jena in 1911, three annually from Helsinki, and the second letter from 1912 as a reply. It is hard to say, why Federley quitted the annual greeting 3 years before Haeckel’s death (apart from the fact, that if his dim handwriting is difficult to interpret for a student in 2004, it must have been extremely hard to read for a man 85 years old).
Federley's letters indicate that Haeckel answered to him at least twice, but unfortunately the replies have not been found from the Federley-archive in the Helsinki University or in other places. Taking into account Federleys submission and flattering to Haeckel in the letters and his acquaintance between the years 1910-1916, it seems evident that if other letters existed, they probably would not have gone unmentioned.
Also Mrs. Harry Federley stayed in Jena in 1910-1911, and she frequently sends her best wishes to Ernst Haeckel in the letters. When Enzio Reuter, Federley's mentor, had asked Ernst' permission for his excursion 15 years earlier, Haeckel had refused to invite Mrs. Enzio Reuter. In an unearthed letter from 31st December (sic), 1897, Enzio Reuter tried to persuade Haeckel to accept also his wife, if the couple let their young daughter to stay in Finland. Reuter already had the travelling fund and he panicked.
In the light of the pressure towards marriage restrictions later on, it is of interest that both Darwin and Haeckel had been married to their cousins. If Emma Darwin hindered Charles' publication of his studies, the death of Anna (Sethe) on Ernst' thirtieth birthday (!) triggered the outbreak of Haeckels mania in his judgements. Generelle Morphologie was the outburst of a grieve-stricken heart that could not even attend the funerals.
Ernst Haeckel stated in a letters to Charles Darwin (The Darwin Correspondence Online Database, document 4555 from July 1864) that because of this loss, he has grown indifferent to any criticism. The man became ontological naturalist who rejected any dualism having a trace of separation of material and spirit. This is where the ardent desire for the materialism or Monism came from. One has the intuition, that Darwin felt great sympathy for his young successor because of their identical marital situation and Haeckel's abysmal angst. The young Haeckel inherited much of his fame because of the comforting praise in Darwin's books. During the excursion of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Federley, Ernst Haeckel had withdrawn to solitude due to "unlucky family circumstances" that Federley did not articulate more explicitly. Mrs. Federley seemed to enjoy the parties of Mr. and Mrs. Rudolf Eucken, preferably.
One of the replies remains more obscure, Federley merely gave thanks for a ”heartily answer in the winter 1912”. The other reply is a more easily reconstructed inquiry from February 1913. In the latter reply, first and foremost, Haeckel had stated that he had not known the Finnish translation of the Welthraetsel. Federley writes with a sarcastic tone and states that he is ashamed of the translator Jokinen and sends a copy by himself. And so Federley writes: ”The news, that you are not aware of the Finnish translation of the Welthraetsel from 1912, is a delightful excuse for me to send you a copy in order to manifest somehow my gratefulness for your so great friendliness with a visible yet a modest expression. At the same time, however, I am ashamed of my countryman, the translator who is a stranger for me, because he has not have the discretion to donate you a translation. After having read his forewords, however, this amazes me less. He is, namely, a social democrat, and as You know, our social democrats are very uneducated and unfortunately also very reckless even when it is a question of the politics towards Russia. In the epilogue the man reproaches you for not appreciating the other great man of the 1900’ies Karl Marx beside Darwin and for not taking heed of his materialistic view of history. So now we both know that Darwin and Marx were the two great men at the last century. Furthermore, the translator wishes that Your Welthraetsel would help in spreading the social democratic thoughts for wider ranks of the people. - How good the translator is, I can not tell, but I wish however, that it is better than the epilogue.”
These were the years prior to the Finnish Civil War. The two gentlemen, Federley and the translator Jokinen, were settling down to the opposite sides of the fronts. One of the most decisive insights into the Haeckelian legacy of popularization is the resounding fact that “The riddle of the universe at the close of the nineteenth century" appealed both to the right-wing and left-wing movements. Indeed, it is hard to find a better common denominator to the political extremism among the left and right than ideological evolutionism. The more vulgar, the better.
Haeckelism is usually associated to the extreme right, but by the time mainly Workers institutes both in Finland and Sweden were more fervent in the popularization. His fulminations against religion and established privilege appealed, indeed, to the left (Gould 1977a, pp. 77-78). It is typical for the Haeckel’s correspondents also in Sweden the have conflicting political views. Wilhelm Leche (1850-1927) was a left wing social democrat and radical, and Anton Nyström (1842-1931) was another left-leaning intellectual “fighting for the propagation of the scientific world view” through the Workers Institute, a “popular science academy”. In contrast, Sven Hedin (1865-1952) was an admirer of Adolf Hitler later on. Gustaf Retzius (1842-1919), the only Scandinavian scientist to be invited to Haeckel’s “Scientific society Ethophysis”, had otherwise aesthetic mindset to exchange compliments with Haeckel (Olsson & Hobfeld 2003).
In the Haeckelian legacy, World War I was a war of nations, whereas World War II was a war of races. In the same vein, the victory of the Whites in the Civil War in 1918 was a victory for Western culture in the eyes of the Swedish-speaking military leadership while the Red herds were associated with Mongols (Aro 1985). For Federley, the Civil War of Finland outlined anthropological conclusions. Federley did not take the gun but the pen.
Roughly speaking, one third of the deceased Reds died in a battle, one third died in the prison camps, and one third were executed. Execution took place even for confiscations, bad manners or merely social sake. The accurate number of the departed cannot be but evaluated in the light of statistics, because authorities were not eager to file the anti-revolutionary incidents under the "legal terror". In the bloodiest Finnish speaking regions, up to 4% of the population got annihilated. The National Archives estimates that the total number of casualties was at least 5,000 dead Whites, 27,000 dead Reds and 4000 other victims (the population of the whole Finland was somewhat over 3 million at the time)[25]. The travelling executioners were not always Swedish speaking, despite their overrepresentation in the nerve centre behind the custom.
The most interactive communication, according to the letter discoveries from the Haeckel House, refers to Haeckel’s support for the cultural Finnish struggle against the aggressions of the Russians in the years predating the World War between Kaiser and Czar. Federley uses the word “Kampf” in the discourse frequently. The culture address “Pro Finlandia” that was collected for the Finnish independence had the names of Rudolf Eucken and Ernst Haeckel in the first page of the list (Federley 1946a p. 178).
Haeckel was an old man who spent his birthdays in solitude and invited only his closest friends to attend. Federleys letters do not contain even a remote hint of criticism against his Master, but he was not in the inner sphere. Federley acted like a prospect disciple and the smug belittling of the 1944 memoirs is unheard of. "Mit den ehrerbietigsten Grüssen von Ihrem Sie stets verehrenden und Ihnen ergebenem": Heil Haeckel, incognito.
Haeckel gave the Linnaen binomial classification name Pithecanthropus alalus ('ape-man without speech') for the first "forefather" of man - before it was dug up (Milner 1990, pp. 147-8). The Java-Man was a discovery of Eugene Dubois, another prospect of Haeckel. The connection has been covered by changing the name to Pithecanthropus erectus, and finally to Homo erectus. Haeckel had another artist, Gabriel Max, to draw the imaginative incarnation.
Haeckel's inspiration on Federley could be compared to this one of the most well-known of the more remote students, with all of the ambiguities from the shores of Java. Dubois, however, had the courage to discard his dear yet more or less dishonest discovery when he was older. "Eugene" did not remain so popular first name for through generations.
Haeckel had the touch that inflamed these young men. He must have been a passionate man. Federley was “converted” by the books, although the obsessed old man was a great disappointment face to face. Federley was not likely to describe Haeckel’s piping voice in the meetings of the Prometheus-society as he did in 1944. Most probably the interactions with Haeckel were only his great merit in this most important (although unofficial) Finnish branch of Monism. Federley's letters do not mention doubts against the recapitulation.
Haeckel made an expedition to Finland in 1897. He was exalted in a congratulative telegram in his 70th birthday in 1904 by J. A. Palmén, followed by an address of 36 Finnish natural scientists[26]. The address was decorated with a painting by the Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt, who was known for his immortalizing painting of Louis Pasteur with his sterile test tubes. The superlatives of the address consisted of 159 words when translated to Finnish.
In his 80th birthday, the list of names had been shortened to J. A. Palmén, Schulman, E. Reuter, K. M. Levander, E. Nordenskiöld, H. Federley, G. Ekman and E. Westermarck[27]. Haeckel himself used to refer to Westermarck in his best-sellers, regarding the research on the evolution of marriage. The superlatives numbered 43 words now, but one still does not understand, what does it mean that "His Highness" had "once also begun to defend the preconditions of the civilization of our folk".
The fellowship of the nine was not that tight ten years later, when Federley made a strong ad hominem –attack against the other great Finnish experimentalist Gunnar Ekman in public. Ekman had written from Hans Speman's laboratory at Freiburg to a major popular culture magazine in Finnish and had drawn attention to the unresolved problems of orthodox genetics outside the discipline, as an embryologist (Ekman 1925, Federley 1925). Ekman concluded his defence by saying (translation from by Anto Leikola, 1982b):
"I had the belief that all biologists, even zoologists, could have genetics among their interests, Isn't it, by the way, a bit dangerous to deny the authority of professors – one never knows whose turn will be next."
Haeckel's book entitled Ewigkeit: Weltkriegsgedanken über Leben und Tot, Religion und Entwicklungslehre (Eternity: World War thoughts on life and death, religion and evolutionary theory) appeared in 1915. Prior to the death of Ernst Haeckel in 1919 there had been a Civil War (in 1918) and the atmosphere was extremely embittered in the southern Finland.
Sic transit gloria mundi. One is left confused by the fact that when the old Haeckel died, there was not even an obituary for him in the Luonnon Ystävä -journal. Neither was there any centennial anniversary in 1934. When Charles Darwin died in 1882, money nearly worth a year's wage of a professor was gathered for a monument for him in London. August Weismann had an obituary written for him in the Luonnon Ystävä, in 1915. Also Alfred Russel Wallace had his obituary before the Civil War (in 1914), despite his socialism, spiritism and agitation against the wealthy upper classes (Rantaniemi 1914).
The Finnish admiral of the person of Haeckel must have suffered damage at least by the condemnation of the infamous history of biology by the Swedish-speaking Finn Erik Nordenskiöld in 1924. The author should not be mixed up with the navigator of the "North-East passage" and Finnish nationalist A.E. Nordenskiöld, who was expelled by the Czar.) Also Gasman (1971, p. 29) drew attention to the large volume that cursed the Welthraetsel in the following words:
“…from a scientific point of view it must be regarded as utterly valueless. Its biological section is a rehash of the History of Creation, Anthropogeny, and the monograph on the plastitude, as little attention as possible being paid to the immense rogress made by scientific research since then. As a matter of fact, biology takes up only one quarter of the volume; the rest is devoted to psychology, cosmology, and theology. The cosmological section gives evidence of the author’s hopelessly confused ideas on the simplest facts of physics and chemistry.“ (Nordenskiöld 1928 p. 524).
Nordenskiöld, however, also ridiculed the idea of natural selection! (Translation from Finnish by Vepsäläinen, 1982):
"…time has pronounced its judgement: Darwin's selectionism has been rejected for a long time ago… We may hence leave the old darwinistic descendence theory. Modern genetics applies an entirely other method in studying evolutionary problems, an experimental approach, and the old morphological method speculating on the origin of species and genera must have retreated at the same rate, as usually has been the case in the history of exact sciences where speculation must give way to facts… As thus natural selection is guided by chance, no regularities in nature become possible. This is, in fact, the greatest weakness of Darwin's theory of natural selection."
It is astonishing that the great Finnish historian of biology concluded that his history of biology should end in recording the fall of Darwinism. The crisis was imported from Germany, but it followed the Western progress. The "extinction" just happened at the face of the Hegelian syn-thesis of Mendelism and Darwinism abroad, in the form of modern neo-Darwinism. Embryonic development, with its mechanistic materialist past, remained outside the neo-Darwinian synthesis in this phase also elsewhere.
Scientists set the scene for Adolf Hitler. Der Führer was not amoral and even his ethics was not reactionary, but followed a consistent ethical code laid by the Haeckelian legacy. Politics was biology applied.
Are the civilized or cultural means of indoctrination better than open confession of hostility, in the longer run? Federley described Monism as a self-evident world view (“Weltanschauung”) that can be taken as granted. Now the Haeckelian legacy has been left largely unturned in Finland. Indoctrination is poisonous to the natural sciences. With orange sunglasses, the world is orange, indeed. The reason for the tragical conclusions from the evolution is largely in tautology and circular reasoning, where the falsification and open scrutiny avoids the real questions and challenging paradigms.
Adolf Hitler emphasized that he was the member number seven in the national socialist party, but “Sein Kampf” was not something particularly personal in 1924-25. It is no wonder that the only ministers meeting at the outbreak of the WWII who had read Mein Kampf themselves were from the Soviet Union. Hitler was not prone to give references and honour to others, but nevertheless the substance of his book and speeches was almost trivial for the time.
Regarding the “Kampf” and the Russians, there is evidence that In Ukraine and Baltic countries people welcomed the German troops as redeemers. These illusions evaporated soon, when the SS (Schutzstaffel) and civilian administration followed the field-army. Hitler did not even try to separate the Russian people from the Soviet government. The Eastern Europeans Slavic people were born "slaves", indeed. If the Finnish speaking Finns sold to Molotov were Mongols and inferior to the Swedish-speaking elite, for Hitler the Slavic people were "Untermenschen" (Bullock 1958 pp. 423-5).
Why did Hitler open a second front by attacking to east, against all of the advices in his headquarters? The command for Barbarossa was undersigned only 5 months after the speech to the parliament, declaring invasion to the opposite direction (England) (Bullock 1958, p. 377). What if the failure of the Red Army (with its many executed officers) to take over Finland in the Winter War, despite Ribbentrops' license from the Nazi-Germany, contributed to the strategy?
The ideal of race hygiene was not put to a final action in Finland, but a time of war tightens the attitudes. Isaksson (1996), Virolainen (1996) and Kemiläinen et al (1985) analyze the anthropologist "mismeasure" of Finnish Romanies, Lapps, and the Finns themselves, but the practices during the war have not been dealt with in the conventional research.
Since 1998, new information has been revealed. The dilemma of the ambitious political goals of the Suomalais-Saksalainen Seura (SSS, Finnish-German association) has been introduced publicly by investigating journalists in an academically poor national television broadcast. I believe the 8 heavy weight professors from the Helsinki University in the SSS delegation meant good and strived in serving their country in a difficult situation between two superpowers. SSS was established for "cultural exchange". Nevertheless, the professors and the business men in the SSS delegation practised nihilism.
The Finnish SS-battalion subdued to Germany was founded 15th of June 1941. It was eight days before the sudden outbreak of the Barbarossa, but the received wisdom says that the Finnish leaders were not told of the timing of the attack until 21st of June. Many of the 1400 Finnish SS-men sent to the Nazi Germany went there merely for the best military training available at the time. In the beginning only Swedish-speaking “German” blood was allowed to enlist, but then the German authorities inclined to accept also the Finnish-speaking SS-men. (Nazi-Germany allied itself also with Japan, finally.) The tragedy is that the Finnish SS-men were recruited by the SSS, with the professors in its governing delegation. Did they have the intuition on the Barbarossa beforehand? Professor Federley did not participate actively in this expression of opportunism, although at least his letters to the Swedish-speaking branch of Finnish-German association in Turku (to J. F. Rosenfeld in the Finnisch-Deutsche Gesellschaft) have survived.
One is compelled to ask, whether Stephen Jay Gould was aware of the irony when he received the 8th "Yrjö Reenpää -Prize" in 1999 from the testaments trusted and managed by the Finnish Cultural Fund. I esteem Gould's personal cynicism on the basis that during the 12 years of reign by Hitler, the annihilation of Jews made a leader even in the most open New York Times only 9 times. A sample of Gould's 400,000 Hungarian Jewish relatives was dismissed in 13 lanes in obscure pages.
Yrjö Reenpää (1894-1976) seems to have been also the last chairman of the delegation of SSS. He was still the Honorary President of the Finnish Cultural Fund when Gould received the Prize, at the repercussions of the TV broadcast on SSS. Although the reports of the proceedings in the meetings of SSS have been deliberately destroyed, the class of culture Reenpää had been associated in this context seem to have been pragmatic duties. What if Reenpää, on behalf of the country, was just compelled for the last chairmanship of the delegation of SSS 12.4.1944 onwards? It seems so late a timepoint of the war (doomed to end more or less catastrophically), that a scapegoat role seems to apply not only to President Risto Ryti but also to Reenpää.[28] Ryti has been described as a clear and analytical thinker, whereas Reenpää is often recalled as a more esoteric philosopher.
In December 1942 Reenpää was nominated by the Finnish Academy of Science to a membership in the committee preparing "practical measures" to establish a Race Biological Research Institute ("rotubiologinen tutkimuslaitos") in the middle of the war to Finland. The chairman for the latter committee was the professor of anatomy, the post-war president of the National Board of Health, Niilo Pesonen (1902 - 1993). Pesonen was also active in the SSS delegation (Jokisipilä 1999 pp. 16, 34). It seems that the aim of the project was to file all the Finnish people but the rumours regarding the elimination campaign of the feeble-minded has not been proved. Nazi-Germany just happened to lose the war.
Jokisipilä (1999) describes, how the SSS was officially erected for cultural exchange, and how it nevertheless had ambitious political goals aside the diplomatic routes that reached undemocratic leaders like Göring and Himmler. Good relationships with a dictatorship underlined the personality of an individual even in the democratic Finland, and Jokisipilä examines this collaboration as a bankruptcy of the post civil war politics. Jokisipilä does not give data to support the allegation that a Vichy-type of pro-Nazi puppet government was planned on these academic scaffolds.
Before the military drawbacks, the route by which the visits of Pesonen to Germany, or people like the main ideologist of NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) Alfred Rosenberg with his "rücksichtlos Kampf" to Finland, were being arranged went through the SSS and Nordische Gesellschaft (Jokisipilä p. 34). Especially the overrepresentation of medical doctors is noteworthy in the SSS. The attitudes towards race hygiene before the World War II in the Finnish-speaking medical journal Duodecim had been more moderate than in the Swedish-speaking Finska Läkaresällskapet (Mattila 1996), but during the war even the Finnish-speaking elite devoured the hook of opportunism.
Fennomanic movement had exercised its influence for a century, and it was certainly inhibitory to the sympathy of Nordic or Aryan nationalism among the common people. Teutonic superiority akin to Nietzsche's 'super-man' was abhorrent to the commonwealth of Finland.
The offensive Pangermanic regime was not an exclusive and isolated case, but followed the norm in the countries ranking high in the Haeckelian legacy. In Finland, National Socialism was never established. There were societies in that direction, but they did not enjoy large memberships. As a party, the Finnish Patriotic People's Movement (Isänmaallinen Kansanliike IKL) had fascist characteristics, but it had merely 8 representatives in the parliament in 1939.
Unfortunately, also the Finnish war propaganda could be based on the stereotype of the “ryssä” and the mentality and sensitivity that produced the “Tihij Don” to describe the chaotic revolutionary battles was not paid attention. If the Swedes were haughty over the Finns, the Finns looked at the Russians with contempt.
Josif Stalin had stated in 1939 that the safety of Leningrad was the main reason for his territorial demands for Finland. Upon the 900 days -long siege of Leningrad, the great command for the "struggle for life" (Kampf) to annihilate the whole city together with its 3 million inhabitants did not get a response from the Finnish leaders. They harassed the brotherhood of arms by trying to avoid the responsibility of closing the line of maintenance and supply (Skyttä 1971, pp. 136-141), in the Finnish record of the history. Finnish troops did participate in the siege in the north, but had critical reservedness.
Finally, Finland concluded a separate armistice with the Soviet Union, which led into war operations between Germany and Finland in a few weeks’ time. In Finland this third war is called the Lapland War (1944-1945).
It is difficult to apply de mortuis nihil nisi bene (only good of the dead one) to a militant era. Reenpää was in charge for testing of Finnish pilots and was a physiologist of senses. Only his collaborators or colleagues abroad were the "pathologists" as it were. Nevertheless, Reenpää did get the information from the human experiments related to G-force, hypothermia etc. Reenpää managed a joint professorship with the Swedish-speaking Ragnar Granit 1937-1940, and it happens that the latter one is sometimes not even mentioned as the other Nobelist of natural sciences from Finland, after Granit moved to Sweden in 1940. It is ironic that Reenpää had to face an access to the results of terminal experiments like G-force test for human eyes during his visits to Nazi-Germany, while Granit got his Nobel for the studies on eye physiology (in 1967 together with Haldan Hartline and George Wald, a man of Jewish culture).
Only in the Finnish democracy, were the national Jewish population let to defend their country with a gun together with the Wehrmacht. (All of the three Jewish soldiers recognized with the Iron Cross, refused to take it. A peculiar detail on the few dozens of Jewish interpreters between the German and Finnish army was their habit of preferring using Jiddish in the duty.)
Some of the Finnish medical officers had a bad conscience for their pathological collaborators in the Nazi-Germany. The World Medical Association's ethical statement for medical research involving human subjects is called the Declaration of Helsinki, according to the 1964 Helsinki conference (www.cirp.org/library/ethics/helsinki/).
Judging the past in the present context is the arch error in the study of history. Race hygiene was applied science from the cutting edge of modern genetics. A small country also has to adopt innovations from others to save resources and to accelerate her progress. The tragedy is that within a small community a sound criticism is unlikely to gain a general support in the lack of sovereign self-prestige. Both the Prohibition and Sterilization Acts followed the course abroad with the exception that the Finnish spokesman Harry Federley did not have to portray himself as a scientist, he really was one.
The populace tends to forget that Germany was the scientifically most advanced nation of the world prior to the chaotic times. The world wars took place in the heights of Haeckel's fame, and Monist movement was organized especially in Germany and Austria. Adolf Hitler did not need a revolution. He did not have to break any law, but only constitute them.
Sociobiology, human behaviour genetics, and evolutionary psychology should be place in their context of the Philosopher’s Stone before the WWII. In the Mendelian heredity complex traits and even social behaviour from general personality to alcoholism, schizophrenia, manic depression, pauperism, racial differences, inherited scholarship and its converse feeble-mindedness, rebelliousness, artistic senses, criminality etc. were claimed to have a significant genetic basis – even a single gene behind them.
Not only the pioneering Swedish-speaking minority but the whole Finnish society had been convinced by the experts on a dubious law based on quasi-science by 1935. The popularization in the post-Haeckelian era led the brightest scientists to treat human beings as raw material that must yield to manipulation in order to reach harmony with the course of evolution. Since 1970s, Finnish society has adopted more liberal set of values not only regarding the abolition of compulsory sterilization. In the light of the absence of indictment against the most opportunist Nazi fawners and beneficiaries of the human experimentation among the professorship, however, the eugenics ideal did not die after the full revelation of the Nazi atrocities. It just became unfashionable.
Hietala concluded that a key feature in the spread of eugenics in Finland was the esteem that professional experts such as medical doctors enjoyed in the Finnish society. People were accustomed to relying on expert opinions. This echoes the conclusions of Paul Weindling (1989 pp. 215-230) concerning Germany. There was hardly any public debate at all. Only fourteen members of a Parliament of 200 voted against the Sterilization Act, which was one of the first measures in Europe in 1935, and the press paid very little attention to the compulsory nature of the act that had become a law. The majority of medical practitioners in Finland were pro-sterilization, led by the example of the head of the National Board of Health. The cynical attitude of the European medical officers to eugenics was a tragedy, and Finland was no exception.
Today, we seem to be accepting again a bottom-line cost-benefit analysis of human life. The main difference to the 1930's biolegislation is that civil servants warning of moral decline are hard to find. The international scene set for the opportunism is accelerated from the past pace by the phenomenon of globalization.
As an indication, editorials in the Western countries tend to describe the success of the Far East regarding the patents utilizing the embryonic stem cells instead of the ethically more sustainable progress with the recently cultured stem cells from adult tissues, bone marrow, periferal blood, cord blood etc. Just a few years ago, the renewal of brains and muscles was unheard of. The volte face has not been derived from the ethically more problematic embryos only. Progenitor cells from one's own body could bear less risk of transplantic rejection or malignant growth, and bear therapeutic potential.
Haeckelian myth of the identical appearance of vertebrate embryos with the rhetoric of the gill slits, tail, fins and furrow of the human fetus remained as one of the most – if not the most - recycled figures of the Finnish textbooks of biology until the modern discovery of stem cells from the embryos. As an example of the association of the recapitulationary drawings to the ethical dilemmas, let me quote the chapter "Abortion and the concept of person" in the Ethics of Abortion (English 1989 p. 85): "Note that one traditional anti-abortion argument has centered on pointing out the many ways in which a fetus resembles a baby. They emphasize its development ('It already has ten fingers…') without mentioning its dissimilarities to adults (it still has gills and a tail)."
Due to the many Swedish ESC-lines in the sixty preliminary cell lines accepted in the Federal funding in the Bush' White House Paper, Sweden is called "the imperium of stem cells" in the Finnish press describing the economical promises in the field. As a result of the White House Paper, the scientific community in the Europe seems to have stood up to oppose the "banning politics" of George Bush Jr. in a nearly solid front.
Due to the pioneering position of the Fennoscandinavia in the popularization, especial openness to ethical scrutiny is required. According to the Stakes information welfare and health care statistics, the percentage of in vitro fertilization in Finland has increased steadfastly from the year 1984 to a world record level of 2,5% of all of the births (since 1978 abroad).
The European traditions and laws regarding the research of human embryos are being transformed hastily. They differ among the member countries, and in some EU-countries the boundary line for embryonic research is not even established. In 2002, for instance, the first legislations of fertilization of human beings for research purposes were launched in UK. In Finland, fertilization for research is not permitted but a law has been passed which merely limits the research utility of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos left over from the fertility therapies to 14 days, which is at the highest level of Europe[29]. The economical pressure is to loosen the legislation and it seems that not only the catholic countries so despised by Haeckel but now also the German-speaking areas are more concerned to slow down the competition in the ethical tangent. Developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and don'ts.
The legislation should not distract individual researchers from the awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. It could be and should be exceeded by alert individuals. The lesson from the Nazi-Germany is this: A law is no substitute for personal moral decisions. The tragedy is not the mania of a drop-out and a corporal but the ardent materialism of the university intelligentsia and the indifference of the large public.
Medical endeavours related to human embryos are pragmatic - yet sincerely noble in aims. How significant are the indirect social consequences at this ethical tangent? What if the adult stem cells are medically better option due to the rejection or tumour problem of the “totipotent” embryonic stem cells? It should be clear, that there is experience in protocols for handling and culturing embryonic cells in the literature, whereas the experience with the (multipotent) adult progenitor cells, umbilical cord blood stem cells etc. is lagging far behind (bone marrow cells excluded).
The bioethical training is largely meant to appease the politicians, funders and the public to keep the banderolls out of the streets. The "publish-or-perish" –principle as a framework makes relevant ethical discussions elusive. Peer review is often a peer pressure process. Science is a self-correcting process, but technical criticism does not reach its social anchorage. This is, de facto, proven by the by the "gill slit" -rhetoric of the Haeckelian embryos and the cross-scientific impact of the recapitulation in criminal anthropology, racism, child development, primary education, and psychoanalysis. The survival of the fittest was the survival of the fakest in the popularization.
Scott Gilbert is the author of the most extensively used book of developmental biology, whose most recent 6th edition (2000) became freely available in the Public Medline (PubMed) -database in the autumn 2002[30]. It is somewhat embarrassing, that even Gilbert used the forgery in the 5th edition of the Developmental Biology (1997). Gilbert has been open-minded enough to give attention to his error (although not in the printed version of the book). In an Internet-appendix to the last chapter, he writes:
"However, even though von Baer and others had discredited the recapitulation notion, it became one of the most popular notions in biology. Gould (1977a, b) has shown that while recapitulation has a limited value in looking at in formation of related species, it is not a general phenomenon. However, recapitulationism became one of the central paradigms of biology." (http://devbio.com/chap22/link2201a.shtml).
Modern developmental genetics is beginning to shape again the Neo-Darwinian popularization and now Gilbert has the confidence to act as an expert in the history of biology and its social functions. He is also a spokesman for the "opening Darwin's black box" in the text-books of the highschools in the form as the new anticreationist "evo-devo" – hype, which emphasizes the extremely conserved regulatory genes (Gilbert 2003). Homeodomains and transcription factors, however, also strengthen the old argument from the "Cambrian explosion". There were more than two times more Haeckelian "phylas" at the emergence of the Metazoa than are existing today. The extreme speed of anatomical change and adaptive radiation during this brief timeperiod requires explanations beyond evolutionary proposals within the modern biota. Homeoboxes do nothing without the actual proteins encoded by the genes subdued.
Let thy gifts be to thyself. I would like to assess the stem cell dilemma in the light of the history of science. The original claims of linear or hierarchic recapitulation and functioning gills in human embryos have been weighed and found wanting. Why do we exaggerate our animal nature and let the doctored embryo drawings to stay in the books to confuse the students? Public Medline gives about 20 hits with “Haeckel” in the title. It is unfortunate, that these articles having at least a connotation of a history of science, are not conventionally abstracted, because the journals in question often are either old, obscure, or not written in English, and therefore are not easily accessible.
The struggle for existence in print is not a sound frame for a real bioethical intervention. Now that the main DNA-riddles are solved – when facing a whole millennium - there are practical opportunities to be taken. Are not there any indirect social costs for the resurrected 'logic' of efficiency? I am afraid, that the activism opposing "gene food" and animal experiments are consuming the public trust to such protest movements to the day, when we see a new round of human experimentation.
The need for better clinical models apart from the animals is a stunning fact. As an example, there are almost fifty drug candidates that have been able to protect brain tissue from ischemic reperfusion injury in animal models - but all of them have failed to help the (wealthy Western) human patients.
DNA fingerprints are being introduced to the airports of the United States in 2005, and in theory the tool could not only identify people but also group them according to their ethnic backround, sex and age in the forensic science. The human genome project (HGP) was the largest government-funded research project in the history of the biomedical sciences to date, and the take-over of a private company with the fast shotgun sequencing based on the public scaffolds was an unpleasant sign for many. To put the HGP in any historical perspective, it's most important message is this: There are no human races. Negrids, mongolids, euripids, whatever. Allelic variation or SNPs (single nuclear polymorphisms) are only found at a frequency of 1 SNP/0,6-1,9 kb throughout the genome[31]. The DNA in the genome of any two individuals is 99.9 per cent identical with the 0.1 per cent variation arising primarily from some three million single nucleotide changes. The recent indications of the large-scale copy variations (LCVs) hesitates the conclusion[32], though, but we can only curse the Haeckelian legacy of a minor difference between the "sheep and goats".
We only grasp our inherent racism, if we are consistent and adjust our emotions to the fact that 95% of the population in Haiti are White. That is, we tend to notice even the least trace of the black colour. In the uncorrupted Finland, we hate only two things: Racism and Jews. In 1.3.-7.5. 2002 Helsingin Sanomat (with a print of ~500,000 in our country of 5,000,000 people) devoted on the details of the operation "Defensive Shield" huge space. According to my measurements, fighting's claiming a total of ~500 casualties covered at least the following space: 0,8 m2 of premiar page, 4,2 m2 in C1-C5 pages (of which 8 times the whole premiar page C1 of the news from foreign countries was panelled), 18 leader columns, and 5 quotes from other newspapers in the premiar. The press is not satisfied in "the fourth" place of the three state authorities.
HGP was proudly presented as a panacea solving every conceivable medical problem, even major social issues like criminality and homelessness. The rumours tell that within ten year a patient's genome can be sequenced by 10,000 euros and that the Single Nuclear Polymorphisms (SNiPs) may reach the diagnosis of even the plastic national diseases like blood pressure or Alzheimer’s. The eugenics of old hailed the expansion of the iron Mendelian Laws, while the new trend is taking advantage of rapid developments in molecular genetics that the genome initiatives provide. The brutal legislations of the 1930's were boosted by industrialization, urbanization and depression, but now the emerging era is more bio-technocratic even to begin with. The bottle neck is not the Moore's law of computer power in deciphering the genetic SNP interactions, but the common sense.
Treatment or treat? The medicalization and geneticization is much more integrated to the "information society" than in the heyday of the old eugenics expansion. Behaviour-controlling drugs divert attention from therapies, counselling and from the underlying causes of problems. Could the tools to sequence individual genomes be even more persuasive to public to cure the recessive social traits than in the last round? Human mental and moral traits were not “inherited in the same manner as coat colour in Guinea-Pigs", but the law of mass action rules the popularization of the science so called. The somatic gene therapies and germline gene replacements are the captions in the modern exhibitions, and the corporate pressure is as likely scenario as the state pressure. Should the supranational insurance companies be permitted to deny coverage for families with pre-existing genetic conditions? Can the insurance be made conditional on selective abortion? Indeed, the nearest caveat of "laissez-faire eugenics" is in the genetic screening tests and amniocentesis during the pregnancy and dealing with deviant behaviour.
The stem cells patrolling in the blood flow are screening the tissues and have a surprising potential to repair organ failures. Not only the circulating cells, but also the usage of the secreted plasma proteins are lagging behind. In protein chemistry - apart from the genetic screens - the most widely studied proteome beyond any doubt is the blood plasma, which stands in a more solid ground, as a discipline with a long tradition. The published genetic contributions to quantitative variation of even the fifteen most widely used plasma proteins for clinical diagnosis varies from 12% (in the case of C-peptide) to 95% (lipoprotein a), with an average of 62%. It is troubling, that only a few proteins are routinely used in clinical diagnosis currently, and that the rate of introduction of new protein-based tests has declined despite the rapid progress of the field with the new proteomics methods. The intraindividual coefficients of variation for the most common set of proteins are 5-50% and the interindividual value is between 14-92% (Anderson & Anderson 2002). Genetic screening of promotor regions are more prone to determinism, and can lead to neglection of "oldfashioned" markers such as the amount of cofactor metals or feedback integrator metabolites having their own receptors with nanomolar affinity. What is the take home message from the modern twin studies? The genetic variation in the traditional twin studies would have been zero percentages in every given parameter. The laymen have not been properly adviced that the genetic fingerprints most commonly used are rather helpless when facing twins. Conan Doyle and his lobby for fingerprinting dating back to Francis Galton's days (and to the days of the hoax of the Piltdown man that Doyle might have designed) do distinguish between the twins!
Besides, with the advance of combinatorial chemistry affinity beads, target-independent antibody discoveries etc., we would be able to find new and more natural "drugs" among the very dilute but potent proteins from blood plasma or platelet-activated serum. There are over 300 assigned proteins in the circulation at the literature, and an order of magnitude more of them to be assigned. Nevertheless, an order of magnitude less of these protein categories is currently being used in any therapy. Even hydroxylethyl starch seems to be more attractive vehicle than the most common plasma protein, albumin, whose antioxidant, transporting and scavenging capacities has not been harvested in the preparations for more specific indications.
The sensational (neuro)genetic determinism is built-in to the hungry and angry mass media, and the genetic markers are advanced with extensive publicity, but only quietly withdrawn. The scientists have to be also storytellers to get funding in the bewildering pace of data flow and inaugurated technical journals. It is the journals at the crossroads of natural and social sciences (collegially referred to as "bull-shitting") that is the bottle neck of publication. Alternatively, the technical journals should invite also peer reviewers with a humanist backround.
The early eugenics argued that working-class strata were outbreeding the wealthy elites at home, but since the World War II, the warnings have dealt with the poor nations outbreeding the advanced nations. We became concerned about "global population growth", which means: The large family size in the Third World. Medical research does not bother with the infant mortality and diarrhoea in the "developing" countries. HIV drugs are only the most apparent case of the lack of real concern. The post-colonial Western countries do not tend to devote media attention to the millions dying in Zaire, Rwanda, Sudan etc. Instead, the old lightning conductor has been found from the state of Israel. One-fourth of the judgements of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and even half of the non-binding resolutions of the UN target Israel. The "developing" countries at the face of the globalization could be likened to the institutionalized individuals or "useless eaters" of the past. The contemporary media war can not be but compared to the rising anti-Semitic tones in most of the European countries between the World Wars. Neither Monism nor anti-Semitism was merely a German phenomenon.
The social problems should be dealt inside the social sphere and the Emma Goldman's are still needed in the society to fill the vacuum of the Western communism that became extinct. Also the scientific progress can not escape its social anchorage and the medicalization should be hindered even if we are to face an economic decline. Neurogenetic determinism as a moral excuse is like pissing to pants in a frost day: it warms up at the beginning, but in the longer run you only feel more chilly.
The babble on "selfish genes" may be pleasant to young and sporty men, but the babble is not worth the public understanding of science, given the exponential number of kids living without their father in house. I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf ("Struggle"). It is the 180-degree angle opposite to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee that I desire. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self-sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of reality.
The myth of recapitulation and of the rhetoric of the "gill slits", "tail", "fins", and "furrows" a'la Haeckel should be de-popularized just like atavistic physical signs of criminals by the way of Cesare Lombroso was eradicated from the Finnish lawyers, de jure. The new legislation for the economic utilization of human embryos for their stem cells and fertilization for research purposes is being done at an ethical tangent of our civilized society.
The layman should be prepared for the threat of genetic determinism and quasi-science at the face of the individual genome sequencing, SNiPs, expanding DNA fingerprinting, pet cat cloning, and other riddles in the new, brave, era of "algeny". After the lamentations regarding the feeble minded, FAQ-idiocy in the cabinets of the natural sciences and divide et impera casted on the "focused" thesis' of the students is the main risk I see. This genre of bioscience should next "find the gene for" intimidation and peer pressure. The fate is not in the stars, nor in the genes, as the codiscovered of the structure of DNA, Dr. Watson, claimed. This fact should be elementary.
[1] Schulman studied in Jena in 1889-90, 91, and 99-00, at the time when Welträtsel was published.
[2] Henrik Ramsay wrote to Haeckel in 1.12.1909. He was a chemist who prepared his doctoral thesis in Emil Fischer's lab and in collaboration e.g. with Otto Diels (Nobel from 1954) in Berlin and Posen, Germany in 1906-1909. He is mainly recalled as the Foreign Minister of Finland in 1943-1944 in the cabinet of the prime minister, professor Edwin Linkomies. Ramsay's role in withdrewing Finland from the brotherhood-in-arms with the Nazi-Germany has recently been articulated in the dissertation of Erkki Maasalo (2004). Ramsay's father was a mathematician and his uncle was a geologist, who coined not only large mineral discoveries in Finland but also the term "Fennoscandia".
[3] E.g. a letter from Fritz Lenz to Harry Federley in 25.3.1924 and 19.11.1924, HFk, HYK.
[4] Alfred Ploetz to harry Federley, 31 August 1928, and harry H. Haughlin to Harry Federley, 16 January 1934 and 23 May 1934, papers of Harry Federley, Helsinki University Library; Weindling 1989, p. 150.
[5] Mattila quotes a letter from Fritz Lenz to Harry Federley from 29.10.1911 (HFk, HYK): "Siw werben doch auch Anhänger für unserem rassenhygienischen Gedanken, besonders unter den dortigen Schweden?"
[6] Jews were expelled from England between the years 1290-1650 and William Shakespeare wrote his Merchant of Venice near the end of the expulsion. Most probably, Shakespeare had never seen a Jew alive. Shylock never was an archetype of a Jew, but an archetype of acceptance of a racist stereotype.
[7] The central archive of Helsinki University: Interview archive of Hertta Tirranen (H. Federley). Tirronen also wrote down Federley's description e.g. on the dubious backround of Odo Morannal Reuter. Reuter the older had an arranged marriage and even his wife who joined him to the academic excursion in Leipzig did not have a clue, where Odo Reuter was having fun. Later on, the man "escaped with a Jewish lady Rosa Lexenberg to abroad without asking the license from his duties at the university". "'Er war ein bodenlos leichtsinniger Mann' and also the gangsters of Helsinki knew Reuter well."
[8] Letters from Charles Davenport to Harry Federley in 12.1.1931 and 18.3.1931, HFk, HYK. The founders were G.P. Frets, P.J. Waardenburg, Harry Federley, Jon Alfred Mjøen, Herman Nilsson-Ehle, R.R. Gates, and Fritz Lenz. A letter from G.P. Frets to Harry Federley from 23.1.1932, HFk, HYK.
[9] The date of the first annual Blood Donor Day 14th June 2004 was chosen to commemorate Karl Landsteiner. Did Landsteiner also have a mission for the emansipation of his suspiced Jewish fellowmen in prooving the safe blood transfusion between different ethnic groups, I do not know. The BDD is very important for recruiting blood donors in the developing countries today.
[10] Thomas' uncle had led a unit with the nick-name in the American Civil War. Muller seems to have been the outsider of the team, although he was a creative thinker who got his own Nobel in 1947 for studies demonstrating the relationship between dosage of X-rays and mutation rate; Allen 1984.
[11] The first division of meiosis.
[12] GMO material accepted in Finland can be followed in http://www.geenitekniikanlautakunta. fi/GMO.htm.
[13] Harry Federley to Herman Lundborg 22.12.1924.
[14] Harry Federley to Herman Lundborg 25.5.1919 and 11.11.1919, H.L.'s, UUB; Herman Lundborg to Harry Federley 30.11.1919, HFk, HYK.
[15] Committee for legalising Eugenic Sterilisation. Other Countries 1929-1932, Papers of the Eugenics Society, London university College, Eug/D 208; Memoranda concerning various laws. Dr. J. Crowley Board of Control, Papers of the Eugenics Society, London University College, Eug/D 226.
[16] The first dozens of sterilizations were alegal at least in the repercussions of the Civil War in Finland (Mattila 1999, pp. 226-254).
[17] Federley gave Lundborg a listening ear for his worries on funding and for his antisemitic conspiracy scenarios “Alla institut av detta slag ha att vänta sig angrepp eller ovilja icke blott av okunniga...utan också hemligt muldvadsarbete från judiskt håll”. Lundborg til Federley 27.1.1925. UUB Lundborgs arkiv.
[18] Letters from charles Davenport to Harry Federley in 12.1.1931 and 18.3.1931, HFk, HYK. The founders were G.P. Frets, P.J. Waardenburg, Harry Federley, Jon Alfred Mjøen, Herman Nilsson-Ehle, R.R. Gates, and Fritz Lenz. A letter from G.P. Frets to harry Federley in 23.1.1932, HFk, HYK.
[19] The Third International Congress on Eugenics. Eugenical News, Vol XVII (1932), 137, 156.
[20] C.A. Borgström, Eine Serie von Kriminellen Zwillingen. ARGB, Band 33 (1939), 334-343. A letter from Fritz Lenz to Harry Federley in 24.10.1939, HFk, HYK.
[21] Komiteanmietintö [Committee Report], no. 5. YEAR?
[22] The real shocker as an accusation against the Harriman bank later on comes in the shape of Aarons & Loftus -book The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (1994). John Loftus is the former US Justice Department Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor, who has access to the files from the WWII. As a private attorney he has helped intelligence agents to obtain lawful permission to declassify top secrets. The research by Loftus and Aarons is severely biased in its topic, but it is their "license to leak" that has stirred up discussion to the point of open and public letters from organizations like Antifa to G.W. Bush. Loftus and Aarons are one of the authors claiming that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in the time of war. The accusations refer to I.G. Farben, well-known for its connection to German in provision of oil, chemicals, and munitions. The cartel is also mentioned in the context of building and operating slave labor factories and death camps after their scaling up from the euthanasia projects. To make a long story on nihilism short: These cartels gave a totally new meaning for recycling, human transplants and Haeckelian term of ecology. The Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company located in a particularly well-known area in Poland. Loftus and Aarons claim tha under the sharing with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being held for enemy nationals. The U.S. government supposedly found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort. As for George Herbert Walker (Prescott's father-in-law) is blamed for having been one of Hitler's most powerful financial investors in the United States. The relationship supposedly went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. If true, Walker was supporting the movement in its most vulnerable and critical period. It was the period after the 1923 inflation, when Hitler was released from prison and the politics were brutalized and radicalized. The foreign currency prooved to be vital when inflation raised the exchange rate fabulously high. (1.11.1923 one US dollar costed 130,000 million German marks, which consumed all of the savings of the middle class.) SA troops (storm troopers) numbered 350,000 men when the correspondent ultra rightwing parties got only a few percentages of the votes in elections. Who paid these private arms that were four times larger than the German army after the Versailles peace treaty? SA did not manage its duties for charity and its hired troops were not considered "Altkämpfers", as the organization was dismantled after Hitler assumed power. Despite the title of Fritz Thyssen's (1873-1951) book I paid Hitler (1941) the sum of 1 million German marks displayed in it do not explain much. Fritz Thyssen fled from the Nazi-Germany after the invasion of Poland and died in a concentration camp in 1945. He did not acknowledge the authorship of the book, however. As a dilettant in the study, I feel temptation to ask, whether the book was a public cover? Hitler confessed funding from abroad, and merely denied the connection to Henry Ford with his Kampf with the Dodge brothers. As far as the story goes, in the fourth generation the great grandfather Samuel Bush kept specimen of lower races in cages for show and had an antropologist to lecture on them. Loftus and Aarons are also the authors of the Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks (1993) that was opening the allegations for the anonymous Swiss treasuries. I must confess that I feel some sympathy for George Walker Bush' redemptive pursuits with his White House Papers for embryos, despite all the fury in the media.
[23] Suuri Maailmanhistoria, 17, 1986, p. 278. Otava, Helsinki, Finland
[24] Schulman studied in Jena in 1889-90, 91, and 99-00, at the time when Welträtsel was published.
[25] http://vesta.narc.fi/cgi-bin/db2www/sotasurmaetusivu/main
[26] Luonnon Ystävä 1/1904, pp. 46-47.
[27] Luonnon Ystävä 2/1914, pp. 80-81.
[28] Soviet Union's major offensive begun in June 1944, when Finland's relations to Nazi-Germany were on trial because of attempts for a separate peace. Finland was in lack of food, weapons and ammunition, and the Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded guarantees that Finland would not seek a separate peace again. Ryti signed his personal guarantee that Finland under his presidency would restrain from peace. When the situation was stabilized, Ryti resigned and negotiations for peace could continue from a safer position for a neighbour of the Soviet regime.
[29] http://www.europarl.eu.int/meetdocs/committees/gene/20010618/440768FI.pdf
[30] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowTOC&rid=dbio.TOC&depth=2
Stem cell business in the Hackelian shadow
It has been said that if the year 1796 is recalled for the discovery of vaccines (by Edward Jenner), year 1928 for the discovery of antibiotics (by Alexander Fleming and others), then the year 1998 will be recalled as the year when pluripotent stem cells from embryos were cultured in a controlled way for the first time (by James Thomson and others).
According to the Stakes information welfare and health care statistics, the percentage of in vitro fertilization in Finland has increased steadfastly from the year 1984 to a level of 2,5% of all of the births (since 1978 abroad). It should be clear, that there is experience of protocols for handling and culturing embryonic cells in the literature, whereas the experience with the (multipotent) adult progenitor cells, umbilical cord blood stem cells etc. is lagging far behind (bone marrow cells excluded).
Stem cells have been observed even in the case of neurological tissues and all of the muscle types. Dennis Bray elaborates the new insights in his textbook in my own topic of biomechanic force and dynamics of actin cytoskeleton. Actin acts to form the embryonic expansions, contractions, thickenings, folds, and invaginations in the embryos (Bray 2001[1]). Stem cells have been observed in adult body even in the case of neurological tissues and all of the muscle types. Just a few years ago muscles or brain cells were catechorical examples whose renewal was unheard of. The recent observations represent a rather complete volte face. The breakthroughs have been derived not only from the totipotent - and ethically most problematic - stem cells from alien tissues (embryos), but from their physiological counterparts, too. That is, progenitor cells from one's own body. The adult body stem cells could bear less risk of transplantic rejection and malignant growth, and they also have already been used for preliminary therapeutic purposes.
Anthropology corrected the Haeckelian legacy of racism from the textbooks over 50 years ago. Embryology has been transformed into a new discipline named “developmental biology”, but I think this should not distract an analogous responsibility. This is especially true due to the economic interests involved, ever since the methodologies in cultivating embryonic stem cells have abrupted.
I think the Haeckelian legacy should be discussed in the context of the abortion legislation, myth of disability of human babies to feel pain upon birth, psychoanalysis, and sexual revolution. How many pregnant women have been persuaded by referring to the confusing "fish stages" of their subhuman embryos or fetuses? Does the modern utilization of human embryos for their stem cells overlap with the same discipline that bears the responsibility for cherissing the memory of Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel? Accusations against Haeckelian deceits have been heard through all of the 20th century technocracy.
I will recall the late Stephen Jay Gould for his laconic statement: "Tales of scientific fraud excite the imagination for good reason. Getting away with this cademic equivalent of murder and then being outed a century after your misdeeds makes even a better copy." (Gould 2000).
And for Gould's conclusion quoting von Baer quoting his predecossor Agassiz: " Agassiz says that when a new doctrine is presented, it must go through three stages. First, people say that it isn't true, then that it is against religion, and in the third stage, that it has long been known--- But we must beware the dreaded third stage, for when we capitulate and then smugly state that we knew it all along, we easily fall into the greatest danger of all - smug complacency - because we have ceased to question and observe." (Gould 2000).
Gould was harsh on creationists, but lived long enough to state that Richardson deserves nothing but praise for for directing attention to this old issue, and cites a letter Richardson had sent to him 16th August 1999:
"'If so many historians knew all about the old controversy, then why did they not communicate this information to the numerous contemporary authors who use the Haeckel drawings in their books? I know of at least fifty recent biology texts which use the drawings uncritically. I think this is the most important question to come out of the whole story.'" (Gould 2000.)
The full name of the main expression of Haeckel was entitled The riddle of the universe at the close of the nineteenth century. Now that the main DNA-riddles are solved, at the close of the twentieth century, there are some more practical opportunities to be taken.
The first round of the prior high-water mark could not work out because of the recessivity. Now we have better means by "algeny", and the folks are already relatively apathetic to abortions, as an indicative. Science is a self-correcting process, but the technical criticism does not seem to reach the depth of its social anchorage.
I think the "publish-or-perish" –competition is not a particularly sound framework for ethical discussions to begin with. But to add here the possibility of an example, where the self-correcting peer review turned into a peer pressure process, makes the matter even worse.
Alas, because the Haeckelian legacy has its historical roots in Germany, I think a forum to the enfant terrible of the philosophy of science - Paul Feyerabend - is appropriate. Only a remnant of the German troops ever came back from the encirclement battles of the failured Barbarossa. Feyerabend was an "aesthetic" substitute ("lieutenant" in the literal meaning of the word) of a Major of Wehrmacht. After shot in the spine in the most tragical way, he ended up to a career as a philosopher of science with his second class Iron Cross. Feyerabend's "epistemologically anarchistic" opening from his position as a professor in Berkeley is infamous for its herecy:
"Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits. And as the accepting and rejecting of ideologies should be left to the individual it follows that the separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution. Such a separation may be our only chance to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realized." (Against Method, 1975, p. 295.)
Feyerabend ended up in opposition to his mentor Karl Popper from the Thomas Kuhn's point of view. He alleged that great scientists may be "methodological opportunists", who use any moves that comes to hand, even to the point that they violate the lines of empiricist methodology.
Public Medline gives only 28 hits with “Ernst Haeckel”, 8 of which are in the title. It is unfortunate, that the articles having at least a connotation of a history of science, are not conventionally abstracted. The journals in question are usually either obscure, old, or not written in English, and therefore not easily accessible to the empirists. Despite of the modest interest in the full articles, Ernst Haeckel has been weighed and found wanting. At the new round of eugenics, the new generation of bioscientists should not be intimidated from stating the evident: Let thy gifts be to thyself.
I emphasize that the medical endeavours related to embryonic stem cells are pragmatic, but sincerely noble and respectable in aims. But how significant are the indirect social consequences of the medical competition on this ethical tangent? The enterprise should not be darkened because of economic interests of a small number of people. McGee and Wolpe, as an example, have expressed their concern over the level of abstraction in the current ethical discourse. Are the terminology and definitions of the debate really narrowed to make the public opposition more complicated to mount?[2]
In my personal experience as a graduent student attending to the lectures, training days and conferences of modern bioethics, I cannot see how could this be "completely irrelevant" for the current choices of research traditions. Does a doctorate in biosciences require indifference to doctored results in the level of popularization?
I do not want to blackmail people doing a noble medical research. I do not want to call collective quilt even for the ones lobbying for the new legislations, since there are sincere therapeutic promises. I have merely gathered circumstancial evidence suggesting that the premisses for the new ethical logics and reasons for a change in research tradition have not been straightforwardly popularized. Authority and responsibility should go hand in hand. Developmental biologists, as ethicists, never whisper the word Hackel in public. The concept of legal incompetence can be best understood by the phrase of the fox as a guard of the henhouse.
Are the seminars in the bioethics only trivial? In the Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index for 2003, Finland came out at #1 – the fourth time in a row. The World Medical Association developed a declaration in 1964 as a statement of ethical principles to provide guidance to physicians and other participants in medical research involving human subjects. It is called the Declaration of Helsinki (Launis et al 2002). Who should consider the importance of being earnest, if not the bioscientists in this country? We should be earnest to our past. A nation that fails to learn from history is condemned to repeat it, said the poet.
Germany was the most scientifically and culturally advanced nation of the world upon opening the riddles at the close of the nineteenth century, and in 1933 the German people had not lived normal life for twenty years. And so Adolf Hitler did not need his revolution. He did not have to break the laws in Haeckel's country, in principle, but to constitute them.
Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.
This representation was motivated by the frustration of having to introduce the Haeckelian legacy even to the expert developmental biologists as if most of them were not aware of it. In my opinion, the human kind just seems to forget not only the reality of a war in the brief lapse of two generations, if it has not left a personal touch.
I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf (Struggle). The idea of competition is innate in the modern society. It is the the opposite view in a 180 degree angle to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee, that I personally cheriss. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of the reality. For the sake of the public understanding of science and trust, a public recapitulation of the Haeckelian legacy by developmental biologists themselves would be vital. As a practical measure, I suggest that the simplified embryo drawings of the simplified upper panel -drawings of Ernst Haeckel in the Finnish textbooks of biology should be abolished. Also the corrections in the internet-appendixes like in Scott Gilberts Developmental Biology (2000) would be highly wellcomed in Finland, for this has putatively been the most recycled item of our schoolbooks of biology in the 20th century.
Take up the White Man's burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought).
Watch sloth and heathen folly;
Bring all your hope to nought.
Rudyard Kipling (the first British Nobel laureate in literature), McLure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
Epilogue: August 2001, The White House Paper and “the sins of the fathers”
An open self-correction process and falsification, in addition to the verification criteria, is vital for the public understanding of science. If moon is cheese in the premisses, it might be correct to implicate in a long chain of deduction that the author of the Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (the another concerned candidate) is the president of the Unites States. A mistake in the premisses given from natural scientist to humanists is fatal, as the logical course per se cannot reach its refutation.
President George Walker Bush addressed his nation in the 9th of August, 2001, on the potential of some types of embryonic stem cells to lead to new and revolutionary therapies. In his speech, President Bush publicly commended and called for more federal funding of scientific research using stem cells from sources other than human embryos. Instead of federal funding for the embryonic stem cell research, focusing on the ~65 preliminary ebryonic stem cell lines, adult progenitor cells – and private companies in the wild market - was exhorted in the largest economy of the world.
The White House Paper can be reproached for using a double standard on ethics, regarding approval of the foreign ESC-lines that were already introduced and concerning the mere transfer of the embryonic utilization from the state to the private companies. Nevertheless, this statement seems to be the most wellknown attempt for a request of a time-up, and I consider this opinion as the singularity on the bioethics against the putative challenge to the Hippocratean research tradition. Next I try to shed light on the historical significance and the political repercussions behind the "White House Paper".
Now that the US archives of the WW II are being declassified by the Interagency Working Group, as appointed by William Clinton in 1995, extremely stringent questions have been asked regarding the civilian annihilation and the Western coalition (Jokisipilä 2001). Why did not the allies bombard the civilian destruction factories, or even their railway connections during their air reign, despite the fervent requests? Both London and Washington were aware, after all, of the destiny of the Jewish civilians, their co-victims, and their protectors, since the Barbarossa that began in June 1941. The number of broken messages 1941-42 was nearly two thousand. One burst could contain even 3000 casualities, and these "enigmas" were so congruent and monogenous that soon they were not even briefed to the British leaders etc. After the war, this information was hidden from the courts of war crimes. The cold war against the former Soviet Union began earlier than thought.
No Jew, as an indication, was handed Red Cross passport, whereas fugitive men like the commendant of Treblinka (Stangl), Death angel with his "mengelian genetics" (Mengele), the leader of the Gestapo in Poland (Kutschmann), and "The Butchler of Lyon" (Barbie) were allowed it - and even recruited for the western espionages in the last case, according to the most controversial intelligence surveys by Loftus and Aarons (1993, 1994). There were only a handful convicted men in Nürnberg, usually released a few years later. The bulk part of the race-breeders and, finally, civilian massmurderers, escaped via the "ratline" through Italy with the smuggled money stolen from the war victims. Despite the pious smoke screen after the shoa (unvoluntary holocaust), the economical collaboration and outright money laundring for Nazies in the west went largely untried, it seems.
Ethics in science means the study of morals, not moralizing as such. In contrast to the rhyme pecunia non olet (money does not smell), I think this is a most relevant issue because in the business the free act of choice is most emphasized.
This has nothing to do with the new ethics of modern bioscience, has it? It might have. As a result of the White House Paper, the scientific community in the Europe seems to have stood up to oppose the "banning politics" of George Bush Jr. in a nearly solid front. Why did the "president's men" call to Scandinavian professors (Outi Hovatta, personal communication) to home at the mid-night to ask the number of the existing embryonic stem cell lines, then?
George Bush Junior got both of his names from George Bush Senior - the second Vespasian-Titus relationship in the history of one of the world's oldest democracies.[3] The father of George Bush Senior and the grandfather of George Bush Junior was the post-war senator Prescott Bush, from whom the two presidents inherited their family name. The grandfather of George Bush Senior and the great-grandfather of George Bush Junior was investor (and former heavyweight boxing champion) George Herbert Walker, from whom the two presidents inherited their first name. The second name of G. W. Bush denotes Walker, whereas the whole name of the Senior president is George Herbert Walker Bush.
Classified ones are not the files of choice as scientific references, but an introduction to the one of the most heated debates related to the motives behind the Bush'es seems not only justified, but a key insight, to me.
Among the most prominent authors linking the fathers of the Bush family directly to Nazi Germany is the former US Justice Department Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor John Loftus, mentioned above. As a prosecutor, Loftus had access to Top Secret files, and as a private attorney he has helped intelligence agents to obtain lawful permission to declassification. The research by Loftus and Aarons is severely biased in its topic, but it is their "license to leak" that has stirred up discussion to the point of open and public letters from organizations like Antifa to G.W. Bush.
The most controversial titles of Loftus and Aarons include Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks (1993, 1998) and The Secret War against the Jews: How the Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (1994).
Loftus and Aarons are one of the authors claiming that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in the time of war. The accusations refer to I.G. Farben, well-known for its connection to German in provision of oil, chemicals, and munitions. The cartel is also mentioned in the context of building and operating slave labor factories and death camps after their scaling up from the euthanasia projects.
To make a long story on nihilism short: These cartels gave a totally new meaning for recycling, human transplants and Haeckelian term of ecology. The Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company located in a particularly well-known area in Poland. As far as the most recent accusations by Loftus go, the coal deposits could be processed into coal or additives for gasoline - in Auschwitz.
According to Loftus and Aarons, Prescott Bush became the national chairman of the United Service Organization's annual fund campaign, which raised $33 million 1942 to provide entertainment for Allied troops. That was also the year, when the 18-year old George Bush Senior abandoned his plans to enter Yale, and made the historical decision to volunteer in the war. Loftus and Aarons claim that while George Bush Sr. was in flight school preparing himself to save his family's reputation, the U.S. government charged his father with running Nazi front groups in the country.
"Under the sharing with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being held for enemy nationals… The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort" (Loftus & Aarons 1994, p. 360-1).
As for George Walker, according to the accusations of Loftus and Aarons, at the time he did not yet directly benefit from financing Hitler. He invested.
"Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party." (p. 358).
If true, Walker was supporting the movement in its most vulnerable and critical period. It was the period after the 1923 inflation, when Hitler was released from prison and the politics were brutalized and radicalized. The foreign currency prooved to be vital, when inflation raised the exchange rate fabulously high. (1.11.1923 one US dollar costed 130,000 million German marks, which consumed all of the savings of the middle class.)
SA troops (storm troopers) numbered 350,000 for many years when the correspondent ultra rightwing parties got only a few percentage of the votes in elections. Who paid these private arms, that were four times larger than the German army after the Versailles? SA did not manage its duties for charity and its troops were not considered "Altkämpfers", as the organization was dismantled after Hitler assumed power. Despite the title of Fritz Thyssen's (1873-1951) book "I paid Hitler" (1941) the sum of 1 million German marks displayed in it is not satisfactory. Fritz Thyssen fled from the Nazi-Germany after the invasion of Poland and died in a concentration camp in 1945. He did not acknowledge the authorship of the I paid Hitler, however. As a dilettant in the study, I feel temptation to ask, whether the book was a public cover?
The most malicious online book George Bush - The Unauthorized biography (http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm) was published by Tarpley and Chaitkin as an assault against the re-election campaign of George Bush Sr. in 1991. Regardless of the documentation of its claims (which I find wanting), these assaults have to be taken into account in order to understand the political backround for the White House Paper.
Tarpley and Chaitkin introduced also the fourth generation, great grandfather Samuel Bush, as a child of his World War I –time. As far as the story goes, Samuel Bush' clan kept specimen of lower races in cages for show and had an antropologist to lecture on them. (The preferred cage-race were "Bushmen" not only in Ernst Haeckel's science books…) To put things in perspective, again, the accusations of "sins of the fathers" in the "bushism" could be compared to the accusations against some neutral countries, such as in the case of the Swiss banks or Swedish industry. Esse non videri: In their The Art of Cloaking, Aalders and Wiebes present a case of even a closer link to the IG Farben (1989, 1996) in the case of the largest private bank in Sweden. If Joseph Stalin, in accords with his name, trusted in steel, see Fritz 1973 for a review of Swedish iron ore and German war industry.
The export and import numbers, respectively, with the Nazi German in the case of the semi-allied Finland were 16.2% and 20.7% in 1939; 52.6% and 20.3% in 1940; 53,5% and 53,2% in 1941; 65,8% and 72,0% in 1942; 67,1% and 75,0% in 1943; and 66,5% and 71,1% in 1944 (Visuri & Forsberg 1992; The 1939 numbers are indicative of the fact that Finland fought and hardly survived through the Winter War all alone, without an ally).
Indeed, due to the many Swedish ESC-lines in the White House Paper, Sweden is called "the imperium of stem cells" in the Finnish press describing the economical promises in the field. Due to the pioneering position of Sweden in the popularization, especial openness to ethical scrutiny is required. In the lightly populated Sweden, the annual number of forced sterilization was at least 2000 even in 1948-49, just after the Word War II (Reilly 1991, pp. xiii). It is dramatical, that Simon Wiesenthal has lived nearly 100 years, after visiting his 44 kg. A rough estimation of the number of documents putting forward the heroic story of Raoul Wallenberg in the Swedish media is some three thousands. From the view point of the accusations against Raoul's two uncles, a document per 10-30 rescued Jews could righteously be called biased popularization. This pious smoke screen has indeed been noticed by the "Nazi-hunters".
We are living at the time of the declassification of files from the World War II, but privileged researchers would not have had to wait to check the roots of the brutalizing recapitulationary myth. The scientific references were never classified. Haeckel's bitter materialism culminated in the upper right panel of his most famous illustration: in the "earliest" stage of the human embryo.
What if
president Bush tried to be earnest within this particular topic? What if he
could have been precisely the man who should have been taken dead seriously?
What if we would also consider judging the present in the past context, before
the market forces break loose?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I take the whole responsibility for the substance, content and style of this thesis, and dedicate my endeavour to the memory of the Yrjö Reenpää –prized Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), whose Hungarian Jewish papa Joe was notwithstanding in the “mismeasure of man“. I am a poor graduate student, who has to quote authorities.
Apart from the economical utility of the human embryos, is a new round of Judenfrage rising simultaneously with eugenics, again? - out of all the cases handled by the UN Commission on Human Rights, nearly one fourth of the judgments have been focused against the single democracy of Israel. Nearly one third of the cases brought up to the Security Counsil have been to do with the same nation. William Shakespeare wrote his Merchant of Venice near the end of the expulsion of Jews from England (1290-1650). I am afraid we are descending to a modern syndrome of Shylock-stereotypology with the selectivity and short memory of the global media war.
The tragedy of the heritage of the German Monist League was not the mania of a corporal and a postcard artist, but the indifference of the whole Europe. Indifference is also the key to understand the recycling of the fraudulent Haeckelian embryo drawings. The recapitulationary and phylotypic embryos seem to have been the most recycled item of the 2000th century schoolbooks of biology in Finland.
My personal determination was predestinated when my 15-year old grandfather had to dug the frozen solid and fullpacked graveyard of Jokioinen during the Winter War against the Soviet Union, for his friends killed in action. Pecunia non olet? Let the experience of the melt smell of the spring, and the lifelong nightmares symbolize the persistance of the motivation. My grandfather volunteered in the platoon scouting the departure of the last German troops out of the country in the landmark of three nations at the end of the Lapland War against Germany. They replied to the "Heil Hitler" of the last officer representing the Third Reich, across the border, and had to search far to find a scrubby-tree tall enough to carry the Finnish flag. My grandfather was another of the two men who delivered the message to the commander after skiing down the no-man's-land. And so the war ended.
The Swedish Alfred Nobel was a salesman of death, but he testamented his money as noble prizes to the persons who had most helped the humankind. In the 20th century fog, about 700 persons got the prize. Nearly 150 of these had an ethnically Jewish heritage, which means over 20% coverage by a population of 0,25%, numbering less than 20 million people (www.dorledor.org; www.science.co.il/Nobel.asp). In the medicine, the portion of laureates is 25%.
Von Wasserman tested vaccines or antitoxins against cholera, tuberculosis, syfilis, tetanus, typhoid, and diphteria. Marmorek made discoveries for multiple epidemics. Haffkine succesfully vaccinated against cholera. Schick developed diphteria-diagnostics and vaccines, Ehrlich salvarsan for syphilis. Neisser & Co. found gonococks causing gonorrhea. Digitalis found by Traube used to be the most used medicine at the time, and also Levine alleviated heart attacks. Typhoid fever was treated by the methods of Vidal and Weil, Woronan and Waksman found streptomysin, the most used chemotherapeutics of its day. Waksman introduced the phrase “antibiotic“, and found also neomysin. Chain was one of the three awarded and knighted for penicillin. Funk invented the concept of vitamins and made research until D, whereas Hess concentrated on the C-letter and scurvy. Reichstein extracted cortison, cocaine used to be one of the first painkillers and tested by Koller to his friend Sigmund Freud (who, consequently, had to go through 33 face surgeries in his lifetime). Minkowski was involved in the story behind diabetes and insulin, Landsteiner developed two different blood categories, whence working transfusion began. Contributors to DNA techniques include Lederberg, Kornberg, Nirenberg etc. Salk institute, the unofficial headquarters of the actin biochemistry, recalls the heritage of Sabin and Salk. Jonas Salk granted an inactivated polio vaccine to the mankind although he became neither a Nobel laureate, nor a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. No patent - no patient: in the countries that have adopted it to systematic use, the infantile paralysis has been almost eradicated.
“If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the Swastika?“ gives 50,000 hits in the Internet. This phrase was the main reason, why the Jenin commission of Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, was not established. The cynical tradition dates back to the days of Francis Poncet, when the commendant of Treblinka (Stangl), Death angel with his Mengelian genetics, The Butchler of Lyon (Barbie), the leader of the Getapo in Poland (Kutschmann) etc. got the diplomacy passport of the International Red Cross via Ratlines to the South America. The strategic names of the 30,000 fugitive Nazis and SS-officers were recruited by the western espionages, which were thus infiltrated by the KGP and GRU. This single act opportunism dug the trenches for the Cold War. De facto every western agent was executed behind the Iron Curtain, and the status quo had to be reached by the damned nukes.
Dear Markku Niskala, as a former secretary general of the Finnish Red Cross and present secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies: What if You would wellcome MDA (Magen David Amon, Red Shield of David) to join to Your politically and religiously neutral organization? It would be a honour to Finland, which has been ranked as the least corrupted country every year in the new millennium in the Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.
Barack Obama vs John McCain
Currently, "A new wave of ethnic cleansing is going on in Iraq,"
Iraqi Christian representative Behiye Hadodo told the gathering. "If these
atrocities continue, the Chaldean, Syriac and Assyrian communities there will be
wiped out altogether, creating a new catastrophe for humanity." Yet nobody seems
to care. Boycotts, divestment and other initiatives are directed only at Israel.
Iraq's Assyrians are a non-Arab ethnic minority located mainly in northeastern
Iraq, and adherents of Christian denominations including the Chaldean Catholic
and Syriac Orthodox churches. A 1987 census recorded 1.4 million Christians in
Iraq, but the numbers began to drop after the 1990 Gulf War, reaching around
800,000 before the U.S. invaded in March 2003. Persecution at the hands of
Islamic radicals -- killings, church bombings, kidnappings, forced conversions
and harassment -- has prompted hundreds of thousands of Christians to flee the
country since 2003. Although accurate statistics are unavailable, researchers
believe the community may have been halved in the past five years. Within one or
two generations, he said, Christians in the Middle East - the birthplace of
Christianity - may be reduced to a negligible number, having been forced to flee
radical Islam. So be it either the civilian Hawaiji Barack Obama or the 5-year
Viet-Kong suicidal captive admirals son John McCain, please mention the
forgotten Iraqi Christians!
Jeru-salem, Jeru-shalom, Jeru-salaam: The city of a great king, which has NOT seen peace since Melchizedech. Isaiah 9:5 prophezied: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." KJV. The "Immanu-el" is the Prince of peace - i.e. not anointed as the KING of it, yet. So the peace with G*d can be obtained only in a personal level, until that. The world peace is waiting and desiring the Jewish people to acknowledge the Jewish carpenter king from Nazareth, but blessed are the peacemakers meanwhile back in the Penny Lane. Not of the Samuel Colt type of.
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[1] Bray is the second author in the Molecular biology of the cell, after Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Science.
[2] "The debate was conducted predominantly under a rubric that we term bioethics, in which issues are framed and coceptualized at a high level of academic sophistication and political authority by groups of highly skilled professionals who are deputized to identify and resolve moral conflict… reports of the hES controversy in major scientific journals show how the terminology and conceptual framing of the debate by experts are narrow and reflect the concerns of a small, professionally invested elite…success in its defenders had in defining the technology early in its development in ways that made opposition and public debate more complicated to and difficult to mount… None of the attempts of opponents to cast the debate in terms that questioned or attacked hES cell research were succesful. They could not overcome the considerable authority of supporters – the prestige of those framing the debate, their institutional legitimacy, and, perhaps most importantly, their greater access to professional journals whose commentaries and interpretations of the issue informed the lay media." (McGee & Wolpe 2001, 185-187).
[3] Vespasian (69-79 AD) was wanted as a Caesar in the course of the sieze of Jerusalem. Before succeeding his father, Titus (79-81) finished the war, as semi-reliably recorded by the defeated general, later historian, Josefus, who later on took the family name of his new masters, Flavius. The divide et impera began both the diaspora/galut as well as the new nomenclature of the geography of the area in 70 AD. Adopted sons had inherited the crown (or laureus) before, but this seems to have been the first genealogical father-son relationship. John Quincy Adams served as the 6th President of the United States (1825 to 1829) and had been the son of the 2nd President, John Adams (1797-1801).
KESKUSTELUA AIHEESTA SUOMEKSI:
Suomen sisällissodan
jälkilöylyissä ensimmäinen genetiikan dosenttimme ja professorimme Harry
Federley kirjoitteli Tukholmasta käsin aikakauslehtiin ja sanomalehtiin, että
mongolirodun aivot painavat noin sata grammaa vähemmän kuin ruotsinsuomalaisen
germaanirodun. Pari vuotta myöhemmin Federley oli perustamassa maailman
ensimmäistä rotubiologista tutkimusinstituuttia Upp-Upp-Uppe!-Där Yppe!!!-
Uppsalaan.
Muistaa sopii, että esim. rannikon 800 miehen ruotsia puhunut Saariston
vapaajoukko teloitti kaikkiaan liki tuhat hämäläistä v. 1918, menettäen itse
vain 3 miestä, keskinäisissä kahakoissaan. Sinä vuonna olivat hirvet vähissä ja
mentiinkin maajussimetsälle mongolirotua metsästämään. Se oli rotuhygieniaa, ei
politiikkaa. Suomalaisiahan tultiin ampumaan Ruotsista saakka. Kun lahtausten
jälkeen Tukholman paraatissa paraatiin huudeltiin murhista, vietiin protestoijia
koivet edellä. Suomalaisia pidettiin 1950-luvulle saakka ruotsalaisissa
tietosanakirjoissa mongolirotuna, monta vuosikymmentä pidempään kuin Englannissa
tai Saksassa.
Olemme tehneet HuuHaalla palkitun prof Matti Leisolan kanssa lähdelöydön
suomalaisoppineiden kirjeenvaihdosta Ernst Haeckelille kun Itä-Saksan arkistot
avautuivat. Pisimmät ja kiihkeimmät Kampf-kirjeet olivat JAPpilta (JA Palmen) ja
juuri Federleyltä. JAP tuli järkiinsä eikä sitten kirjoittanut ainoatakaan
populaaria kirjaa evoluutiosta nuoruutensa kiihkon jälkeen vaikka oli Suomen
ensimmäinen evolutionisti biologian professori Mäklinin nujerrettuaan ja
eläkkeelle saatettuaan.
Mutta vanhemmiten Federley päinvastoin vain alkoi juntata selektio-oppejansa
lainsäädäntöön ja onkin v. 1935 pakkosterilisaatiolakimme ja eugeniikan
legislaatiomme isä. Laki oli muuten voimassa v. 1973 saakka, jolloin se
muutettiin aborttilaiksi. Kulta-aika pakkosterilisaatioille oli maassamme paljon
myöhemmin kuin länsimaissa, v. 1960. Tuolloin lääkintähallituksen pääjohtajana
toimi Niilo Pesonen, joka oli käynyt Kakolan rotuhygienian saarnamatkojensa
takia Natsi-Saksaan sotasyyllisyystuomion takia. Samoin kuin Edwin Linkomies,
Kakolasta vaan yliopiston rehtoriksi. Tapahtuipa kerran Suomessa. Ei missään
muualla. Vain Suomessa sotien jälkeen on SS-miehiä istunut maan hallituksessa,
jopa sisäministerinä poliisin päällikkönä...
Löysin yliopiston arkistoarkkitehti EV:n vinkistä julkaisemattomasta Hertta Tirranen -arkiston proffien, proferssorskien ja vahtimestarien haastattelumateriaalista Jatkosodan PM Linkomiehen maininnan, joka kertoo sosiaalidemokraatti Väinö Tannerinkin ihailleen IKL:ää lähellä ollutta kokoomuksen Edwin Linkomiestä ateismista. I. e. siitä, että tällä oli ateistinen vakaumus niin nuoresta, että pääministeri kieltäytyi ehtoollisesta koko elinaikansa - kun Tanner taas oli joskus nuoruudessaaan haksahtanut ehtoolliselle ihmisten painostuksesta. Natsi-Saksaa lähestynyt hallitus oli ateistivetoinen. Tätä ei ole koskaan tunnustettu.
“Lämpivästi tunteva, sydämellinen, hyvää tarkoittava ja herkkä ihminen.” Näin kirjoitti Risto Ryti 4.6.42 Adolf Hitleristä vuonna 2005 yleisölle paljastetuissa ja julkaistuissa päiväkirjoissaan. Päiväkirjat kertovat maanisen vihamielisen Hitlerin raivostuneen jo siitä kun hän kuuli mainittavan sanan “juutalainen”. Aikansa luulon mukaisesti Ryti ilmeisesti otaksui, että alkoholismi, väkivaltaisuus, skitsofrenia, vajaamielisyys jne. ovat yhden tai kahden geenin tuloksia per ominaisuus - ja siten kitkettävissä evoluution valintaopin mukaisesti. Rytin päiväkirjojen rotuhygieninen pohdiskelu rikollisuuden periytyvyydestä ja niin ruumiillisesti kuin henkisestikin “ala-arvoisten ihmisten” pakkosterilisaatioista tulisi ottaa vakavasti. Nyt päiväkirjojen arvioijat vain naureskelevat sille. Maamme kohtalonhetkillä kohtalonuskoinen Risto Ryti oli kuin kuningas Saul meedioiden asiakkaana sekä Suomessa että ulkomailla. Uuden Gerda Rytin elämäkerran mukaan rouva jopa käänsi ja toimitti okkultistisia ja spiritistisiä kirjoja suomeksi - vaikka hankkeesta onkin visusti vaiettu. Tämä on raskauttavaa kylmästi laskelmoineelle rationalistille, jonka silmiinpistävänä piirteenä piskuista IKL:ää (äärioikeistolaista Isänmaallista Kansanliiketä) lähellä aloittanut kokoomuslainen ja satakuntalainen osakuntaystävä, jatkosodan lopun koleerinen Johtaja Edwin Linkomies kirjassaan “Vaikea aika” kuvaa siinä määrin kylmänä analyytikkona, että epäili Rytillä olleen “sydäntä rinnassaan lainkaan”. “Jumalan ja Hitlerin avulla” Ryti pilkkasi selviävänsä ahdingoista Saksan von Blucherin mukaan juuri ennen Tali-Ihantalan suurhyökkäystä.
Yliopiston kanslerin tai rehtorin palleilta YK:ta edeltäneeseen Kansainliittoon Suomen edustajaksi lähtenyt Rudolf Holsti sanoo keskellä yleiskokousta, siis Rippentrop-Molotovin etupiirisopimuksen alla, että "Adolf Hitler on raivohullu koira joka pitäisi ampua". Siihen päättyi rakentava, vuosikymmeniä kestänyt yhteys tekniikan, teollisuuden ja kulttuurin saralla. Tuonti ja vienti Saksaan ja Saksasta putosi, Suomi sai mennä Stalinin syliin. Mikään muu maa ei tällaista viimeisissä Kansainliiton kokouksissa töräyttänyt. Kysyttäessä asiaa, vastasi tämä yiopiston holtittomuuden toinen ääripää vain lakonisesti, että "Kaikkea se viina teettää." Tältä pohjalta Elias Erkon ulkoministerikauden paatos käsitellä Neuvostoliittoa kuin se "ei olisi suurvalta lainkaan" (Paasikiven mukaan, ohjeena Moskovan neuvottelureissulle), oli katastrofaalista. Mistä ne kaikki olivat tiedonkin saaneet? Tulla saman pöydän ääreen, tyhmät päät yhteen, yliopiston idiootti-professorit. Tai niin no: Kreikassa käytettiin sanaa idiotees maallikosta. Myöskään heprean käsite idioot ei tarkoita mitään kielteistä ja kolme "idioottia" vastasi todistajina paikkakunnan rabbia. Nimenomaan idiootteja professorit eivät ole. Idiootti oli maallikon arvonimi - maallikon jolla on jotakin lautamies- ja heinäntekojärkeä päässänsä kun polis-kaupungin tai valtakunnan politiikkaa tehdään.
Akateeminen Karjala-Seura kampanjoi järjenvastaisia Aunuksen retkiä yms. suurvaltaa vastaan vuosikaudet kabineteissaan. Suomalais-Saksalaisen Seuran yliopistomiesten varaan suunniteltiin ilmeisesti jopa nukkehallitusta Ranskan Vichyn-hallituksen tapaan. Professorit vain hävittivät SSS:n pöytäkirjansa ja heidän henkilökohtaisia kontaktejaan Göringiin yms. "väli"-rauhan aikana on pitänyt kaivella ulkomailta. (Väliaikaisesta rauhasta siis puhuttiin aivan yleisesti rauhansopimuksen aikaan. Taustalla oli siis Natsi-Saksaan nojaten revanssin ottaminen.) Yliopiston professori oli tottunut elämään kuin pellossa, kukkoina tunkiolla. Kansainväliseen politiikkaan päästessään sellainen johtaja oli pahinta mitä pienelle ja köyhälle maalle saattoi tapahtua. Siihen verrattuna historian dosentti Erkki Tuomioja historiattomassa palestiinalaismaniassaan Israel silmätikkunaan on vain harmiton pääministerinpoika.
Natseille ei merkinnyt mitään demokraattisten vaalien mandaatti. Kuten Goebbels sanoi valtiopäivätaloon päästyään 1933: "Täältä me emme lähde kuin jalat edellä". Siksi Suomenkin kohdalla merkitystä oli vain miehen henkilökohtaisella habituksella. Ja niin Ryti kuin Carl "ampukaa antautuessa" Mannerheimkin miellytti kovasti Hitleriä. (Hitlerhän liikuttui kyyneliin saakka saadessaan Mannerheimilta syntymäpäivälahjaksi Suomi-konepistoolin, hyvänen aika! ValtakunnanFuhrer lähti siltä istumalta ammuskelemaan lahjallaan ja sanoi ainoastaan valkokenraali Mannerheimin näkevän hänen korpraalinsieluunsa.) Ja silti kovimmat natsit Suomessa olivat johtajien kunnianhimoiset puolisot. Gärda Rytikin iltahartauksiensa kanssa. Nainen joka toimitti salaa suomeksi okkultistisia oopuksia ja esitteli Talvisodan pääministerilla ja Jatkosodan presidentille meedioita. Veljensä Jarl Serlachius oli Risto Rytin valinta Alfred Kordelinin testamenttia toteuttaessaan Jokioisten kartanonherraksi ja sitä kautta Forssan komendantin sijaiseksi sadoista teloituksista päättämään, alle kolmekymppisenä. Ylipäänsä perheettömän, Mannerheimin veljeltä Jokioisten kartanon ostaneen Alfred Kordelinin testamentti tieteelle oli rahassa mitattuna suurempi kuin jopa kaimansa Alfred Nobelin testamentti! Kyllä on pojilla ollut puljaamista ja pimittämistä: "Sulle-mulle-hälle-tolle".
Suomen Pankin johtajana Ryti laittoi muut
johtajat käytävään pelaamaan korttia. Suomi oli ainoa maa joka maksoi
USA:lle velkaansa pula-ajan läpeensä. Ainoa maa maailmassa, myös USA:n
päivälehdistön lööppien mukaan. Henki oli sama kuin J. V. Snellmannin
aikaan, kun Suomesta ulkomailla saatavan maineen vuoksi tahallaan
väkeä nälkään tapettiin. Henki oli sama pankkitukien aikaan 90-luvun
lamassa, kun elinkelpoisia(kin) yrityksiä ajettiin konkurssiin
huonoimpien pankkien sijaan. Ennen pankkitukia suuri velka oli pankin
ongelma. Sen jälkeen pieni velka oli ongelma, liian suuri olikin
helpotus. Tukipolitiikassa pankille tuli edulliseksi kaataa firma
jotta pääsi valtion pussille. Tapettiin lypsävät lehmät ja myytiin
vuodat pakkohuutokaupoissa kummin kaimoille. Mitä korvaamatonta hyötyä
oli pitää yllä Suomen luottokelpoisuus maailmalla ja ajaa nurin yli 50
000 yritystä? Siinä meni sitten. Arvioni Rytin päiväkirjoista:
http://www.helsinki.fi/
Jos armo pääsee lakitupaan, pääsee laki ihmissuhteisiin. Jos armo sivuuttaa maan lain, ei siinä ole mitään hohdokasta. "Missä MIKÄ TAHANSA kansa on ilman lakia, siinä kansa käy kurittomaksi" sanottiin Sananlaskuissa. Toinen saman kirjan aforismi on, että valheellinen ruhtinas viihtyy valehtelevien neuvonantajien keskellä. Miettii nyt sitäkin, kuinka moni Bill Clintonin seikkailujen edestä tai Bushin republikaanisuvun salaisuudesta sai valehdella. (Verirahat ja Prescott Bushin & tämän apen George Herbert Walkerin kaupankäynti Puolan orjatyövoimaa tarvinneiden hiilikaivosten Fritz "I Paid Hitler" Thyssenin kanssa: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/George_Bush_ja_Isien_synnit.htm ).
Täällä koko
suomalaisen eugeniikan l. rotuhygienian argumentaationi viitteineen, anteeksi
englannin kieli. Eugen oli suosittu nimi:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm
Lainaan pätkän:
"The early Mendelism thought that evolution proceeds by discontinuous leaps, the
early biometricians stressed natural selection operating on small variations.
The A-B-O blood groups[9], hemophilia, varieties of eye colour etc. were found
to be inherited in a Mendelian fashion by 1910. In excitement of the Mendelian
heredity, also complex traits and even social behaviour like alcoholism,
schizophrenia, manic depression, criminality, rebelliousness, artistic sense,
pauperism, racial differences, inherited scholarship and its converse,
feeble-mindedness were thought to be governed even by one or two genes. The
attractive Mendelism was "experimental" and quantitative and its exaggeration
outweighed the more cautious biometry. The recessivity and synergism of the
genes was known, but it was not underlined to the public (Mattila 1999 p. 42).
Likewise, the advertizements, boldly assessing that the problems could be done
away with in a few generations, persisted although most biologists must have
known that defective and recessive genes could not be eliminated even with the
most intense artefactual selection. (Allen 1985, p. 42-46, 50-72; Sapp 1987,
XII, 33; Leikola 1983; Vepsäläinen, 1982). In other words, most of the
biologists were cowards with their doubts in the face of indoctrination and kept
silent."
Gasman-saitissani on aluksi pätkä skännäystä Gasmanin kirjasta. Tätä esseetä muuten
ladataan sivujeni 500 esseestä eniten, viime kuussa 5280 kertaa:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Tilastot.htm
Mitä eugeniikan viime rundilta opittiin? Se, että pahimmatkaan lakipykälien
taakse piiloutuvat tiedepoliitikko-murhaajat eivät jää käpälälautaan, vaikka
väärentelisivät tutkimustuloksia ja tilailisivat ihmiskokeita juutalaisvangeilla
natseilta (kuten Yrjö Reenpään tapauksessa, joka SSS:n l. Suomalais-Saksalaisen
Seuran viimeisenä puheenjohtajana lienee vastuussa seuran paperien
hävittämisestä). Päinvastoin ne kaverit kukitetaan ja nostetaan
patsaanjalustalle toisinajattelijat teilaavassa yliopistossa. SSS:n hallituksen ja
maan hallituksen välillä kävi kiivas liikenne ja juuri SSS naitti hallituksen
Saksaan Helsingin vapautuksen muisteloiden ja SS-miesten panttipataljoonan
junailemalla. Nuo 1918 muistelot eivät edes osuneet tasavuosiin, aivan korni
mutta korkean diplomatian tapahtuma.
Yliopiston rahoitusnepotismi on muuttunut fyysisistä jälkeläisistä henkisiksi
oppilaiksi, mutta vertaansa sille on menneisyydessä vetänyt vain Korkeimman
Oikeuden nepotismi. Samat professorit, jotka perustivat Suomeen Rotuinstituutin
1942 ja kampanjoivat kaikkien vammaisten eliminoimista Saksan tavoin
Suomestakin, istuivat korkeimmissa viroissaan v. 1964 Helsingin kokouksen
aikaan, kun tehtiin yhä voimassa oleva kv. Helsingin Julistus ihmiskokeiden
etiikasta - ripittäytymättä itse koskaan. Suomen Valtakunnan Liitto SVL teki
muodollisenkin ohjelmanjulistuksen, joka sisälsi myös juutalaiskysymyksen. Siinä
oli mukana etupäässä professoreita ja dosentteja Helsingin yliopistosta,
kaikkiaan 40 kpl.
Paperilla julkaistua Open Access -tavaraa aiheesta artikkelissani "Haeckelian
Legacy of Popularization - Survival of the fakest" kirjassa Challenges for
Bioethics from Asia:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
Pauli.Ojala@gmail.com
Biotieteilijä, drop-out
(MSci-Master of Sciing)
Helsinki, Finland
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#Posters
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