The German Genius

Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae in 1758 and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 were a time of transition. During this transition period Lamarck published his theory of transformation, in 1809, which argued for an “intrinsic tendency of organisms to strive toward perfection” together with an ability to adjust to the environment (the inheritance of acquired characteristics). It was also during this transition period that “downward classification” was phased out, to be replaced by “upward classification.” In “downward classification,” the organic realm was divided/organized according to its internal logic, as it appeared to this or that theoretician, using his view of what nature actually consisted of, and in the belief that species differed in their very essence, an essence that reflected their eidos , their special substance. In “upward classification,” observations started with species, the irreducible basic building blocks, and then their similarities with other organisms were observed and codified, working upward to higher taxonomic groups. 50
    But the very idea of classification was itself evolving. For centuries the scala naturae , the scale of perfection, had been virtually the only conceivable way of bringing order into diversity. The idea was less popular with botanists than with zoologists, however, since hardly any trend toward perfection was observable among plants, except for a general advance from algae to the phanerograms (the subkingdom of flowering plants). And so, other approaches to classification were tried. Organisms were placed on the scale of perfection according to their affinity with less perfect or more perfect neighbors. 51 There was a conviction that similarity (of whatever kind) reflected an underlying causal relationship. Two kinds of similarity in particular were identified by German writers such as Friedrich Schelling and Lorenz Oken: true affinity and analogy . “Penguins are related to ducks by true affinity but to the aquatic mammals by analogy. Hawks show affinity with parrots and pigeons, but are analogous to the carnivores among the mammals.” Such a reconceptualization seems bizarre but this approach proved crucial in the ensuing history of biology, influencing Richard Owen in his ideas of homology and analogy, which came to dominate comparative anatomy.
    Without these developments in thinking about classification, the theory of evolution probably could not have developed. Yet there was still some way to go. The great problem with evolution was that it could not be observed directly, unlike the familiar phenomena of physics, such as falling stones or boiling water. Evolution, plainly, can only be inferred and only then can such evidence as fossils or stratification be adduced. 52
    To us, the time it took between the first glimmerings of evolutionism by Leibniz in his Protogaea (1694) and the full-blown theory of Lamarck in 1809 seems inordinately long. Like Buffon, who had flirted with evolutionism all his life, Lamarck was French, and Darwin himself, of course, was British. Yet evolutionism was far more popular in Germany than anywhere else. 53 Just how widespread it was there has been explored by several historians. Henry Potonié, Otto Heinrich Schindewolf, and Oswei Temkin are just three who have rescued the names of numerous early German evolutionists from oblivion: besides Blumenbach, Reil, and Kielmeyer, there were Friedrich Tiedemann, Reinecke, Voight, Tauscher, and Ballenstedt. Although it may come as a surprise that, with all these figures devoting their time to evolution, it should be an Englishman, Charles Darwin, who conceived the idea of natural selection, we should remember that, among the many people who set the stage for Darwin, the Viennese botanist Franz Unger stands out. Unger argued that the simpler aquatic and marine plants preceded the most complex varieties, that there must have been an original germ of all kinds of plants, that new species must have originated from already-existing ones and that all plants are united with each other “in a genetic manner.” Among Unger’s students was Gregor Mendel. 54
    And so, in the late eighteenth century, in Germany, doubt, deism, Pietism, and the drive toward perfection—in history, in art, in biology—all came together to create a way of looking at the world, looking within, looking back, and looking forward all at the same time. It was a transitional period, when people were groping,