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Self-Organization Meets Evolution: Ernst Haeckel and Abiogenesis

2022; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-04783-1_2

2524-776X

Georgy S. Levit, Uwe Hoßfeld,

Philosophy and History of Science

Although Darwin proposed a logically coherent theory of evolution, which presupposed the natural occurrence of initial life forms, he never offered a theory of the origin of life. This task was instead taken up by his German pupil Ernst Haeckel. In contrast to Darwin, Haeckel paid lots of attention to abiogenesis. Already in his first major Darwinian book, Generelle Morphologie (General Morphology), he postulated the origin of life on Earth by way of archigonia, i.e., spontaneous generations of monera (the most primitive structureless microorganisms) directly from inert matter. For Haeckel, all living organisms on earth evolved from monera, and until his very last publication, he admitted the initial occurrence of monera was a repetitive event; i.e., the very initial evolution was polyphyletic. This created a tension between his monistic and pro-Darwinian tendency toward strictly monophyletic explanations on the one hand and his theory of abiogenesis on the other hand. Essentially, Haeckel’s concept was a self-organization hypothesis built into the framework of Darwinian theory, and it fits into the more comprehensive doctrine of Haeckelian philosophical monism as well. Although it appears archaic from the modern viewpoint, Haeckel’s theory of abiogenesis contributed to the growth of experimental studies of abiogenesis in the early 1920s—for example, in the development of the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis. In his book, The Origin of Life, Aleksandr Oparin explicitly mentions Haeckel and discusses Haeckel’s concept of abiogenesis in some detail. In this chapter, we reconstruct Haeckel’s theory of abiogenesis as a self-organization theory and demonstrate its importance as an early attempt to discuss the origin of life in the post-Darwinian era.