Namhafte Vertreter der Kieler Biowissenschaften im Nationalsozialismus: Adolf Remane - der Zoologe

Adolf Remane war einer der vielseitigsten Zoologen des 20. Jahrhunderst in Deutschland. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte lagen im Bereich der Morphologie, Phylogenetik und Meeresbiologie

Biologieunterricht und die Neuedition von "Mein Kampf" (2016)

Im Beitrag wird einmal mehr deutlich, wie wichtig es ist, auch historische Quellen zu nutzen (und nicht zu tabuisieren), um aus den Fehlern der Vergangenheit für die Zukunft zu lernen. (DIPF/Orig.

Ernst Haeckel und die Frage nach der Herkunft und dem Stammbaum des Menschengeschlechts

Die Wissenschaftshistoriker Uwe Hoßfeld und Georgy S. Levit lenken in ihrem Beitrag den Blick auf Jena und den weltberühmten „Deutschen Darwin“, der sich über einen Zeitraum von 45 Jahren auch mit humanphylogenetischen Fragestellungen befasste. (DIPF/Orig.

Unterrichtsprojekt "(Anti-)Rassismus - Wir begeben uns auf eine Zeitreise!"

Chelsea Vogel, Uwe Hoßfeld und Karl Porges fragen, wie sich (Anti-)Rassismus im Biologieunterricht behandeln lässt und bieten die Idee, mithilfe eines Workbooks die Lernenden auf eine Zeitreise mitzunehmen. (DIPF/Orig.

"Die Juden müssen ihre Sonderart aufgeben". Ernst Haeckel und der Antisemitismus

Die Autoren untersuchen die Stellung des Jenaer Biologen zum Antisemitismus in Deutschland. (DIPF/Orig.

Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology 25/2020

The name DGGTB (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie; German Society for the History and Philosophy of Biology) reflects recent history as well as German tradition. The Society is a relatively late addition to a series of German societies of science and medicine that began with the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften”, founded in 1910 by Leipzig University’s Karl Sudhoff (1853-1938), who wrote: “We want to establish a ‘German’ society in order to gather German-speaking historians together in our special disciplines so that they form the core of an international society…”. Yet Sudhoff, at this time of burgeoning academic internationalism, was “quite willing” to accommodate the wishes of a number of founding members and “drop the word German in the title of the Society and have it merge with an international society”. The founding and naming of the Society at that time derived from a specifi c set of historical circumstances, and the same was true some 80 years later when in 1991, in the wake of German reunification, the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie” was founded. From the start, the Society has been committed to bringing studies in the history and philosophy of biology to a wide audience, using for this purpose its Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie. Parallel to the Jahrbuch, the Verhandlungen zur Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie has become the by now traditional medium for the publication of papers delivered at the Society’s annual meetings. In 2005 the Jahrbuch was renamed Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, reflecting the Society’s internationalist aspirations in addressing comparative biology as a subject of historical and philosophical studies

The biogenetic law and the Gastraea theory: From Ernst Haeckel's discoveries to contemporary views

More than 150 years ago, in 1866, Ernst Haeckel published a book in two volumes called Generelle Morphologie der Organismen ( General Morphology of Organisms ) in the first volume of which he formulated his biogenetic law, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Here, we describe Haeckel's original idea as first formulated in the Generelle Morphologie der Organismen and later further developed in other publications until the present situation in which molecular data are used to test the “hourglass model,” which can be seen as a modern version of the biogenetic law. We also tell the story about his discovery, while traveling in Norway, of an unknown organism, Magosphaera planula , that was important in that it helped to precipitate his ideas into what was to become the Gastraea theory. We also follow further development and reformulations of the Gastraea theory by other scientists, notably the Russian school. Elias Metchnikoff developed the Phagocytella hypothesis for the origin of metazoans based on studies of a colonial flagellate. Alexey Zakhvatin focused on deducing the ancestral life cycle and the cell types of the last common ancestor of all metazoans, and Kirill V. Mikhailov recently pursued this line of research further