The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought

Prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin’s foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. But, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. Robert J. Richards’s intellectual biography rehabilitates Haeckel, providing the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, as well as a moving account of Haeckel’s eventful life.

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“This is a brilliant book. . . . It is intellectually brilliant, offering an account of Haeckel as driven by tragic failures in love that colored his view of life. And the book is brilliant scholarship, drawing on a wide range of sources to paint a quite different picture of Haeckel’s work than other scholars have achieved.”—History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

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''[An] excellent, well-illustrated and scholarly biography of Haeckel.''—Andrew Robinson, Financial Times