Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the Limits of Science

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, two German evolutionary biologists, Ernst Haeckel and Erich Wasmann, argued publicly about how to apply evolutionary biology and where its explanatory limits, if any, lay. The German Jesuit evolutionist entomologist Wasmann’s (1859–1931) faith and Jesuit philosophical training intersected to reconcile evolution and Catholicism by delineating the philosophical limits of science: Wasmann demarcated a material and historical world, which science can describe, and the realm of subjective experience and the soul, which it cannot. Wasmann’s evolution contrasted (and conflicted) strongly with contemporary German atheistic and anticlerical monistic evolutionary biology. This paper discusses Wasmann’s very public debates with monism’s prophet, Ernst Haeckel.