Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: Sir, That Hennig was a Nazi sympathizer, even a member of the NSDAP, is a rumour that appears to have been started by the panbiogeographer Leon Croizat (1894–1982) (Platnick and Nelson, 1988, p. 415; see also Morrone, 2000, p. 46; Heads, 2005, p. 106; Williams and Ebach, 2008, p. 95). Croizat, whose life was described as “a critique of the cladocentric approach, with a notable focus on German idealism and Italian fascism” (Heads, 2005, p. 116), never denounced Hennig as a Nazi in print, nor did he ever retract this allegation when confronted with criticism (Platnick and Nelson, 1988, p. 415). The myth of Hennig as a Nazi sympathizer, or NSDAP member, has been firmly laid to rest by Schmitt (2001, p. 320, and in press; see also Schlee, 1978; Wiley, 2008). It is in retrospect of course impossible to elucidate the motivation that drove Croizat to that allegation, other than that he was highly critical of Hennig’s (1950) phylogenetic systematics, and later denounced him as a plagiarist (Platnick and Nelson, 1988, p. 416). But his noted aversion against German Idealism and fascism might perhaps provide a clue, as it points to some of the literature prominently cited by Hennig (1950). Heads (2005, p. 105) placed Hennig in the tradition of German Idealism (Beiser, 2002), which is certainly off the mark as Hennig (1950) was steeped in logical positivism (Rieppel, 2007). But some of the literature prominently cited by Hennig (1950) was, indeed, rooted in that tradition, as it reflects the Neo-Romanticism and Nature Mysticism that characterized part of German biology during the years of the Weimar Republic, which was then ideologized in terms of an Aryan Biology by supporters and representatives of the National-Socialist Regime (Mosse, 1964; Bäumer, 1990a; Deichmann, 1995; Rieppel, 2011a). This is not to say that Hennig (1950) cited this literature in such a compromised spirit; it was simply the current German biological literature of the time, and Hennig (1950) took it as a scientific resource, putting ideological connotations of contemporary biology aside. His allegiance to logical empiricism, which he shared with the botanist Walter Zimmermann (Rieppel, 2007)—an important influence on Hennig (Donoghue and Kadereit, 1992)—in fact placed him in opposition to the idealist and neo-romanticist undercurrent that tainted the biological literature in question (Rieppel, 2011a). But that literature was nonetheless, and after World War II continued to be, also received and discussed for its strictly scientific merits. Alas, to critics such as Croizat it may have opened the door to read into Hennig (1950) leanings towards conspiracy with the Nazi regime in which he never engaged. Heads (2005, p. 105) noted that “even Hennig (1966) accepted orthogenesis”, as indeed was the case. Since the publication of his 1950 book was delayed due to scarcity of paper, Hennig (1947) published an abstract in which he specified: “… all members of a higher taxon carry within themselves the evolutionary tendencies that were inherent in their common ancestral (stem-) species”. Endogenous evolutionary tendencies and cyclicity of phyletic development were hallmarks of orthogenesis (Levit and Olsson, 2006), then very popular in German palaeontology. The most prominent contemporary palaeontologists cited by Hennig (1950, pp. 335–336) in that context (as well as in others) were Schindewolf (1936), Beurlen (1930, 1937a), and Hennig (1927). Of those, both Beurlen (1935, 1937b) as well as his PhD supervisor Hennig (1935) were outspoken supporters of National-Socialist ideology; both lost their academic positions in 1945 (Adam, 1977; Grüttner, 2004; Levit and Olsson, 2006; Rieppel, 2011a). Hennig (1950) invoked the issue of orthogenesis in the context of his discussion of the “principle of dichotomy” that he believed to govern speciation (Rieppel, 2011b). This discussion Hennig (1950, p. 335) opened with reference to D’Ancona’s (1939) mathematical approach to population dynamics. Hennig must have appreciated such a quantitative approach to biology, as he would later claim that mathematization is the hallmark of all true natural science (Hennig, 1948, p. 138). At the time, Umberto D’Ancona was professor of zoology at the University of Padova (Pantin, 1965). His 1939 treatise on population dynamics was largely, but not exclusively, based on the work of his father-in-law, Vito Volterra, who in 1931 had published his seminal Leçons sur la théorie mathématique de la lutte pour la vie, a title D’Ancona had encouraged him to use (Davis, 2005). D’Ancona’s (1939) treatise was the first publication in a series edited by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who again applauded D’Ancona’s quantitative approach, as in his view it elevated biology to a science on par with physics. What physics had done for humankind, i.e. open the door to the construction of “radios, airplanes, bridges and canons” (Bertalanffy, 1939, p. v), quantitative biology would do for the Volk: Bertalanffy found the paradigm of quantitative biology, i.e. genetics, to be of “eminent political importance with respect to racial hygiene” (Bertalanffy, 1939, p. v). Resonating Volterra’s (who sacrificed his career in opposition to Italian fascism), the title under which D’Ancona’s (1939) work—originally written in Italian, then translated into German for publication in Bertalanffy’s series—reads “Der Kampf ums Dasein”, an all-important metaphor in Aryan Biology. Bertalanffy (1940, p. 531) later tied D’Ancona’s (1939) work to contemporary organicist ecology (Jax, 1998), a connection that again surfaced in Hennig (1950), who cited not only Bertalanffy, but also the ecologist Karl Friederichs in this context. Bertalanffy (1941, p. 247) called himself the “father of organicism” in a paper that was cited by Hennig (1950, p. 5), one that Bertalanffy published in the ideologically highly charged Der Biologe, a journal that was founded as an outlet for Aryan Biology (Bäumer, 1990a,b; Deichmann, 1995). In this paper, Bertalanffy (1941, p. 257) prided himself that even the Reich head-forester Hermann Göring had adopted his organicist views and made them the basis for nature management. Organicism drew an analogy between the individual organism and the ecosystem, considering both spatio-temporally located complex wholes, i.e. hierarchically structured individuals composed of parts that persist in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Ideologically charged organicist ecology extrapolated from the laws that govern plant and animal communities to those that range over a human community (Volk), which again was conceived of as a complex whole (a nested hierarchy of parts in a dynamic equilibrium). Just as with any organism in an ecosystem, the individual in a human community is called upon to serve the benefit of the whole according to the Lebensgesetze; non-compliance with these Lebensgesetze would rob the individual of the reasons for its existence (Bäumer, 1990a; Deichmann, 1995). Such emphasis on complex wholes that are “superorganisms” governed by laws of life led “to the National-Socialist truth that the Volk as a community of blood and fate is the highest of all transindividual units” (Weiss, 1994, p. 193). One such ideologically enthused ecologist was Friederichs (1937, p. 91), who called ecology “the science of blood and soil [Blut und Boden]” (Deichmann, 1995, p. 137; Stella and Kleisner, 2010, p. 43). His book was praised for its “intimate relationship with National-Socialist ideology” in a review (May, 1937/38, p. 486) that again was published in an ideologically highly charged journal, the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft (Hoβfeld and Olsson, 2006). Hennig (1950, p. 117) took from Friederichs (1927) the concept of species as dynamic, causally efficacious complex wholes (Wirkungseinheiten; see also Dupuis, 1984, p. 8; Rieppel, 2011c), which he contrasted with the abstract type concept of idealistic morphology. This shows that Hennig (1950) adopted Friederichs’ (1927) view of species as complex wholes (individuals) without any of its ideological overburden, as he applied it in a much different context that was closer to his heart—the critique of idealistic morphology. Another example to the same effect is provided by Hennig’s (1950) reference to Werner Zündorf’s papers on idealistic morphology and phylogenetic systematics, which were again published in the notorious journal Der Biologe. Zündorf (1940, 1942) combined his critique of idealistic morphology with a defense of the importance of phylogenetic systematics, relating the latter to research on race1 formation that in his opinion was relevant to racial hygiene and eugenic legislation. Although Hennig (1950) applauded Zündorf’s critique of idealistic morphology, nowhere in his writing is there any trace of a reference to issues of racial hygiene and eugenics. It is important to understand that scientific discourse at the time proceeded on two levels, a basic level of empirical research, coupled with an ideological overburden in the case of a few but by no means all the sources referred to by Hennig (1950). Hennig took from the contemporary scientific discourse what he found useful for his own purpose, which was to develop a theory and method of phylogenetic systematics, while neglecting the ideological overburden if such was implied by any of the authors he cited. This is very much the same situation as prevailed in contemporary palaeontology, where Otto Schindewolf took from Karl Beurlen those empirical insights he found relevant for his science (Reif, 1983, 1986), while rejecting the ideological overburden as irrelevant “secondary thoughts” (Nebengedanken: Schindewolf, 1936, p. 61). I am greatly indebted to Gary Nelson, who shared his index of authors cited by Hennig (1950, 1966) with me.
Source: Cladistics
Author: Olivier Rieppel
Institution: Field Museum of Natural History
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1558926165