Theory Biosci.

(2002) 121: 252±259

Ó Urban & Fischer Verlag
http://www.urbanfischer.de/journals/theorybiosc

Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the Limits of

Science

A. J. Lustig

Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, USA

Address for correspondence: A. J. Lustig, Dibner Institute for the History of Science
and Technology, MIT E56-100, 38 Memorial Dr., Cambridge, Mass., 02139, USA,
e-mail: alustig@dibinst.mit.edu

Received: May 20, 2002; accepted: June 17, 2002

Key words: ants, epistemology, evolution, Jesuits, monism

Summary: In the late nineteenth century, two German evolutionary biologists, Ernst
Haeckel and Erich Wasmann, argued publicly about how to apply evolutionary biol-
ogy and where its explanatory limits, if any, lay. The German Jesuit evolutionist ento-
mologist 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 de-
scribe, and the realm of subjective experience and the soul, which it cannot. Was-
mann's evolution contrasted (and conflicted) strongly with contemporary German
atheistic and anticlerical monistic evolutionary biology. This paper discusses Was-
mann's very public debates with monism's prophet, Ernst Haeckel.

The late nineteenth century, like the late twentieth, saw fierce battles over
the power of evolutionary biology to extend its explanatory purview from
the origins and history of nonhuman life on earth to the human realm as
well, including such contentious domains as human psychological nature
and the historical origins and functions of religion. Some of the fiercest
clashes occurred in Germany, where Darwin's great evangelist and popu-
larizer, Ernst Haeckel, used evolutionary theory as the underpinning of a
philosophical system, monism, which Haeckel intended would do away
with Christianity and provide an ethical system to replace it. For him, evo-
lution was a proven fact, a necessary part of a monistic worldview.
Perhaps Haeckel's most vocal opponent was a German Jesuit evolutionist
entomologist by the name of Erich Wasmann, an expert on the biology
and behavior of the social insects, particularly ants, who argued cogently
against monism's weaknesses and sought on both scientific and philosophi-
cal grounds to retain a place for dualistic approaches separating the realms

1431-7613/02/121/03±252/$ 15.00/0
 Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the limits of Science 253

of the material and the spiritual. Wasmann argued that while evolution, in-
cluding evolution of humans, was a plausible theory, it was not and could
not be proven fact in Haeckel's sense and there were domains in which
neither evolution nor monism could provide ultimate answers.
Haeckel and Wasmann were arguing against a deeply turbulent cultural
background. A widespread sense of cultural and religious destabilization,
due not only to evolution but perhaps even more to modern biblical criti-
cism, led Haeckel and Wasmann to see themselves as engaged in a vast
struggle between rationality and unreason. That Wasmann was not only a
Catholic but a Jesuit put him squarely in the context of the German Kul-
turkampf (ªcultural struggleº) of the 1870s and 80s, which pitted the new-
ly united Germany's civil government under Bismarck against the Catholic
Church, which was itself undergoing a spiritual and political revival under
Pope Pius IX; Wasmann spent his entire career outside of Germany,
mostly in a theologate near Maastricht, Holland, due to the expulsion of
the Jesuit order from Germany in 1872.
Erich Wasmann was born in 1859 to Catholic converts living in the South
Tyrol. He had a Catholic education, and then entered a Jesuit seminary
with the intention of being ordained and pursuing an academic career in a
Jesuit university, although from the time he was a young man, Wasmann
suffered a debilitating lung disease, which eventually prevented him from
full-time teaching. He was, however, ordained in 1888, and throughout his
life integrated his priestly with his biological calling, in a mixture that
made many of his colleagues (both scientific and theological) uncomforta-
ble.
Wasmann's first book (1884), on the Trichterwickler, or birch leaf roller
beetle, concluded with an orthodox anti-Darwinian design argument for
the origins of that insect's complex instincts. But between then and begin-
ning to publish his ant work in the later 1880s, Wasmann became a con-
vinced evolutionist. This was due partly perhaps to two years spent study-
ing zoology at the German university in Prague, where one of his teachers
was Hans Driesch, and partly, apparently, on the basis of his own studies
of four species of beetles of the genus Dinarda, which live in ant nests and
demonstrate morphological and behavioral variance according to geo-
graphical distribution, which Wasmann took as inferential evidence of an
adaptive radiation from a common ancestor (see Wasmann 1932, Stumper
1954, Barantzke 1999).
For the rest of his career, Father Wasmann was a very visible advocate of
evolutionary theory, a public advocate of the reconcilability of evolution-
ary theory with Catholic doctrine, and a source of sometimes hysterical
frustration and suspicion to the Darwinist establishment of the period ±
who believed that obviously a Jesuit who promulgated evolutionary theo-
ry must be a spokesman for the kind of devious cabal for which that order
was so well known, with its object to lead the public astray from true evo-
254 A. J. Lustig

lutionary doctrine. This comment by an assistant to Rudolf Virchow, the

famous Berlin cellular pathologist and statesman, is sufficiently illustrative:
By means of this wooden horse, the Jesuits hope to gain a footing in the
land in which, above all others, the freedom of science has been most
highly respected. We shall fare as did the Trojans of old. If this gift
brings our enemies into the country, they will do their utmost to take
root and to exert their injurious influence with the reckless tendency to
destruction which characterises them, just as did the Greeks in Troy.
Therefore again I say: Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!
(in Wasmann 1912, p. x)
Wasmann was particularly fascinated by the so-called myrmecophiles, the
thousands of species of other animals, mostly arthropods and particularly
beetles, that live in close association with ant colonies. Among these, Was-
mann was most interested in what he called, as part of his taxonomy of
myrmecophily, symphiles, like staphylinid beetles of the genera Lomechusa
and Atemeles, resident in nests of European ants of the genera Formica
and Myrmica, which are apparently accepted by their host ants as part of
their colony, even to the extent of rearing their larvae, feeding them as
they would their own nestmates, and grooming them. The lomechusine
larvae are another story, however; they are exclusively carnivorous, and
their prey is the ant brood within the host nest. But in spite of this perfi-
dy, the ant workers nevertheless tend the beetle larvae as assiduously as
they do their own. Lomechusa and Atemeles-infested nests also suffered in
another fashion; for somewhat obscure reasons, the production of normal
workers and reproductives in these nests is interfered with, producing only
deformed intermediates, which cripples, and eventually kills the nest.
What could induce creatures to take such care of organisms that at the
very least were no relation to them, and in some cases actively preyed
upon them or their brood, and had such debilitating effects on the colony?
Wasmann devoted much attention to these questions, making them simul-
taneously the crux of his understanding of evolutionary theory, a test case
for the rejection of the theory of natural selection, and the vehicle for the
development of an alternative mechanism bearing on this and possibly
other cases of social evolution.
This alternate mechanism, which Wasmann (1901) called ªamical selec-
tionº, began with ancestors of the beetles that were casual ant predators.
By chance, however, the ants were simultaneously attracted to volatile exu-
dates secreted by the beetles. The ants were less hostile to these beetles,
and allowed them to infiltrate the colony, eventually even choosing to fos-
ter beetles that produced the most and best exudates. This success then
fostered the development in the ants of ever more elaborated adoption and
caretaking instincts, finally extending even to the care of the beetle brood.
In effect, Wasmann argued, the ants were actively selecting the beetles, ex-
 Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the limits of Science 255

actly analogous with human beings' artificial selection of domestic plants

and animals.
Wasmann explicitly opposed amical selection to Darwinian natural selec-
tion as an explanation of the origin of the symphilic instincts. Natural se-
lection, he argued, could not account for the appearance of positive in-
stincts in the ants to care for these symphiles, precisely because caring for
them harmed the nest and so should be eliminated by natural selection. In
any case, Wasmann agreed with many biologists of the time (including his
Prague teacher Hans Driesch) that natural selection generally played only
a subordinate, negative role in evolution, weeding out the unfit, but could
not account for the appearance of positive novelty.
Ant society was thus for Wasmann a construct of instincts, rather than the
materially bounded nest. These instincts for selflessness and mutual care
were in a sense independent of their objects; thus it was that workers
could lavish care on ªforeignº guests like Lomechusa, and derive the same
gratification from that as they did from caring for their own. Amical selec-
tion was opposed to natural selection precisely as the result of these auton-
omous instincts: within their psychical limits, ants were capable of discrete
choice, and these choices were what comprised the colony.
This rejection of mechanistic philosophy and attribution of psychic auton-
omy to ants and other animals is indicative of Wasmann's overall scientific
approach, which aimed to reconcile Catholic theology and evolution by
delineating the philosophical limits of science: what science could or could
not explain, and how. Wasmann framed his arguments in the context of
turn of the century German monistic philosophy, and specifically against
monism's chief prophet and evangelist, Ernst Haeckel. Wasmann and
Haeckel clashed spectacularly in the course of two very widely attended
and even more widely reported public lecture series, given in Berlin by
Haeckel in 1905 and Wasmann in 1907, both on the subject of evolution-
ary theory.
Haeckel's lectures were a valedictory, by a grand old man of German
science called out at 71 to defend himself and monism, primarily against
Wasmann's criticisms in previous public appearances and publications.
Wasmann's lecture was a response to Haeckel's, in which he lectured for
an hour (with numerous lantern-slide illustrations, in the most up to date
multimedia technology of the day), listened to six or seven responses by
various scientific and nonscientific figures (several of them extremely vitu-
perative, ad hominem, and anti-Catholic), and then had half an hour to re-
ply to all ± the sellout affair lasted until the early hours of the morning.
Haeckel vigorously defended the tenets of monism, as he had in his best-
seller popular works, Der Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wis-
senschaft, Glaubensbekenntniss eines Naturforschers, 1892 (translated into
English as Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: The Confession of
Faith of a Man of Science, 1895) and the enormously influential Die Wel-
256 A. J. Lustig

traÈthsel, 1899 (The Riddle of the Universe, 1900). Monism held that all ap-
parent dualisms ± matter and energy, organic and inorganic, body and soul
± were properly to be seen as manifestations of one immutable set of nat-
ural laws governing matter and energy alike. This being so, the questions
of religion and the questions of science collapsed into a single set, in
which science must necessarily provide the only valid answers. ªTruth un-
adulteratedº, Haeckel proclaimed,
is only to be found in the temple of the study of nature, and that the
only available paths to it are critical observation and reflection. . . . In
this way we arrive, by means of pure reason, at true science, the highest
treasure of civilized man. We must . . . reject what is called ªrevelationº,
the poetry of faith . . . In this respect it is quite certain that the Christian
system must give way to the monistic (Haeckel 1900, p. 345).
Moreover, he claimed,
In monism the ethical demands of the soul are satisfied, as well as the
logical necessities of the understanding (Haeckel 1895, p. vii).
Three particularly inflammatory consequences followed. First, the insist-
ence that if matter and spirit are only one thing meant that God had to be
either everywhere, fully identified with the world ± a form of pantheism ±
or nowhere ± atheism ± options which were to Haeckel logically equiva-
lent (Haeckel 1900, p. 298). The second was the unity of psychic and phy-
siological phenomena, which meant that ªthe soul is . . . a natural phenom-
enonº and that ªtherefore psychology [is] . . . a section of physiologyº
(Haeckel 1900, p. 91). The third was the hypothesis of human evolution
taken as an article of faith (emphases mine):
For the purpose of our monistic philosophy . . . it is a matter of com-
parative indifference how the succession of our animal predecessors
may be confirmed in detail. Sufficient for us, as an incontestable histori-
cal fact, is the important thesis that man descends immediately from the
ape (Haeckel 1900, p. 86).
Haeckel ± who was in many ways the E. O. Wilson of his day ± summed
up thus:
Monistic cosmology proved . . . that there is no personal God; compara-
tive and genetic psychology showed that there cannot be an immortal
soul; and monistic physiology proved the futility of the assumption of
`free will'. Finally, the science of evolution made it clear that the same
eternal iron laws that rule in the inorganic world are valid, too, in the
organic and moral world (Haeckel 1900, p. 357).
All of these propositions were proven facts, and ªIt is only the ignorant or
narrow-minded who can now doubt their truthº (Haeckel 1895, p. 39).
 Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the limits of Science 257

Scientific efforts to maintain philosophical dualism must therefore ªrest on

confusion or sophistry ± when they are honestº (Haeckel 1900, p. 296).
Enter a Jesuit, specially trained, as everyone knew, in sophistry and confu-
sion. Wasmann insisted at every point in his writings and 1907 lecture on
the weaknesses and unstated a priori assumptions of monism, the sound
philosophical basis for psychological dualism, the status of evolutionary
narratives as plausible explanations rather than ªproven factsº, and the re-
concilability of scientific materialism with theology. Wasmann insisted that
evolution was not an experimental science, and could not and should not
provide the same kind of certainty:
[evolution] is only capable of giving us a higher or lower degree of
probability as to the processes of historical development. . . . [When]
man looks back he sees only monuments, ruins, and traces of previous
evolutions; and he cannot even survey the evolution itself, he can only
obtain some conception of it by way of inference, after a careful and im-
partial comparison of very various pieces of evidence.
The doctrine of evolution is therefore not an experimental science, and
can never be one. It is essentially a theory based upon a group of hypoth-
eses which are in harmony with one another, and afford the most prob-
able explanation of the origin of organic species (Wasmann 1912, p. 7).
It is important to note that this statement is not a criticism of the theory
of evolution or of descent with modification as a historical fact, but rather
an explication of the epistemological capacities of these kinds of explana-
tions. Wasmann admitted, moreover, the logical possibility of human des-
cent from animals. For him this was a purely empirical question, although
so far inconclusively demonstrated (in which he was perfectly correct, in
that no convincing fossil record at the time documented human evolution;
Haeckel's arguments were based entirely on comparative evidence from
morphology and embryology), rather than the article of faith it was to
Haeckel. But, Wasmann insisted, human beings were qualitatively differ-
ent from all other animals because they possessed a spiritual nature or
soul, which was not reducible to material law although it was certainly
correlated with it. This was, he said, the indubitable work of God, though
it might well have been breathed into human beings once their corporeal
ancestors had become sufficiently complex to house it. Over the question
of the content of spiritual and conscious existence, therefore, rather than
its description, science had no jurisdiction. As Wasmann summed it up at
the lecture in 1907 (emphases Wasmann's):
Biology has considered the question from its point of view in only one,
and that a material, aspect. The other, i. e. spiritual, aspect of the same
problem falls outside its scope, and the results of biological investiga-
tion do not touch the existence in man of a soul created by God . . .
258 A. J. Lustig

Similar remarks will apply to the hypothetical history of the human race.
It may on its material side originate in the dust of the earth . . . [But]
man would have become man completely only when the organised mat-
ter had so far developed through natural causes, as to be capable of
being animated with a human soul. The creation of the first human soul
marks the real creation of the human race, although we might assume
that a natural development lasting millions of years had preceded it
(Wasmann 1912, pp. 50±51).

In Wasmann's special study, myrmecology, the likeness between ant and

human societies could not possibly be more than metaphoric, however
tempting metaphor might be. Ants had psychical lives (he observed in this
august journal), their community was held together by ªinstinctive sympa-
thyº, and was even capable of accommodating alien species in perfect ami-
ty, but ªeven the intelligence of an ant would be sufficient to understand,
that animal and human societies are as far apart as heaven and earthº
(Wasmann 1905).
What were the results of Wasmann's and Haeckel's face-off? In the short
term, the verdict was clear. The numerous press reports of Wasmann's lec-
ture, in the general, the Catholic, and the other religious newspapers (even
for example the main Jewish newspaper of Berlin), were virtually unani-
mous: Wasmann had vanquished his critics, in substance, in logic, and in
demeanor. He had exposed weaknesses in the arguments of prominent
scientists, and exposed an anti-Jesuit, anti-Catholic, and anti-religious fer-
vor in them that bordered on hysteria.
In the longer term, Wasmann's view of evolution, that is, that material
questions are the proper domain of science and that spiritual questions are
qualitatively different and the proper inquiry of religion, has come to be
enshrined as official Catholic doctrine on the subject of evolution, as of (in
brief) Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis (1950), and (in full)
Pope John Paul II's 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
ªTruth Cannot Contradict Truthº.
On the other hand, Haeckelian monism is now very much resurgent as a
philosophical program (if not under that name), particularly in the work
of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists like E. O. Wilson, Ri-
chard Dawkins, and others who seek first to explain religion away as a
natural psychological phenomenon without ontological grounding, and
then to replace it functionally and even emotionally in human society with
evolutionary biology (see also Stenmark 2001).
Of this project, many of Wasmann's criticisms are still valid. Playing on
the way that his critics mocked his credentials as Father Erich Wasmann,
S. J. (Societas Jesu) by accusing him of being two different people, Erich
Wasmann S., for ªScientistº, and Erich Wasmann J., for ªJesuitº, Wasmann
said of Haeckel in his closing remarks in 1907:
 Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the limits of Science 259

I ask your indulgence if I apply to Haeckel also what has been said of
myself, viz. that I possess a twofold nature, and am at once a theologian
and a scientist. Yes, indeed, there are in Haeckel two personalities: he is
at once a scientifically accurate student of nature and a bold advocate of
Darwinism, dealing freely in generalisations. He has both these person-
alities; and not unfrequently he himself mistakes one for the other
(Wasmann 1912, pp. 234±235).

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