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Summary: Leading Edge
Book Review
Cell 135, December 12, 2008 ©2008 Elsevier Inc. 1
What do Charles Darwin and the dancer Isadora Duncan
have in common? Apparently, they shared and deeply admired
a mutual friend: the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. A towering
figure in the intellectual and scientific circles of the late 19th
and
early 20th
century, Haeckel's name has been relegated to the
shadows of modern thought. In fact, when the name of Haeckel
does not elicit a shrug, it almost always
ignites the incantation of "ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny," often fol-
lowed by a repudiation of the name
and charges of fraud, anti-Darwinism,
and--in the worst of cases--racism.
So, what brought about this change in
the standing of the man that Charles
Darwin himself praised as being "one
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