Three questions
After Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species” in 1859, people spoke of Darwin’s Theory of Descent and of Transformation. The origin of the variants within species was still unclear at the time.
Three fields of work thus emerged, which are still being worked on in different ways today: The kinship of species, the change in body structure, the physical mechanism of change.
The mechanism of change and the synthetic theory of evolution
In the first half of the 20th century, the molecular basis of the inheritance and change of species was discovered. Knowledge of genes, now almost common knowledge, their mutation and reduplication, as well as population dynamics and diversification of species, provided essential insights. Classical Darwinism was able to integrate these findings, and the modern Snthetic Eolutionary Theory emerged. It operates in the field of species, thus retaining the scope of the original Darwinian theory.
The history of the development of the Synthetic Theory is well researched and has been described several times (Mayr 1984, Junker & Engels 1999, Junker 2004).
Genotype – phenotype
In the synthetic theory, the individual is considered to be the result of the information stored on the genes, it is its manifestation, the “phenotype” of the “genotype”. Evolution is thus defined as the change of genomes. In this extreme reductionism – “The Selfish Gene” (Dawkins) – the chemical conversions and the construction of the structures are related to a single control element, namely the genes. The body structure with its mechanical conditions is completely lost from view in this perspective. This is why the synthetic theory cannot make any statement on the transformation of animal construction types, with a modern word, on bauplan evolution.
The relationship of species – Prelude: Systematics and evolution before Darwin
Linné – Systematics without evolution
In the middle of the 18th century, Carl Linné organized the animals and plants that had been described up to that point and were yet to be described into a system according to graded similarities, which brought a hitherto unknown clarity and overview to the diversity. Linné’s systematics, with its almost rigorous binary nomenclature and arrangement of species – genus – family – order – class, still dominates the field today.
Its purpose is to name the objects of nature in order to be able to communicate about them. It fulfills this purpose despite the considerable subjectivity of the assessment of what is similar.
Lamarck – Systematics as an expression of evolution
Whereas for Linné, species were still creations of God and thus stood as equals on one level, for Lamarck each individual species was the result of a primordial creation and a subsequent process of transformation driven by specialization in a specific way of life. Simple-built organisms are the result of recent primordial creation, while complex-built organisms, such as vertebrates and humans, are the result of long-past primordial creation.
Many species specialize in a similar way, giving rise to structural types that differentiate into ever more diverse lifestyles. This explains their physical transformation. Lamarck’s systematics resulted from this reasoning, which he presented in overview tables — they correspond to our modern dichotomous identification keys. On this theoretical basis, Lamarck was able to organize the then confusion of invertebrate animals into an order that became the basis of the modern system of the animal kingdom.
This was an organismic theory of evolution, because the gradual /transformation is based on the organism and its abilities.
Only a few years after Lamarck, Louis Pasteur was able to show that primordial generation was not possible, thus depriving Lamarck’s theory of evolution of its foundation. The defamation of Lamarck by the anti-evolutionist Georges Cuvier, who in his obituary replaced the term “les besoins” (the need to live) with “désirs” (longings, desires), did the rest to distort the image of Lamarck and his importance for systematics, which has only recently been corrected by Levevre (2010).
Ernst Haeckel – The reinterpretation of being and becoming
After the Darwin’s book (1859), it seemed inevitable that the system of the animal kingdom founded by Linné and further developed by Lamarck should be seen as the result of the evolutionary process. This was immediately obvious for the level of species,genera, and families.
However, there were no smooth transitions between the construction types of animals – they were called animal tribes, evoking the image of individual trees – and there were no mediating species between insects and crustaceans, for example. It was clear that they too had evolved, and in the common 19th century thinking of progress and higher development, the simple creatures had to be the original ones and the more complex ones the more highly developed ones that had emerged from the simpler ones.
Ernst Haeckel, who stands for the reception of Darwinism – especially in the public sphere – like no other, also disseminated this thinking through his words, writings and outstanding illustrations. For him, the illustration and description of a natural object, an animal, was sufficient and complete natural research. Functional aspects are missing, as can be seen in his excellent depictions of jellyfish, among other things.
If there is a lineage of animal species, it can be visualized in the form of the well-known family trees. In his Anthropogeny (1874), Haeckel drew the first family tree of the animal kingdom, which also included humans — which was Haeckel’s main concern. The simple-built animals stand near the base, the complex-built ones in the crown of the tree.
The methodological result
This mixed up the two aspects of Darwin’s theory, namely descent/kinship and transformation. In addition, the description of the form without its functionality as a viable organism, and the order according to similarity was declared to be the result of the course of evolution – untenable in terms of scientific theory and an error with long-term effects.
Willi Hennig – The formalization of the error
All subsequent designs of phylogenetic tree are based on the same working method. It was formalized as Phylogenetic Systematics (Hennig 1950) and dominates the mainstream of research today. It is considered to be evolutionary research, which in reality is nothing more than traditional systematics based on similarities — for Hennig, the animals were simply carriers of characteristics. Ernst Haeckel’s mistake continues.
However, experienced systematists are well aware of how subjective it is to create such a system and they refuse to declare it as the result and reflection of an evolutionary process.
“Darwinism” under criticism
Over the course of time, all terms and working methods relating to evolution and evolutionary research have been condensed into the term Darwinism. It is only in the statements that the criticized terms become clear.
Gutmann & Bonik (1981: 182) „Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was one of the greatest propagators of the idea of evolution in the German-speaking world. In only apparent reference to Darwin, he developed an unclear and far-reaching natural philosophical total interpretation of the world (monism). Many of his biological ideas, such as the gastraea theory or the biogenetic basic law, still have a canonizing effect today and therefore hinder the pluralism of theories and proper phylogenetic reconstruction.
Gould calls the level of species on which the synthetic theory works “microevolution” and states that from here there are no statements on “macroevolution”, namely on the evolution of animal construction types. Ernst Cassierer (see Weingarten 1993) had already made corresponding critical comments in the 1930s.
Mocek (1988) does not see “The becoming of form” explained in Darwinism. Wuketits (1993) expresses corresponding criticism. Edlinger (2009), in his critical appraisal of Darwinism, goes beyond this point and examines the fundamental positions of the synthetic theory, especially the concept of adaptation, which he rejects as always true and overstretched and therefore meaningless. Bonik & Gutmann (1981) did not stop at this criticism and developed the Critical Theory of Evolution, the basis of the Frankfurt Organismic Theory.
In fact, the wrong development since Haeckel can be seen in zoology textbooks today. One hundred and fifty years after Darwin, the field of research is still not able to explain the main evolutionary lines, the “bauplan evolution”. They refuse to accept the reconstructions of evolutionary lines according to the Frankfurt organismic working concept and remain at the level of naturalism, i.e. describing nature without reference to causalities.
The transformation of body architecture
Three approaches aside the Frankfurt reconstruction theory attempted to clarify the evolution of construction types in the animal kingdom without the traditional link to kinship and systematics:
Homology research, was seen as the basis of evolutionary research mainly in the German-speaking world. It failed due to its internal illogicality, but it was of historical significance in that it hindered further development.
Modern research on “bauplan-evolution” attempts to bring about transformations between animal construction types using genetic methods, so far without result after thirty years.
The New Animal Phylogeny is the result of the reconstruction of gene structures of bilaterally symmetrical animals (Bilateria) ((Adoutte et. al. 1999, 2000, 2003). The ancestraö Bilaterian must have been metamerically structured. This confirmed the reconstructions according to the Frankfurt working concept (Gutmann 1970 and following). The New Animal Pylogeny is based on gene structures, it does not describe the transformation of the construction types of the Bilateria. It makes no statement on the non-bilateria (ctenophores, sponges, coelenterates), which were not the subject of the study.
Brake with tradition
The break with the working concepts of classical Darwinism, as Wolfgang F. Gutmann in 1970 raised evolutionary research in the following decades to a new level of knowledge about the paths of evolutionary development and the ways in which the body architecture of animals is transformed. The results, published in many papers (see bibliography) are summarized as illustrations and descriptions as posters (German 2018, English 2021) and they are described here in the appendix as pdf documents in the form of a summary.