The World's Fair

Proteus is a film about the 19th century biologist and artist Ernest Haeckel. It's almost a few years old now, and has already worked its way through the blogosphere. But, given Dave's interest in Haeckel and the recent uptick in Haeckel-talk at the blogs, let me bring it up again.

Slate had a beautiful slideshow of Haeckel's images a while back. The Panda's Thumb made note of it. Haeckel's famous for his amazing artistic abilities, and the unbelievable wealth of imagery he left us (well, and being tagged with first defining "ecology"). Panda's Thumb gave it a strange run-down, worrying over the mixture of art and science, holding those two as separate endeavors, and then trying to back out to explain that we can all still appreciate both halves, so long as we keep them apart. I shouldn't say strange, though -- they are certainly attuned to the uses of Haeckel and his drawings as part of Creationist "arguments." (Pharyngula's posts, linked above, about Haeckel and Creationism are similarly based on a concern for misuse of past biology for current anti-evolution arguments. So be it. They are all using historical references to help defend contemporary points. I don't have a particular interest in it, for now.)

Haeckel's art and science were not distinct activities. They were, indeed, born of the same pursuits. And that's okay.

Nick Hopwood, he of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, had a really interesting article in Isis (the journal of the History of Science Society) last year: "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel's Embryological Illustrations." (It's available on-line, for anyone who wants to read a thorough academic article in the midst of their blog surfing.) Haeckel was accused of fraud for his embryo illustrations. Hopwood's essay (and I'm excerpting the abstract here) "uses the [fraud] accusations to shed light on the novelty of Haeckel's visual argumentation and to explore how images come to count as proper representations or illegitimate schematics as they cross between the esoteric and exoteric circles of science."

The essay also "explains why, though Haeckel was soon accused, controversy ignited only seven years later, after he aligned a disciplinary struggle over embryology with a major confrontation between liberal nationalism and Catholicism--and why the contested pictures nevertheless survived."

Only reason I bring all of this up is that I saw Proteus just recently. And it, naturally, reminded me of all this stuff. And it was a pretty interesting documentary. Not about his embryo stuff, mind you, but about the immense number of contributions he made to our studies of marine life. So go check it out.

That makes this a commentary in a blog post about a film about a biologist who was an artist.