The Twentieth-Century Desire for Morphology

In the history of biology, the study of form inhabits an ambivalent place. Some morphological topics have been explored in depth, whereas the majority of research traditions and practices that featured twentieth-century evolutionary morphology have only marginally been investigated. Until quite recently, scholarship on the history of morphology has focused narrowly on its origin in the nineteenth-century Romantic biology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and others, its reformulation within the Darwinian framework, or its alleged breakdown during the beginning of the twentieth century. Historical interest in the rise and decline of the evolutionary morphology promoted by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and Carl Gegenbauer (1826–1903), for example, has been quite significant. Historians have been occupied at length analyzing the importance of the Haeckel-Gegenbauer school for twentieth-century morphology, its rise and decline, as well as the role played by Goethe in the growth of either descriptive or idealistic early twentieth century morphology (Richards 2002, 2008; Gliboff 2008; Hopwood 2015; Bowler 1983, 1996; Di Gregorio 2005; Nyhart 1995).