German biologist, physician, and philosopher (died 1919)

Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, ontogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the disproven but influential recapitulation theory, later generalizing it into the so called "Biogenetic Law". He wrongly claimed that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny, using incorrectly drawn images of human embryonic development to derive the law.