Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Neither Creation nor Evolution:
the Third Way in Mid-Nineteenth Century Thinking
about the Origin of Species 1
Nicolaas A. Rupke
Abstract
A revision of the standard account of nineteenth-century evolutionary biology is proposed. The debate
about the origin of species was not merely one of creation versus evolution. There existed a third view,
which equated the problem of how species originated with that of how life had commenced. Major and
minor scientists alike postulated that species had appeared not as a result of divine fiat nor by the transmutation
of one form of life into another, but by the spontaneous generation of their first seeds, germs or
primordial embryos from dead matter, a process also referred to as autochthonous generation. Especially
in the German-speaking world, until the appearance of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species
(1859), this was the dominant theory of how plants, animals and humans had come into being. Among
the leading autochthonists were Hermann Burmeister, Heinrich Bronn and Carl Vogt. Sympathisers
included Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Lyell. One of the empirical foundations of the theory
was the observed fixity of species. Added to this was the discovery of repeated extinctions and reappearances
of life on earth. The existence of geographical provinces of distribution of plant and animal species
seemed to confirm autochthonous origins, and Alphonse de Candolle, Joseph Dalton Hooker and other
botanists flirted with the theory. Also the existence of human varieties and their segregated distribution
across the globe was attributed to the autochthonous generation of each race. Leading biomedical scientists,
among whom Johannes Müller and Rudolf Virchow, worked with the notion of spontaneous species
generation. Its philosophical roots greatly varied, from the idealism and vitalism of Naturphilosophie
to vulgar materialism. Vogt and other left-wingers linked their belief in the spontaneous emergence of life
following Cuvierian earth catastrophes to their support of the Revolution of 1848. In the Origin of
Species, Darwin ignored the autochthony view. Following the book's appearance, many autochthonists
converted to evolution, and their previous view was written out of the record and "forgotten."
Tertium datur: Autochthonous Generation
During the middle of the nineteenth century, several eminent biologists and paleontologists
rejected both "evolution" and "creation" as modes of the origin of species. They
1 I warmly thank Peter Bowler, Bill Bynum, Thomas Junker and especially David Livingstone and Jim Moore
for encouragement and advice.
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005): 143-172
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