Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

152
Figure 3. Carl Vogt (Vogt
1859,frontispiece).
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Nicolaas A. Rupke
professor of anatomy Rudolph Wagner ridiculed the
belief in the existence of an immaterial human soul
(Rupke 1994, 307-308). Vogt's contributions to the earth
and life sciences ranged widely, and included influential
popular books, textbooks, as well as specialised studies in
marine biology.
During his younger years Vogt regarded "revolutions"
as the decisive moments in the development of the history
of life and of society. Repeatedly in the course of
geological time all life had been exterminated by catastrophes,
but out of the ruins new "creations" had
emerged, constituting a sequence of increasing perfection.
This sequence could be compared to that through
which an embryo goes in its development towards birth.
Yet Vogt's comparison of the succession of life on earth
with ontogeny did not imply that he accepted an evolu-
tionary phylogeny. On the contrary; he aggressively rejected the notion of species transmutation,
just as he strongly denounced the belief in miraculous creation. The revolution-restitution
pattern of geological history, and thus also the repeated re-emergence of
life, were an expression of material laws and of innate properties of matter (Bröker 1973,
51-55). Thus to Vogt abiogenesis was not heterogenesis, in the sense that life and its
manifestations were nothing more than configurations of matter and its natural laws.
Ironically, Vogt's early anti-evolutionary utterances took the form of footnotes added
to his translation into German of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), the pro-evolutionary treatise by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. Vogt
rejected what to many people was the essence of the book, namely the notion of the
spontaneous origin of life from lifeless matter and the evolutionary origin of species by
natural laws that had been divinely enacted. It is not clear why Vogt should have wished
to spend his time during the time-consuming turmoil of the revolutionary years translating
a book the central thesis of which he disagreed with, but he simply may have approved
of the anti-establishmentarian furore it had created (Gregory 1970, 70-71; Rupke
2000, 220). In any case, Vogt’s translation, which came out under the title Natürliche Geschichte
der Schöpfung des Weltalls, der Erde und der auf ihr befindlichen Organismen, begründet auf
die durch die Wissenschaft errungenen Thatsachen (1851; 2nd edn 1858), shows him to have
been a decided opponent of spontaneous generation and of species transformation.
Vogt denounced evolution as a "view that had come from nature philosophy" ("aus
der Naturphilosophie hervorgegangene Ansicht" (Vogt 1851a, 98)). This theory of the
gradual transmutation of successive creations contrasted with his own "theory of revolutions
that let continually new faunas appear on earth" ("Revolutionstheorie, die stets
neue Faunen auf der Erde auftreten läßt" (Vogt 1851a, 124)). Geological revolutions had
repeatedly destroyed all life, and new organic worlds had followed in the wake of the
destructions, not as a result of old forms being transformed into new, nor because of a
transcendental Creator, who would be a ridiculous figure to try twenty-five times or
more to get things right or just as ridiculous to enact laws to do the work for Him while