Art Forms in Nature | Ernst Haeckel, 1899-1904

Bill Domonkos, 2016, Art forms of Nature by Ernst Haeckel

“I live on Earth at present and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing – a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the Universe.”

Buckminster Fuller *, I seem to be a Verb, 1970

*(1895 – 1983) An American architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor.

Die2BRadiolarien2B2528Rhizopoda2Bradiata25292B 2BErnst2BHaeckel

Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiata), 1862 Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiata), 1862

Ernst2BHaeckel.2BLichenes252C2BArtforms2Bof2BNature2B2528Kuntsformen2Bder2BNatur2529.2B1904

Ernst Haeckel. Lichenes, Artforms of Nature (Kuntsformen der Natur). 1904
.

Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.