Darwin and Neuroscience: The German Connection

What is it about?

Most historians attribute the warm German reception of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) to three factors: a native tradition of evolutionary thought, the popular writings of naturalists like Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), professor of zoology at the University of Jena, and a large audience of freethinkers eager to identify progress with nature. The early adoption of the principle of natural selection by Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), professor of physiology at the University of Berlin, complicates this narrative. His example refutes the contention that Darwin owed his success in Germany to Romantic ideas of teleology, form, and development. Instead, natural selection aligned with the Lucretian reasoning that du Bois-Reymond used in his studies of neurophysiology, a perspective that favored mechanical explanations over the invocation of immaterial spirits, final causes, and supernatural interventions.

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Why is it important?

Drawing from my scholarly biography of du Bois-Reymond, this essay describes his immediate advocacy of Darwin’s theory, arguing that the principle of natural selection was a mode of explanation congenial to du Bois-Reymond’s mechanical outlook. It also identifies De rerum natura by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus (99 BC – c. 55 BC) as the primary source of du Bois-Reymond’s scientific philosophy. Both points—the fact that a neuroscientist was the first German convert to Darwin, and the influence of Lucretius on his conversion—represent significant revisions to the historiography of the reception of Darwin’s theory.