Edgar Dacqué

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Edgar Dacqué (born July 8, 1878 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse (then Neustadt an der Haardt), † September 14, 1945 in Munich ) was a German paleontologist , geologist and natural philosopher . He is considered to be the innovator of idealistic morphology and represented a teleological theory of evolution .

origin

His father Eugen Dacqué (born April 5, 1848, † March 30, 1922) was a banker. His mother Martha (born September 18, 1851, † December 15, 1887) was a daughter of the theologian Hermann Victor Andreae and a niece of the geologist Achilles Andreae .

Life

Dacqué came to Munich in 1897 to study paleontology and historical geology . In 1903 he received his doctorate under Karl Alfred von Zittel and in 1914 he was appointed (associate) professor for palaeontology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In this function he also took over the management of the paleontological collection of the Bavarian state .

plant

Dacqué's work can be divided into two periods: a first purely scientific and a second (from 1924), in which he also addressed questions of natural philosophy, metaphysics and religious philosophy .

The main focus of his scientific work in the first period was the paleontology of invertebrates and paleogeography . The hypothetical southern continent of Gondwana made sense to him because of the distribution of important groups of plants and animals (fossil and recent). Since the continental drift hypothesis published by Alfred Wegener in 1915 was still little known and did not appear plausible, Dacqué assumed, in accordance with the prevailing land bridge hypothesis, that huge land bridges (between Africa, India and Australia) collapsed in the Mesozoic.

Dacqué viewed the evolutionary theoretical approaches of Lamarck and Darwin as one-sided and in need of supplementation. He therefore supplemented it by taking up the idealistic morphology of the early 19th century and conceiving a “ metaphysics of the family tree ”. Idealistic morphology was a method developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with which he laid the first foundations for comparative morphology . She traced the similarities of the organisms back to an ideal "type". Dacqué's drafts of evolutionary theory were primarily concerned with the descent of humans and their position in nature. He viewed humans teleologically as both the archetype and the goal of evolution. He interpreted the entire evolution of life as a “revelation of the entelechy of man”. "Man lies in all natural historical organic development - fundamentally and from the beginning."

Dacqué's religious philosophy dealt with the falling away of man from God and his redemption through Christ . It contains influences from the mystic Jakob Böhme and the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling . Corresponding to the importance that he ascribed to man for all of nature, Dacqué viewed the evolution of all life as “the will to demonic self-realization”, as a desecrated state that demands redemption through the “self-emptying love of God” .

reception

Dacqué's comparative biological form of fossil lower animals (1921) is considered to be one of the most important contributions to the comparative anatomy of fossil animals. His typological approach influenced Adolf Remane and Otto Schindewolf to a great extent. He also wrote some of the most successful popular accounts of natural history of his time.

His metaphysical views have been generally rejected in science. However, he found a significant response from Thomas Mann , who took up Dacqué's ideas in the prelude to his novel “ Joseph and His Brothers ” (1933) and had already taken a clear stand for his concerns in a lecture in 1929.

Memberships

Edgar Dacqué became a member of the Paleontological Society in the founding year 1912 .

Fonts

  • The idea of ​​descent and its history from ancient times to modern times. Ernst Reinhardt , Munich 1903 ( archive )
  • Basics and methods of paleogeography. Publishing house by Gustav Fischer , Jena 1915 ( archive )
  • Geography of the pre-world (palaogeography). BG Teubner , Leipzig and Berlin 1919 ( archive )
  • Comparative biological science of forms of the fossil lower animals. 1921.
  • Primeval world, legend and mankind (1924, numerous new editions)
  • Nature and Soul (1927)
  • Life as a symbol. Metaphysics of a theory of evolution (1928)
  • The Geological Ages (1930)
  • Nature and Salvation (1933)
  • The Becoming of the Globe (1934)
  • Organic morphology and paleontology (1935)
  • Paradise lost. On the history of the human soul (1938)
  • The prototype. The creation myth retold (1940)
  • From the depths of nature (1944)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dacqué, Edgar . Lexicon of Biology , Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 1999 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Werner Quenstedt, Manfred Schröter: Dacqué Edgar Viktor August . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), pp. 465-467 ( online ).
  3. ^ Idealistic morphology , in: Lexikon der Biologie, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 1999 ( online ).
  4. ↑ See also Kay Meister: Metaphysische Konsequenz - die idealistic Morphologie Edgar Dacqués , in: New Yearbook for Geology and Palaeontology - Abhandlungen, Volume 235, Issue 2, pp. 197-233 (2005).
  5. ↑ a b c Quoted from Werner Quenstedt, Manfred Schröter: Dacqué Edgar Viktor August . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), pp. 465–467 ( online )
  6. ↑ a b c Georgy S. Levit and Uwe Hoßfeld: A bridge-builder: Wolf-Ernst Reif and the Darwinisation of German paleontology . Historical Biology 25, pp. 297-303 (2013), here p. 303.
  7. ↑ Dierk Wolters: Between Metaphysics and Politics. Thomas Mann's novel "Joseph and His Brothers" in his time . Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 1998, pp. 94-99.
  8. ^ Palaeontological Journal 1, Issue 1, March 1914
personal data
SURNAME Dacqué, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German paleontologist and natural philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Neustadt an der Weinstrasse
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1945
Place of death Munich