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The roots of Evo-Devo in Russia: Is there a characteristic “Russian Tradition”?

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Abstract

This paper raises the general question of whether there are any national peculiarities that characterize the scientific and philosophical roots of Russian-language evolutionary developmental biology. The researchers and theories are surveyed which, with hindsight, have been crucial for the Russian tradition when it comes to general methodological principles and constituting concepts. Based on published works and archival documents the main concepts of the “founding fathers” of the Russian tradition with their “Western analogues” are compared. The focus is on A. O. Kowalevsky (1840–1901), I. I. Metschnikov (1945–1916), A. N. Sewertzoff (1866–1936), I. I. Schmalhausen (1884–1963) and the parallelisms between them and E. Haeckel (1834–1919), V. Franz (1883–1950), and C. H. Waddington (1905–1977). In addition, the problem of specific influences constituting the Russian-language context of the Modern Synthesis is addressed. The major thesis of this paper is that the very character of the Russian developmental biology and its intellectual environment predisposed a strong bias towards environmentalist interpretations and thus anticipated what we now call “ecological developmental biology”.

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Notes

  1. I do not attract modern Anglo-Saxon literature on Baer to analysis, because here I am first of all interested in the Russian self-reflection of Baer’s views.

  2. The German words ‘Zweck’ and ‘Ziel’ can both be translated into English as ‘goal’.

  3. German original: “Das Gesetz von v. Baer zeigt uns, in welcher Reihenfolge sich die auch jetzt beim erwachsenen Tier bestehenden Merkmale seiner Vorfahren anlegten; das Gesetz der Rekapitulation zeigt uns dagegen, in welcher Reihenfolge die ancestralen Merkmale, die einst bei den erwachsenen Ahnen der in Rede stehenden rezenten Form vorhanden waren, aber beim rezenten erwachsenen Tier durch andere Merkmale ersetzt worden sind, sich ausbilden” (Sewertzoff 1931, p. 279).

  4. More details on Fritz Müller’s in place in evolutionary morphology, e.g., in Breidbach (2006).

  5. There are various transliterations of his name in the scientific literature, which include Elie Metchnikoff, Il’ia Mechnikov, Ilja Metschnikow and Elias Metschnikoff. He used the latter version himself in foreign-language publications.

  6. The description of Metschnikoff’s view on mesoderm formation, e.g., in Brauckmann and Gilbert (2004).

  7. A critical account of Metschnikoff’s evolutionism can be found in Winsor (1972).

  8. German original: “Die Stadien einer Morphogenese sind so konservativer in der Rekapitulation der ursprünglichen Entwicklung, je näher sie dem beginn, um so progressiver, je näher sie dem Ende derselben stehen”.

  9. The terms heterochrony and heterotopy were coined by Haeckel.

  10. With the “hold of new geographical areas“ is meant the enlargement of the territory inhabited by a species.

  11. Compare: “Darwin never seriously doubted that progress has been the general rule in the history of life” (Ospovat 1995, p. 212).

  12. Two letters from Sewertzoff to Franz were found by Uwe Hossfeld in the Archives of the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. They are presumably written in the late 1920s, before Sewertzoff (1931) published his major work.

  13. Sewertzoff’s original text in German: “Meines Erachtens besteht der Unterschied zwischen unseren Ansichten hauptsächlich darin, dass Sie bei der Klassification der Entwicklungsrichtungen vom rein Morphologischen Standpunkte ausgehen; ich dagegen gehe vom morpho-physiologischen Standpunkte aus.”

  14. It can be argued, however, that Naef was under the influence of Sewertzoff.

  15. There are several transliterations of his name: Schmalgauzen, Schmal'gausen, Šmalgauzen and so on. Here, I use the back-transliteration of his German name that he himself used for non-Cyrillic publications.

  16. Below I follow Levit et al. (2006).

  17. The Russian scientific tradition prescribes using “we” instead of “I” and “us” instead of “me” also in the works by a single author to stress the rootedness of a scientist in his scientific school.

  18. Phytocenology is in Russia an established part of geobotany and biogeocenology. It corresponds roughly to plant community ecology, but with an emphasis on the geographic and geological aspects.

  19. Similar to G. G. Simpson’s “Megaevolution” (Simpson 1944).

  20. ARAN, f. 1504, op. 3, l. 27–29.

  21. Here and later I quote Schmalhausen’s letter as it was written, without any intervention into style and spelling.

  22. Schmalhausen wrote the major parts of the book in Kazakhstan in the scientific health resort Borovoje, where he was, on the one hand, isolated from the international scientific community, but, on the other hand, came into close contact with Vernadsky, Leo Berg, Sukachev and other outstanding representatives of Russian environmentalism.

  23. For a detailed analysis of differences between the Baldwin effect and the genetic assimilation see Hall (2001).

  24. Schmalhausen’s idea here was surely not to equate his theory to Simpson’s, but to stress the Darwinian character of his concept. Timoffeev-Ressovsky et al. (1975, p. 148) used the terms “centripetal” and “stabilizing” selection synonymously.

  25. Schmalhausen, as a cautious and well-trained scientist, never exaggerated the field of his competence and very rarely employed the term “biosphere”.

  26. The relationship between teacher and pupil was sometimes literally paternalistic. For example, as Schmalhausen was in poor health Sewertzoff himself looked after him and Schmalhausen spent the summer of 1909 in Sewertzoff’s Datscha (summer house), assisted personally by Sewertzoff and his family.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lennart Olsson, Uwe Hossfeld and Sabine Brauckmann for their comments on the first draft of this paper. I am thankful to Uwe Hossfeld, who provided me with letters from A. N. Sewertzoff to V. Franz, a gift which cannot be overestimated. I am thankful to Marlen Jank and Kerrin Klinger for technical assistance.

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Archive of Ernst-Haeckel-Haus (EHH).

Archive of the Russian Academy of Science (ARAN).

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  1. AG Biologiedidaktik/Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, Berggasse 7, 07745, Jena, Germany

    Georgy S. Levit

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This paper is an extended version of my talk delivered to the First and founding meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (EDD), 16–19 August (Prague, Czech Republic). I thank Scott Gilbert for inviting me to this meeting

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Levit, G.S. The roots of Evo-Devo in Russia: Is there a characteristic “Russian Tradition”?. Theory Biosci. 126, 131–148 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0013-9

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