The Darwinian revolution in Germany: from evolutionary morphology to the modern synthesis

The Darwinian revolution in the German speaking lands was the result of a variety of influences and disciplinary convergences. One of the paths led from pre-Darwinian comparative morphology via Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary morphology to the Modern Synthesis. Our research demonstrates that there was no immediate replacement of one paradigm by another as described in the classical work of Thomas Kuhn. Rather, the development of novel conceptual structures looked like a Russian ‘matryoshka doll’ consisting of an over-arching ‘meta-paradigm’ embracing conceptual structures of ever smaller scale. Such a meta-paradigm for German life sciences was initially established by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which determined the specificity of German evolutionism throughout the 2nd half of the 19th and well into the 20th century.