What is Darwinism? (5) Back to the roots: Ernst Haeckel

In collaboration with Alan Fox (Languedoc Diary) this article is posted on his blog as What is Darwinism?. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was translated into German in 1860, and reportedly was it a revelation to Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, however, went much further than Darwin and developed a metaphysical paradigm, monism, a variety of pantheism, according to which everything evolved gradually. When creationists refer to 'evolution', it's usually something much closer to this monism they refer to than to Darwin's theory of evolution (that e.g. doesn't include an evolving universe).