#Scala naturae how to

SerresĪrgued that the developing human brain progressed through the hierarchy of nature as itĭeveloped at first it looked like the brain of a fish, then a reptile, then a bird, and He received an award from the Académie des Sciences (Academy of Sciences). Serres published two volumes of comparative work on vertebrate brains in 1821, for which

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History) in Paris in Paris, France, worked with Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a professor of zoology at Higher and lower organisms enabled him to argue that the organs of the higher life formsĭeveloped through the stages of lower morphologies thus, development mirrored the hierarchy of The arrested organs from organisms high on the scala naturae to the normally developed Terminations to development, to help support his theory of recapitulation. Meckel used malformations, which he saw as the results of early Idea that embryonic stages of higher forms recapitulate the forms of animals that reside lower Vergleichenden Anatomie ( Contributions to Comparative Anatomy), Meckel outlines the

Multiple treatises on comparative anatomy and in his 1811 text, Beyträge zur Specimens, which he collected from all over the world.

Meckel was meticulous in his comparative study of abnormal embryological He grew up helping his father prepare specimensįor the family’s anatomical collection, and he became professor of anatomy at the Meckel was born in 1781 in Halle, Germany. Scala naturae and recapitulation and applied them to their own embryological studies. That embryos pass through the morphological stages of beings lower on the scala naturae.įollowing Aristotle, many scientists attempted to find examples of recapitulation in developingĮmbryos, such as in the chick ( Gallus gallus). Aristotle had hinted at recapitulation, or the idea The large variety of species found on earth. Top of the earthly creatures because of their likeness to the Deity, but were placed under Godĭuring the early 1800s, when Meckel and Serres first articulated theirĭoctrines of recapitulation, many accepted the scala naturae as the main explanation for In this new framing of the scala naturae, humans maintained their position at the Restructured the scala naturae to reflect God’s place in creating the hierarchy of Proponent in Aristotle, who worked in Greece four centuries before the common era.Īristotle’s scala naturae arranged all organisms into a hierarchy based on theĬomplexity of their form. The concept of scala naturae, or the great chain of being, had an early

#Scala naturae how to

The mid-eighteenth century debate about how to explain morphological similarities between The recapitulation ideas of Meckel and Serres became part of They compared the anatomy and embryos of different species so as to relate stages of embryonicĭevelopment to the scala naturae, led other scientists to generalize their individualĬoncepts into one general theory. Rather, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their similar approaches, in which Serres, a physician at Hôtel-Dieu de Paris in Paris, France, did not work together. Meckel, a professor of anatomy at the University of Halle in Halle, Germany, and Progress through successive stages in which they resemble lower level forms is called The concept that the embryos of higher order organisms Serres both argued that fetal deformities result when development prematurely stops, and theyĪrgued that these arrests characterized lower life forms, through which higher order organisms Johann Friedrich Meckel and Antoine Etienne Reynaud Augustin Serres developed in theĮarly 1800s the basic principles of what later became called the Meckel-Serres Law. The Meckel-Serres Conception of Recapitulation