Introduction To Darwinism
His ideas changed in summer 1862 when he returned to study at Jena, where Ernst Haeckel introduced him to Darwin's work and theories. Dohrn became a fervent defender of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
At that time comparative embryology was the keystone of morphological evolutionary studies, based on Haeckel's recapitulation theory, the idea that an organism during its embryonic development passes through the major stages of the evolutionary past of its species. Morphology became one of the major ways in which zoologists sought to expand and develop Darwinian theory in the latter years of the 19th century. Dohrn chose to become a "Darwinian morphologist".
Dohrn received his doctorate in 1865 at Breslau under Eduard Grube, and his Habilitation in 1868 at Jena with Rudolf Virchow, Ernst Haeckel and Carl Gegenbaur. The study subjects were Medicine und Zoology and his Jena monograph was Studien zur Embryologie der Arthropoden. From 1868-1870 he was a Docent in zoology at Jena. During these times, he worked several times at facilities located by the sea: Heligoland alongside Haeckel in 1865, Hamburg in 1866, Millport, Scotland with David Robertson in 1867 and 1868 and moved to Messina, Italy, during the winter of 1868 together with his friend and colleague Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay to work on the marine life of the Straits of Messina. In 1870 Dohrn was called up to (briefly) serve in the Franco-Prussian War.
Read more about this topic: Anton Dohrn
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