Es soll im folgenden nicht behauptet werden, Wasmann sei der erste Jesuit, der sich als Naturwissenschaftler mit der Frage der Evolutionstheorie auseinandergesetzt habe. Hier warensicher sein Lehrer Tilmann Pesch, Professor fur Naturphilosophie am Jesuitenkolleg in Blyenbeek,und noch manche andere zu erwahnen (Schmitz 1932, S. 282). Durch sein internationales Ansehenals Ameisenforscher ist er einfach der markanteste Vertreter der jesuitischen Einsatzes auf diesem Gebiet

http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~christiankummer/publikationen/zwischenforschungund.pdf.

Barantzke, Heike: Erich Wasmann – Jesuit und Zoologe in Personalunion, in:Jahrbuch fur Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie VI (1999) 77-140

Koltermann, Rainer: Naturwissenschaft und Glaube. Die Kontroverse zwischenErich Wasmann S.J. und Ernst Haeckel um Evolutionstheorie undSchopfungsglaube, in: Sievernich, M. und Switek, G. (Hrsg.), Ignatianisch.Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu. Freiburg: Herder 1990, 444-461

Schmitz, Hermann: Nachruf P. Erich Wasmann, in: Mitteilungen aus den DeutschenProvinzen der Gesellschaft Jesu 12 (1932) 280-289

Terhal, H.J.J.: Erich Wasmann S.J., in: Natuurhistorisch Maandblad 45 (1956) 4-7,34-37, 58-61, 79-82, 112-115 und 121-124



„Jesuit und Naturforscher in Personalunion“, - говорил о себе Васманн (Иезуит и исследователь природы в одном лице).
Brandau, Elisabeth
Sie nannten mich "Ameisenpater"
2004, 159 Seiten, Softcover
ISBN: 3-937634-26-6 Preis: 9,80 Euro
http://www.zisterzienser-langwaden.de/verlag/...


When father Wasmann died at Valkenburg in 1931, he left behind an extensive insect collection. This 'Museum Wassmannianum' was given on permanent loan to the Natural History Museum Maastricht in 1941. The scientific value of the collection was such that Prof. Dr H. Bischof had it moved to Berlin in 1943. In September 1945 the American major Baily brought it back to Maastricht. In 1964 the museum became the owner of the collection.

http://www.nhmmaastricht.nl/textonly-en/col_emw.htm


 

      ******


Robert J. Richards<sup>1

1</sup>This article is based on my forthcoming book, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought in Germany.

Through the next decade, the political and social situation, from the old liberal point of view, continued to deteriorate. In 1903, the newly elected pope, taking the ominous name of Pius X, cast a lengthening shadow up from the south. The threat of Catholic revanchism brought an invitation from friends in Berlin for Haeckel to sally forth out of retirement and to take up arms against the newly resurgent Church. The invitation, especially mentioned that the continually growing reaction in the leading circles, the over weaning confidence of an intolerant orthodoxy, the shift in balance toward ultramontane Papism, and the consequent threat to German spiritual freedom in our universities and schools—that all of this made an energetic defense a pressing necessity.²⁴

Haeckel accepted the invitation and, in 1905, gave three lectures in the great hall of the Sing Akademie in Berlin to over two thousand enthusiastic auditors on each of the succeeding days. He rehearsed, in a minor key, the indictment against old enemies, especially those who either rejected or hesitated to endorse evolutionary theory, but orchestrated a thundering denunciation of a new and quite unexpected foe. This was a group most conspicuously represented by an entomologist, a man who was chiefly responsible for bringing the old bear out of his cave.25 This individual argued strongly for evolutionary theory, grounding his defense in extremely compelling empirical evidence; and he had just written a scientifically exemplary study, Die moderne Biologie und die Entwickelungstheorie (Modern biology and evolutionary theory, 1904). But the scientist was also a Jesuit priest, Father Erich Wasmann (1859-1931). For the Jesuits to endorse evolution meant that subtle chicanery had to be afoot. Haeckel declared Wasmann’s book “a masterpiece of Jesuitical confusion and sophistry.”26 Wasmann bears some extended consideration not only because of the vehemence of Haeckel’s reaction but also because of this Jesuit’s scientific acumen, which has preserved his name in the reference lists of modern entomological studies, and especially because he provides a telling case of an individual whose scientific observations trumped his initial dogmatic convictions.<sup>27

27</sup> Of the hundreds of authors cited by Edward O. Wilson in his Insect Societies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), Wasmann has about the eighth largest number of citations, some fourteen (p. 521). Abigail Lustig has written an illuminating essay on Wasmann and colleagues. See her “Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 282-307. Lustig also has published a comparison of the intellectual styles of Haeckel and Wasmann. See her “Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel and the Limits of Science,” Theory in Biosciences 121 (2002): 252-59.

The Guests of Ants—Evidence for Evolution Since his days in the Jesuit seminary in the Netherlands, Wasmann had been an enthusiastic collector of bugs (not unlike the Cambridge student Charles Darwin). Because of a recurring lung infection, the young seminarian could not go to the missions or teach in a Jesuit school after finishing the philosophy curriculum. Instead he was allowed to engage in private theological study and to continue exercising an obvious talent for entomological research. His interest in this latter quickly turned to ants and a class of beetles that lives symbiotically in ant nests, the so-called “myrmecophile” or “guest of ants.” In the short period from 1884 to 1890, Wasmann had over sixty publications on ants, termites, and their guests. His meticulous study of slave-making behavior in ants of the new and old worlds culminated in a work that secured his reputation as a leading authority in entomology: Die zusammengesetzten Nester und gemischten Kolonien der Ameisen (The commonly established nests and mixed colonies of ants, 1891). He concluded that work with a consideration of its bearing on evolutionary theory. He argued that slave-making ants in the Americas and Europe, which displayed common instincts, had either to have been created originally with these behavioral traits or to have evolved in the two, widely separated locations in a strictly parallel fashion, which on Darwinian grounds seemed quite improbable. One had to acknowledge, therefore, that a higher intelligence had established internal laws of development and instilled their causal processes in the hereditary structure of these organisms.28 Wasmann’s anti-evolutionary convictions, however, became muted after deeper study of those odd beetles that came to live in ant nests. Indeed, through empirical evidence supplied by the guests of ants, he dramatically altered his original attitude toward evolution. In a series of articles first appearing in Biologisches Zentralblatt and in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach,29 and then summarized in Moderne Biologie und die Entwicklungstheorie, Wasmann presented extensive and quite detailed empirical evidence for evolutionary transitions in the myrmecophile.30 He distinguished three kinds inquilines, or ant-guests, according to their morphology and behavior: the aggressive type (Trutztypus), the symphilic type, and the mimetic type. Aggressive, tank-like beetles could be found in the genus Dinarda. These species displayed heavily armored, compact individuals that were impervious to ant attacks. Wasmann examined four species that were distributed over north central Europe and showed that they varied in color and size depending on the color and size of the species of ants with which they lived. The similarity of color made the beetles less conspicuous in the nests; and appropriate size made them less vulnerable to attacks on their appendages. Wasmann asserted that “we have here, therefore, a case in which we can explain effortlessly and completely satisfactorily, by the simplest natural causes, the differentiation of similar species of the same genus from a common progenitor.”31 He further argued that the genus Chitosa, which inhabited southern Europe, had to be related to Dinarda through a common ancestor. Thus, he concluded, evolutionary adaptations had been acquired in the descent of species. Moreover, inquilines found in termite nests in India suggested that beetle species in the genus Doryloxenus, typical of the myrmecophile dwelling with African wandering ants (Dorylus), had come to live with termites, quite different insects; moreover, one could trace alterations in the species of this genus as they evolved more effective adaptations for protecting themselves against termite attacks. Wasmann drew further evidence of evolutionary transformation in the symphilic group of myrmecophile, those that secreted a sweet exudate and were fed by the ants in return. He showed that species of the Lomechusini varied in features dependent on the species of ant with which they lived. The most startling evidence he produced, however, was within the mimetic group. These were beetles that had evolved to look like ants. Wasmann showed that myrmecophile of quite different genera that yet inhabited nests of the same species of ant had converged in their morphologies (see fig. 2). On the basis of such evidence, Wasmann affirmed that “we ought calmly accept the evolutionary doctrine insofar as it is scientifically founded on a definite class of structures with a sufficient degree of probability.” 32

The drama of the evolution-religion conflict and a sense of its high-culture entertainment value brought Wasmann, amidst a flurry of newspaper interpretations of the debate, an invitation in 1906 to reply to Haeckel at the Sing Akademie. He declined the offer, but a short time later did accept a comparable invitation issued by a group of prominent scientists in Berlin. Initially he was to have addressed a meeting of the entomological society, but Ludwig Plate (1862-1937), a member of the inviting committee and an associate of Haeckel, insisted that the meeting be open to the public.40 Wasmann agreed and he further allowed that after his three public lectures, his opponents could present their objections and he would respond. Initially some twenty-five critics requested time, but Wasmann left it up to the committee to pare down the list to something manageable. On February 13, 14, and 17, 1907, Wasmann lectured in the Sing Akademie each day to over one thousand people, who paid one mark for each occasion (two for reserved seating). He took as his subjects: the general theory of evolution and its support drawn from entomology; varieties of evolutionary theory—theistic and monistic (atheistic); and the problem of human evolution.41 At 8:30 on the evening of February 18, with the audience swelling to some two thousand men and women, eleven opponents confronted Wasmann in the auditorium of the Zoological Gardens. His objectors were allotted varying amounts of time, with Plate, the principal organizer, receiving the longest period at half of an hour. Wasmann was granted thirty minutes to answer his eleven critics. He mounted the podium at 11:30 p.m., with the full complement of the audience still in their seats. He focused his response on Plate’s objections, and brought in others as time permitted. He asserted that he would surrender to the idea of spontaneous generation if the scientific evidence demonstrated the likelihood, but he could not allow the creation of matter and its laws to be proper scientific subjects. These latter problems lay in the province of metaphysics, about which he would nonetheless be happy to argue. His own position on the purely scientific issues, he said, was close to that of Hans Driesch: one had to postulate, internal vital laws to devise adequate explanations of species descent. Though Plate and others continued to attribute an interventionist theology to Wasmann, he claimed that his science did not require that—though he was philosophically committed to the belief that God had created matter and its laws, which laws might, he allowed, eventually include those governing spontaneous generation. And while the evolution of man’s body from lower creatures had yet to be shown, he also allowed that as a possibility. But, he maintained, it was the natural science of psychology that absolutely distinguished human mentality from animal cognition, and therefore a gradual transition in mind from animals to man was precluded by science itself. Wasmann’s opponents shelled him not only with intellectual objections but also lobbed the occasional invective designed to dismember less substantial egos—Plate concluded that “Father Wasmann is not a genuine research scientist (Naturforscher), not a true scholar”; the anthropologist Hans Friedenthal (1870-1943) referred to Wasmann as a “dilettante” in the area of human evolution.”42 Yet Wasmann met the over-wrought responses with a calm professionalism made piquant with a “dry sense of humor” (as the Berliner Morgenpost characterized his lectures).43 The Deutsche Tageszeitung judged that with the exception of Plate, Wasmann’s opponents “seemed almost like pygmies.”44 After midnight, at the conclusion of the reply to his critics, Wasmann, according to the Kцlnische Volkszeitung, received from the audience a “thunderous ovation.”45 It seems clear that if he did not always convince his auditors—some five hundred articles in the various German papers reported a variety of judgments—he at least charmed them. But from our historical perspective, he did more than that. He showed that evolutionary theory at the turn of the century still had not achieved consensus, though was rapidly approaching fundamental agreement among professionals of every philosophical conviction. And his subtle arguments demonstrated that no necessary antagonism had to exist between evolutionary theory and a liberal, philosophically acute brand of theology. Not all objectors from the side of religion showed themselves as high-minded as Wasmann. Certainly Arnold Brass of the Protestant Keplerbund did not.



Coda: “The Rape of the Ants” After his encounter with Haeckel and the Monists, Wasmann continued his research on inquilines and their hosts. His correspondence network of important ant-men—August Forel, William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937), and Hugo von Buttel-Reepen (1860-1933)—continued apace, with the exchange of many ant species among them. Wasmann built up the largest entomological collection of ants in the world, some 3500 different species. He also strove unremittingly against Haeckelian evolutionary theory and its cultural spread, which he believed to be rife during the first decades of the new century. He lectured and wrote on the dangers to German culture of Monistic thought, especially that connection about which Virchow had warned, namely, its alliance with the Social Democratic Party and the Communists. Wasmann thought this danger particularly acute after the Great War, with German institutions and society in shambles and with their need of reconstruction. In a lecture delivered to the Catholic Union in Aachen on January 28, 1921, Wasmann asked, rhetorically, about the direction to take in the wake of the destruction of German cultural and social life. Our answer can only be shouted: back to Christianity and away with Haeckelian Monism! For the impregnation of anti-Christian ideas of this neopaganism into our social networks bears the chief responsibility for not only the material collapse of our Fatherland but also its ethical and religious orientation. For that reason we say: Haeckel’s Monism is a cultural danger [Kulturgefдhr].77 During Wasmann’s last years, he saw the beginning of a transformation in German society, but in a way that confirmed his dark forebodings. Wasmann died in 1931. His ants, however, were fated to have a curious connection with the Nazi regime.78 After his death, Wasmann’s large collection of books and reprints, along with his ants and beetles, were donated to the Natural History Museum of Maastricht to be used for all researchers. In October of 1942, Dr. Has Bischoff, curator of the Berlin Zoological Museum, received an order from Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and himself an amateur entomologist. Bischoff was to go to Holland and get Wasmann’s ants. He first traveled to the Jesuit house in Limburg looking for the collection. He was told it was transferred to the Natural History Museum in Maastricht. The museum personnel and other citizens learned of Bischoff’s mission; and, with the connivance of even the Quisling mayor, they hid the ants in the basement of the city hall. Only temporarily foiled, Bischoff returned to Maastricht the next spring with a contingent of SS troops. Quite formally he stated the ants were being repatriated. They were German ants! The burgomaster retorted that Wasmann was born in the Tyrol. They were Italian ants. The Dutch, needless to say, did not win the argument. The ants and Wasmann’s book collection were carted off to Berlin. A Time Magazine article of 1944, entitled “The Rape of the Ants,” stood aghast at the perfidy of the SS, who even stooped so low as to steal ants.79 (79“The Rape of the Ants,” Time 44, no. 21 (20 November 1944), science section.)

After the Normandy Invasion, Colonel John Wendell Bailey (1895-1986), head of typhus control in Europe, made his way to Maastricht in fall of 1945 to examine Wasmann’s collection. Bailey was a professor of entomology at the University of Richmond and a former student of Harvard Professor William Morton Wheeler, Wasmann’s old friend. When he got to the museum he learned about the fate of the ants. He decided to chance it and traveled the 600 miles to Berlin and the Zoologisches Museum, which lay in rubble. He did manage to locate Bischoff and with some tactful threats discovered that Wasmann’s ants and books had been stored in the deep vaults of a bank. The bank lay in ruins, but the vaults were still secure. Miraculously the entire collection of ant species and the library had survived. Since the bank was in the Russian sector, Bailey had to negotiate with a Russian general, whom he befriended with many cartons of American cigarettes and several bottles of whiskey. After the proper papers were signed, Bailey and several G.I.s loaded the ants and books—some 160 insect trays, 150 small boxes, 100 bottles of specimens in alcohol, and 50,000 books and reprints—on two trucks and three jeeps and took them to the American sector. Bailey discovered, however, that some of the insects were missing, which he later found in Himmler’s country home in Waischenfeld, just over the Swiss border. Bailey shipped the ants and books back to the Maastricht Natural History Museum, where today they are still used in research.

Lustig, A. (2002). “Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel and the Limits of Science.” Theory in Biosciences 121: 252-59.

Lustig, A. (2004). “Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler,” The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. L. Daston and F. Vidal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 282-307.

©2006, Vladislav Krasilnikov (translation & supplement) 

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