Ernst Haeckel, Image of Human Evolution (1907)

Ernst Haeckel was a biologist, naturalist, and physician who did as much as anyone to popularize Darwin’s evolutionary theories in Germany. A friend to controversy, he antagonized religious communities in particular with his in-your-face arguments about the verifiable foundations of evolution and the incompatibility of faith-based doctrines regarding the natural world. In this image of human evolution taken from Haeckel’s 1907 book The Human Problem and Linné’s Primates, we see a depiction of embryonic change in three mammals: a bat, a gibbon ape, and a human being. The image works to collapse the ontological distance between humans and other animals that exist on the same developmental tree, a collapse that was still resisted by religious believers who took the Bible literally.