Well-Respected Beards, No. 011: Ernst Haeckel

Sure, sure, the creationists like to bitch about some misleading embryo drawings, and — here’s a shocker — we’ve learned some new things about evolutionary biology since he was studying it at the turn of the (other) century. Was he a German social Darwinist at the dawn of the First World War? Yeah, prolly, but I’m no expert on the history of eugenics. It cannot be denied, however, that he was a badass academic and a scientific illustration machine, and I’ll take his stuff over Jackson bloody Pollock any day. Art is for fuckers anyway once you get a load of these radiolarians … there’s enough beautiful stuff outside to keep us happy forever, assuming we don’t paint over it all with drab gray concrete and high-rise condos.

Thanks, Ernst. Thernst.

Photos: Radiolaria from here, Ernst from Wikipedia.