title: Ludwig Edinger: the vertebrate series and comparative neuroanatomy.
abstract: At the end of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Edinger completed the first comparative survey of the microscopic anatomy of vertebrate brains. He is regarded as the founder of the field of comparative neuroanatomy. Modern commentators have misunderstood him to have espoused an anti-Darwinian linear view of brain evolution, harkening to the metaphysics of the scala naturae. This understanding arises, in part, from an increasingly contested view of nineteenth-century morphology in Germany. Edinger did espouse a progressionist, though not strictly linear, view of forebrain evolution, but his work also provided carefully documented evidence that brain stem structures vary in complexity independently from one another and across species in a manner that is not compatible with linear progress. This led Edinger to reject progressionism for all brain structures other than the forebrain roof, based on reasoning not too dissimilar from those his successors used to dismiss it for the forebrain roof.
authors.affiliation: a History and Philosophy of Science , Indiana University , Bloomington , IN , USA.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Patton
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002490:Central Nervous System / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005858:Germany; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D009445:Neuroanatomy / Q000266:history*; D014714:Vertebrates
keywords: Carl Gegenbaur; Ernst Haeckel; German Romanticism; Ludwig Edinger; comparative neuroanatomy; evolutionary morphology; vertebrate series