Inseparable Impulses: The Science and Aesthetics of Ernst Haeckel and Charley Harper

In this article, we examine the way images make arguments about science. The two examples we put forth make arguments about Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory is a useful example, because the artists make visual arguments in many different ways, and the examples we present here expose the role of aesthetics in making scientific arguments. The first image, Plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, shown in Fig. 1a, depicts Chiroptera, or bats, evenly spaced on a white field. The second, Charley Harper’s Darwin’s Finches from The Giant Golden Book of Biology, shows 13 finches, also placed next to one another on a white field (Fig. 1b). Although these two images appear to have little in common, they can both be viewed as arguments for some aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. This paper will analyze these images in light of the image-makers and their styles. We will show how these images connect to broader scientific discourses. In doing so, we hope to show that visual style is intimately connected with scientific practice. As we shall see, just as artwork may always be understood in terms of style, to neglect to take account of the style of a scientific image is also to miss something about its content. Aesthetic components are not auxiliary to scientific representation but are required to make sense of images and to understand the scientific discourse they represent.