[Re:] More on Hennig and Rosa

[Thomas Schlemmermeyer]

One of the speakers of the Hennig congress in Goettingen, some time ago, (was
it M. Schmidt from Bonn?) said that Hennig never spoke Italian nor read Italian
literature, and that in war times the major colleague of Hennig (who provided
him with literature excerpts and so on) was his own wife, in Germany.

Am I just dreaming, or is this my true memory, and above mentioned things were
really mentioned in Goettingen?

However, considering that Hennig had a sound humanistic education (he knew
greek and latin?), he may have read some european sources, written in French or
Italian, almost automatically without even explicitly mentioning them?

   Thomas


On (         Mon, 3 Jul 2000 08:57:20 -0400),         John Grehan
<jrg13 at PSU.EDU> wrote:

>
>A colleague kindly drew my attention to an article by Kuge and another
>person (the name is missing) published on the web page
>http://www.cladistics.org/about/hennig.html
>
>The article refers to Hennig's war experience in Italy, noting that he was
>not interned, but worked in the anti-malaria service of the British. The
>author's acknowledge suggestions that during this time Hennig learned
>Rosa's theory. They conclude "However, whenever Hennig might have acquired
>knowledge of Rosa's earlier contribution, he may just as well dismissed it,
>because Rosa's ideas were so strongly influenced by Lamarckian thinking".
>
>My current understanding of Rosa was that he was not Lamarkian, but nearer
>to the concept of orthogenesis. If this was enough to Hennig to "dismiss"
>hologenesis, still the information acquired becomes background knowledge,
>and if incorporated (which is evidently the case if a historical connection
>is established) cladists will owe as much historical debt to Rosa as to
>Hennig. Perhaps the society will have to be renamed the Willi Hennig and
>Daniele Rosa society!
>
>John Grehan
>
>