On June 14, 2024, the biologist, philosopher and historian of science Michael T. Ghiselin, member of the California Academy of Sciences, passed away forever. His specialty and passion were nudibranchs and he was known for his criticism of the falsification of the history of Lamarckism in biology textbooks. The Stazione Zoologica (SZN) has lost another member of its family. In September 1968 Ghiselin came to the SZN for two months, taking advantage of the AIBS (American Institute of Biological Sciences) table to - we read on his file card - "use the primary sources existing in the library [the archive was not yet there] to historical studies on the influence of the theory of evolution on 19th century embryology”. The following year he published The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (California UP, Berkeley, 1969) with a tribute to Naples on the cover.
It was a bit contested, he told me, because at just thirty he was too young to allow himself to write about Darwin. He came back a few more times. To him we owe the complete bibliography of Anton Dohrn and the English translation from the German of Dohrn's programmatic work on The origin of vertebrates and the principle of succession of functions (1875, 1994) , a principle also recognized by Darwin. Ghiselin also dealt with the bioeconomic perspective on the organization of the SZN (2000) and, together with the undersigned, the impact of the SZN on Italian zoology (2001). (Christiane Groeben)
