Exploring the past through the present

I am afraid that I don’t know what the “river‐of‐knowledge” is. Also, I am not sure that “the past illuminates the future” although the lessons learned from history are sometimes used in the analysis of contemporary events in a given field of biological research. The goal of my short account on Russian comparative embryology (Mikhailov 2012) was not to recapitulate the past, as important as that may be, but to trace underlying conceptual patterns that continued to shape evolutionary embryology research in Russia from the mid‐nineteenth to mid‐twentieth century. Inevitably, this allowed me to sketch the portraits of the founders of comparative and evolutionary embryology, Karl von Baer, Alexander Kowalevsky, and Illya Mechnikoff. (Both Kowalevsky and Mechnikoff were followers, not pupils of von Baer, and each one of them had a different style of thinking and reasoning as well as a different temperament.) It was not my intention to create any impression of a substantial agreement or disagreement between Alexander Kowalevsky and Karl von Baer. As repeatedly noted, the importance of Kowalevsky’s studies was recognized and appreciated by von Baer, who, nonetheless, did not accept that these findings could open up novel perspectives in the study of the origins of vertebrates (Blyakher 1955; Vucinich 1988; Adams 2008). Also, I am far from criticizing Margherita Raineri’s treatment of Kowalevsky’s studies, but it seems to me that the “von Baer versus Kowalevsky” contraposition (see Raineri 2009 and her present remark) needs a commentary. Despite its length, the following quotation from the book (1955) by Leonid Blyakher (a corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science) may counterbalance Raineri’s outlook on von Baer’s 1873 paper: