18 Facts About Paul Kammerer

Paul Kammerer began his academic career at the Vienna Academy by studying music but graduated with a degree in biology.

Paul Kammerer made ovoviviparous fire salamanders become viviparous, and viviparous alpine salamanders become ovoviviparous.

Paul Kammerer made olms produce live young and bred dark-colored olms with full vision.

Paul Kammerer supported the Lamarckian theory of heritability of acquired characteristics, and he experimented extensively in an effort to prove the theory.

Paul Kammerer succeeded in making midwife toads breed in the water by increasing the temperature of their tanks, forcing them to retreat to the water to cool off.

The male midwife toads were not genetically programmed for underwater mating so over the span of two generations, Paul Kammerer reported that his midwife toads were exhibiting black nuptial pads on their feet to give them more traction in this underwater mating process.

Paul Kammerer suggested that his specimens had been altered by a laboratory assistant.

Science historian Peter J Bowler wrote that most biologists believe that Kammerer was a fraud and that even the others claim that he misinterpreted the results of his experiments.

Paul Kammerer postulated that all events are connected by waves of seriality.

Paul Kammerer was known, for example, for making notes in public parks of what numbers of people were passing by, noting, for example, how many carried umbrellas.

Six weeks after the accusation by Noble, Paul Kammerer committed suicide in the forest of Schneeberg, an event which is discussed by Arthur Koestler in his book on Paul Kammerer and his theories.

The Lamarckian biologist Ernest MacBride supported the experiments of Paul Kammerer but commented that they would have to be repeated to be accepted by other scientists.

Interest in Paul Kammerer revived in 1971 with the publication of Arthur Koestler's book The Case of the Midwife Toad.

Paul Kammerer was known by his public lectures and newspaper articles as an ardent pacifist and Socialist; it was known that he was going to build an institute in Soviet Russia.

Koestler's book favors evidence that exonerates Paul Kammerer, while downplaying or ignoring evidence against him.

Paul Kammerer was quite interested in the study of coincidences, as was Koestler.

Sander Gliboff, a historian of biology and professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, has commented that although Paul Kammerer's conclusions proved false, his evidence was probably genuine and he did not simply argue for Lamarckism and against Darwinism as the theories are now understood.

In 2009, developmental biologist Alexander Vargas, Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Chile, suggested that the inheritance of acquired traits that Paul Kammerer reported to observe in his toad experiments could be authentic and be explained by results from the emerging field of epigenetics.