Müller, Fritz

Born Mar. 31, 1821, in Windischholzhausen, near Erfurt; died May 21, 1897, in Blumenau, Brazil. German zoologist.

Müller graduated from the universities of Berlin (1844) and Greifswald (1849). In 1852 he moved to Brazil, where, from 1856, he was a professor at a number of educational institutions. From 1876 to 1891 he worked at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. His principal works dealt with the embryology and ecology of invertebrates, specifically mimicry. He contributed to the development of Darwinism. In his work For Darwin (1864), Müller substantiated the existence of recapitulation and showed that in the evolutionary process, changes in the ontogeny of an organism may occur at various stages of the individual’s development, an idea further developed in A. N. Severtsov’s theory of phylembryogeny. Müller, with E. Haeckel, formulated the biogenetic law.