Carl Vogt

Vogt in 1848.

Vogt was the son of Philipp Friedrich Wilhelm Vogt, professor of clinics, and Louise Follenius. His maternal uncle was Charles Follen.[5]

Vogt studied medicine at the University of Giessen. He earned his medical doctorate from the University of Bern in 1839 with a dissertation under the title Beiträge zur Anatomie der Amphibien.

In 1847 he became professor of zoology at the University of Giessen, and in 1852 professor of geology and afterwards also of zoology at the University of Geneva. His earlier publications were on zoology. He dealt with the Amphibia (1839), Reptiles (1840), with Mollusca and Crustacea (1845) and more generally with the invertebrate fauna of the Mediterranean (1854).[6] In 1842, during his time with Louis Agassiz in Neuchâtel, he discovered the mechanism of apoptosis, the programmed cell death, while studying the development of the tadpole of the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans). Charles Darwin mentions Vogt's support for the theory of evolution in the introduction to his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Vogt was also a proponent of scientific materialism and atheism.[7]

Vogt was active in German politics and was a left-wing representative in the Frankfurt Parliament. Karl Marx scathingly replied to attacks by Carl Vogt in his book Herr Vogt (Mister Vogt) in 1860.[8] Marx's defenders pointed to the fact that, years later (1871), records published after the fall of the Second Empire proved that Vogt had been indeed secretly in the pay of the French Emperor.[9]

Carl Vogt was a proponent of polygenist evolution; he rejected the monogenist beliefs of most Darwinists and instead believed that each race had evolved from a different type of ape.[10] He wrote the White race was a separate species from Negroes. In Chapter VII of his Lectures on Man (1864) he compared the Negro to the White race and described them as “two extreme human types”. The differences between them, he claimed, are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proved that Negroes are a separate species from Whites.[11]