Nicolaas A Rupke

Academic paper

Isis

84

2

231-251

THE VERTEBRATE ARCHETYPE (from the Greek arkhe, "original," and tupos, "imprinted image") is one of the most fascinating constructs of what has been called the "morphological period" in the history of biology (approximately 1800- 1860). It represented the fullest expression of a belief in the fundamental relatedness, if not of all organisms, at least of all animals with endoskeletons. Moreover, as Darwin scholars have long recognized, the vertebrate archetype provided a direct stepping-stone to the notion of evolutionary ancestors.' To us, the concept of an archetype has echoes from Plato's theory of ideas to Carl Jung's notion of pervasive cultural symbols in our collective unconscious. During the late nineteenth century a theory of archetypes was introduced into Old Testament philology, too, by the Gottingen theologian Paul Anton de Lagarde, who maintained that all manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible go back to a single, authoritative text from the early part of the second century A. D.

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