Richard Wolfgang Semon (22 August 1859, in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

– 27 December 1918, in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

) was a German

zoologist Zoology ( , ) is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the structure, embryology, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems. Zoology is one ...

explorer Exploration is the process of exploring, an activity which has some Expectation (epistemic), expectation of Discovery (observation), discovery. Organised exploration is largely a human activity, but exploratory activity is common to most organis ...

evolutionary biologist Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biol ...

and memory researcher who believed in the

inheritance of acquired characteristics Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also calle ...

and applied this to social evolution. He is known for coining the terms '' engram'' and '' ecphory''.

Australia

Before taking up his appointment at the University of Jena, he spent three years travelling around Australia; and the Indonesian Archipelago and, as a consequence, he was one of a number of influential German-speaking residents such as Ludwig Becker, Hermann Beckler, William Blandowski, Amalie Dietrich, Wilhelm Haacke, Diedrich Henne, Gerard Krefft, Johann Luehmann, Johann Menge, Carl Mücke (a.k.a. Muecke), Ludwig Preiss, Carl Ludwig Christian Rümker (a.k.a. Ruemker), Moritz Richard Schomburgk, Karl Theodor Staiger, George Ulrich, Eugene von Guérard, Robert von Lendenfeld,

Ferdinand von Mueller Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, (; 30 June 1825 – 10 October 1896) was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist. He was appointed government botanist for the then colony of Victoria, Australia ...

, Georg von Neumayer, and Carl Wilhelmi who brought their "epistemic traditions" to Australia, and not only became "deeply entangled with the Australian colonial project", but also were "intricately involved in imagining, knowing and shaping colonial Australia" (Barrett, et al., 2018, p. 2).

Thesis

Semon proposed psycho-physiological parallelism according to which every psychological state corresponds to alterations in the nerves. His ideas of the ''mneme'' (based on the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory) were developed early in the 20th century. The mneme represented the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting "mnemic trace" (or " engram") would be revived when an element resembling a component of the original complex of stimuli was encountered. Semon’s mnemic principle was based upon how stimuli produce a "permanent record,... written or engraved on the irritable substance", i.e. upon cellular material energetically predisposed to such inscription. According to historian Petteri Pietikainen:

Semon argued not only that information is encoded into memory and that there are 'memory traces' (engrams) or after-effects of stimulation that conserve the changes in the nervous system, he also contended that these changes in the brain (that is, engrams) are inherited. Semon's mneme-theory fell into disrepute largely because in a Lamarckian fashion it proposed that memory units are passed from one generation to another.

Semon was a proponent of the theory of organic memory, which was popular amongst

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...

s and

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...

s from 1870 to 1918. The theory later lost scientific legitimacy as it yielded no reliable data and advances in

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinians, Augustinian ...

made the theory untenable.

Evidence

Semon found evidence in the way that different parts of the body relate to each other involuntarily, such as "reflex spasms, co-movements, sensory radiations," to infer distribution of "engraphic influence." He also took inventive recourse to

phonograph A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound. The sound vibration Waveform, waveforms are recorded as correspond ...

y, the "mneme machine," to explain the uneven distribution and revival of engrams. Semon's book, ''Die Mneme'', influenced the ''Mnemosyne'' project of the idiosyncratic art historian

Aby Warburg Aby Moritz Warburg (June 13, 1866 – October 26, 1929) was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the ''Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg'' (Warburg Library for Cultural Studies), a private library, which was later m ...

. N.B.: Semon's ''Mneme'' should not be confused with ''

meme A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying c ...

, ''a separate concept coined by

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an Oxford fellow, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Simonyi Professor for the Publ ...

. Despite Dawkins having coined 'meme' distinctly from ''mneme'', that has not stopped Dawkins' contemporaries from comparing the concepts for being remarkably similar. David Hull, a philosopher of biology, argued that meme and mneme are parallel concepts of which Dawkins inadvertently provided the first development of since Semon. Nevertheless, the two concepts are not often discussed together.

Suicide

In 1918 in Munich, shortly after the end of

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, Semon committed suicide wrapped in a German Imperial flag allegedly because he was depressed by Germany's defeat.

Legacy

Semon is commemorated in the scientific name of a

species A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

of green-blooded skink ('' Prasinohaema semoni)'',Beolens, et al. (2011), p.240. and an Acantocephalan ('' Australiformis semoni)''.von Linstow (1898).

References

Bibliography

Anon (1895), "''The Ceratodus'': a German Scientist's Work", ''The Queenslander'', (Saturday, 30 March 1895), p.597
in part, refers to Semon (1894). * Barrett, L., Eckstein, L., Hurley, A.W. & Schwarz A. (2018), "Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglement: An Introduction", ''Postcolonial Studies'', Vol.21, No.1, (January 2018), pp. 1–5. * Beolens, B., Watkins, M. & Grayson, M. (2011), "Semon", p. 240, in B. Beolens, M. Watkins, & M. Grayson (eds.), ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. . * * * * Landsberg, A. (2004), ''Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture'', New York, NY: Columbia University Press. * (includes a summary, an actualization and extension of the Semonian theory of memory) * Pietikainen, P. (2007), ''Alchemists of Human Nature: Psychological Utopianism in Gross, Jung, Reich and Fromm'', London: Routledge. * Rampley, Matthew (2000), ''The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin'', Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag. * Richards, G. (2002), ''Putting Psychology in Its Place: A Critical Historical Overview'', London: Routledge.
Semon, R. (1894), ''Zoologische Forschungsreisen in Australien und dem Malayischen Archipel, ausgeführt in den Jahren 1891-1893 von Prof. Dr. R. Semon, Erster Band: Ceratodus'', Jena: Gustav Fischer.

Semon, R. (1899), ''In the Australian Bush and on the Coast of the Coral Sea: Being the Experiences and Observations of a Naturalist in Australia, New Guinea and the Moluccas'', London: Macmillan & Co.

Semon, R. (1921), ''The Mneme'', London: George Allen & Unwin.

Semon, R. (1922), ''Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen'', Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann
(in German)
Semon, R. (Duffy, B. trans.) (1923), ''Mnemic Psychology'', London: George Allen & Unwin.

von Linstow, O.F.B. (1898), "Nemathelminthen von Herrn Richard Semon in Australien gesammelt", ''Denkschriften der Medizinisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft zu Jena'', 8: 467–472
(in German) {{DEFAULTSORT:Semon, Richard Wolfgang 1859 births 1918 suicides 1918 deaths 19th-century German zoologists 20th-century German zoologists Suicides in Germany