Background
Ernst Ludwig Krause was born on November 22, 1839, in Zielenzig, Germany (now Sulecin, Poland). He was the second of five children of Ernst Friedrich and Eleonore Krause.
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
In 1857 Krause began to study science at the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Alexander Braun on botany, of Gustav Rose on mineralogy, and of Johannes Muller on comparative anatomy.
University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany
Krause received his doctorate from the University of Rostock in 1874.
Ernst Ludwig Krause was born on November 22, 1839, in Zielenzig, Germany (now Sulecin, Poland). He was the second of five children of Ernst Friedrich and Eleonore Krause.
After attending the Realschule in Meseritz (now Miedzyrzecz, Poland), Krause trained to be an apothecary. In 1857 he began to study science at the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Alexander Braun on botany, of Gustav Rose on mineralogy, and of Johannes Muller on comparative anatomy. He received his doctorate from the University of Rostock in 1874.
Krause never worked as an apothecary but educated himself in a variety of fields and wrote popular scientific works. He also published numerous popular science books and to wrote for newspapers and journals.
Belief in progress, a doctrine founded on the achievements of science, led to the creation of the journal Kosmos, of which Krause was an editor from 1877 to 1883. Among his co-workers on Kosmos, which advocated a unified world view, were Darwin, Haeckel, Arnold Lang, Strasburger, and a group of philosophers. Krause’s essay on Erasmus Darwin was translated into English (1879) at the urging of Charles Darwin, who wrote a biographical introduction for it. This work is still indispensable for studying the history of the theory of evolution.
Krause’s first publications were directed against spiritualism. He early became an enthusiastic adherent of Darwin's theory, which he made the basis of his own “natural system” for plants (1866). In this connection, he criticized the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired adaptations. From 1866 until his death Krause was friendly with Haeckel and defended the latter’s monistic world view in numerous popular essays. The great success of Krause’s Werden und Vergehen (1876) is understandable in the context of the vehement ideological disputes provoked by Darwin’s theory. In this period Krause introduced many readers to the basic ideas of the theory of evolution. Simultaneously, he showed that the new views had thoroughly shaken the traditional anthropomorphic conception of God and of God’s actions.
It is not known for sure whether Krause was married or not.