Alexander W. von Götte

Alexander Wilhelm Götte (31 December 1840 to 5 February 1922), best known as Alexander W. von Goette, was a German zoologist born in St. Petersburg who is remembered for his studies of the biological development of various animals. He studied medicine at the Imperial University of Dorpat and obtained his doctorate in 1866 at Tübingen. In 1872 he began work as an assistant to Eduard Oscar Schmidt at the institute of zoology in Strasbourg, in 1877 he became an associate professor, and from 1882 to 1886 he was director of the zoological institute at the University of Rostock, afterwards returning to Strasbourg, where he taught until 1918. He accepted evolution but was critical of the ideas of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, rejected natural selection and favoured guided evolution by a law-governed process. The invertebrate species Opisthocystis goettei is named after him.