2013 Was the 75th Anniversary of Ervin Bauer’s Death

Science minded people commonly remember Lotka, Rashevsky, Bertalanffy and Haldane etc. when they are speaking about the foundation of theoretical biology (see Alt et al. 2010). In similar Russian (or Hungarian) works Ervin Bauer’s name is perhaps mentioned too (see Tokin 1965). Why is Bauer omitted in most cases? The usual explanation is that Bauer’s principal work: Theoretical Biology (Бауэр 2002) did not enter the pool of widely known scientific books due to its publication in Russian. The political system in the earlier Soviet Union (and the author’s tragic life) banned not only the translation but also even the circulation of this work (see Müller 2005) before the fifties of the last century. This explanation can be accepted. Bauer, however, published a short and early version of his theoretical work in German (Grundprinzipien...in the following Fundamentals, Bauer 1920), which already in 1920 contained his significant principle about permanent nonequilibrium of living matter (see Elek and Müller 2013). How could it happen, that Bauer’s memory totally faded away from the western biological literature? This is the question I attempt to answer in the following.