It has long been known that one of the most effective popularizers of evolution "concocted" some drawings, but only now has the breathtaking breadth of his deception been revealed.
Most people have heard and been taught the idea that the human embryo, during the first few months of its development in the womb, goes through (or briefly repeats) various evolutionary stages, such as having gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, and so on. Further.
The idea was not only presented as a scientific fact to generations of biology and medicine students, but also used for many years to motivate abortion. The abortionists claimed that the unborn child to be killed was only at the stage of a fish or ape and had not yet become a human being.
This idea (called embryonic repetition) has been vigorously promoted since the late 1860s by Ernst Haeckel to introduce Darwinian evolution in Germany, despite Haeckel's lack of evidence to support his views. (The superficial similarity of various embryos to each other attracted the attention of zoologists before Haeckel, including J. F. Meckel (1782-1883), M. H. Ratke (1793-1860), and Etienne R. A. Serre (1786-1868), who built the theory that the higher animals go through stages comparable to the adult lower animals; and K. von Bayer (1792-1876), who was a creationist and opposed this point of view as he courageously opposed Darwinism (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1: 789, 1992) It was Haeckel who popularized the idea of "ontogeny repeats phylogeny" with his captivating phrase (meaning,that the intrauterine development of the human embryo is the "scrolling" of the steps in the human imaginary evolutionary ascent from primitive creation.)
DATA FALSE
Lacking evidence, Haeckel decided to fabricate the data. He fraudulently altered the drawings of human and dog embryos made by other scientists to enhance the similarities between them and hide the differences …
Haeckel's German colleagues (for example, in 1874, Wilhelm Heath, Jr., an anatomy teacher at the University of Leipzig) were worried about this forgery and extorted a direct confession from him, in which he accused the draftsman of making gross mistakes - without even realizing that he was the draftsman himself!
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Most knowledgeable opponents of evolution in the past 70 years have realized the fallacy of the theory of repetition. (For example, evolutionist Stephen J. Gould said, “Both the theory (repetition) and the 'graded approach' to classification it inspires are or should be dead today.” - Dr. Down's Syndrome, Natural History, 88: 144, April 1980.)
However, the idea of recapitulation is still primarily used as evidence to support the theory of evolution in many books (and in particular, encyclopedias) and popularizers of evolution like the current Carl Segan. (For example, World Book Encyclopedia, 6: 409-410, 1994; Collier's Encyclopedia, 2: 138, 1994; Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, Book Cub Associates, London, 1977, pp. 57-58.)
BUT WAIT - THIS IS NOT ALL
When evolutionists say the repetition theory is false, they usually do not mean that the compared embryos do not provide evidence of common ancestors. Indeed, they still often use the implied similarities between embryos in their early stages of development (referred to as "embryonic hemology") as evidence of evolution. This presumptuous assumption is based on the idea that such similarities are "well known." (Creationists have pointed out for many years that similarities do not prove the existence of common ancestors, but can equally be a consequence of common development, common directions of technical activity, etc.)
This apparent similarity of embryos for many years, consciously or unconsciously, was based on a selection of 24 drawings by Haeckel, first published by him in 1866 in his Generalle Morphologie der Organismen and then repeated in 1874 in his more popular Anthropogenie. It claims to show embryos of fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, cow, rabbit and human in three stages of development.
Various stages, in particular the earliest, show significant similarities. Since these drawings appeared, it has been assumed that they gave us something close to the truth about the embryos of vertebrates. And so many that they still appear in textbooks and popular writings on evolution.
In fact, nobody bothered to check - until now. It turns out that Haeckel's fraud was worse than anyone realized. It not only influenced the idea of repetition. It turns out that the similarities are much, much less than anyone thought.
FRAUD EXPLORED AND EXPLORED
Michael Richardson, lecturer and embryologist at St. George in London exposed this further fake in an article published in the journal Anatomy and Embryology (No. 196 (2), 1997) and in the journals Nauka (September 5, 1997) and New Scientist (September 6, 1997).
Richardson says he always felt that something was wrong with Haeckel's drawings, "because they don't fit his (Richardson's) understanding of the size at which fish, reptiles, birds and mammals develop their distinctive features." (“Anatomy and Embryology”). He found no record of anyone actually comparing the embryos of one creature with another, so “no one has cited any comparative data to support this idea” (ibid.). So he assembled an international team to do just that: to study and photograph "the external forms of embryos from a wide range of vertebrates at a stage comparable to that depicted by Haeckel" (ibid.).
The team collected embryos from 39 different creatures, including marsupials from Australia, tree frogs from Puerto Rico, snakes from France, and an alligator fetus from England. They found that the embryos of different creatures are very different from each other. Indeed, they are so different that the drawings created by Haeckel (similar looking embryos of a human, rabbit, salamander, fish, chicken, etc.) could not be made from real creatures.
Nigel Hawkes interviewed Richardson for The Times, London (11 August 1997). In an article describing Haeckel as a “fetal liar,” he quotes Richardson: “This is one of the worst cases of scientific falsification. It is shocking to discover that someone considered to be a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It pisses me off … He (Haeckel) did the following: he took a human embryo and copied it, pretending to be a salamander, and a pig, and everyone else looks exactly the same at the same stage of development. No, they don't look … They are fakes."
Haeckel not only altered the drawings with additions, omissions, and trait changes, but, according to Richardson and his team, “he also concocted a scale to exaggerate the similarities among creatures, even when there was a tenfold difference in size. Haeckel veiled the differences even more by not bothering to indicate the names of the creatures in most cases, as if one representative was enough for a whole group of animals (Science, September 5, 1997).
Ernst Haeckel's drawings were declared a forgery by Professor Heath in 1874 and were included in Haeckel's quasi-confession, but according to Richardson, Haeckel's confession was lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book titled Darwin and after Darwin”and were widely reproduced in biological texts in English.
Will there now be a race among libraries, publishers and booksellers to exclude from circulation, reprint evolutionist books, and other recognition that the idea of embryonic resemblance, suggesting evolution, is based more on academic fake?
Top row: Haeckel: depictions of embryos of different animals showing incredible similarities at one of the early stages of development.
Bottom row: Richardson: photographs showing what the embryos of these animals actually look like at this stage.
(Photographs of the embryos courtesy of Dr. Michael C. Richardson. First published by MK Richardson et al., © Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co., Tiergartenstrasse, 69121 Heidelberg, Germany.)
Left to right: Salmo salar, Cryptobranchus allegheniensis, Emys orbicularis, Gallus gallus, Oryctolagus cuniculm. Homo sapiens
Russell Grigg (Translated by I. V. Davydov)