Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny?
Haekel’s faked embryonic drawings
The theory of embryonic recapitulation asserts that the human fetus goes through various stages of its evolutionary history as it develops. Ernst Haeckel proposed this theory in the late 1860’s, promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany. He made detailed drawings of the embryonic development of eight different embryos in three stages of development, to bolster his claim. His work was hailed as a great development in the understanding of human evolution. A few years later his drawings were shown to have been fabricated, and the data manufactured. He blamed the artist for the discrepancies, without admitting that he was the artist. (source: Russell Grigg, “Fraud Rediscovered”, Creation, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp.49-51)
That is a fairly straightforward description of Haeckel. Again you don't say what your problem with it is.
Modern Biology rejects Haeckel. It is not taught in modern biology classes or mentioned in modern biology textbooks other that to mention its existence and describe why it is in error. See Wikipedia and CB701 and CB701.1
There are a couple of text books mentioned on CreationWiki. I would be surprised if the actual content matched their declared level of heinousness. The two sentences they quote is a straightforward description of the gills which are undeniably present in a human embryo at a particular stage in its development. The point is only that gills come before lungs on an evolutionary time scale and are required by the embryo until the lungs have formed. This is not Haeckel's idea at all, and is merely discriptive of the stages the embryo goes through.
To call Haeckel a fraud because he proposed an hypothesis which proved to be wrong is "bearing false witness". Lots of hypothesis are proposed and rejected. And the problems with Haeckel's drawings were found almost immediatly.
On the other hand the world that Haeckel operated in was one of colonialization and subjugation of supposedly inferior peoples. The American Civil war had recently ended and the shock of the end of the institution of slavery created a great deal of angst among those who found support for slavery in the bible. There was a need for 'scientific' proof of the superiority of the 'White Man'. It was in this context that the concept of 'race' was invented (notice that Modern Biology rejects the concept of race too). Haeckel's work was one of the attempts to prove the superiority of the European White race. If there was fraud involved, it was against people of color, not biology or science in general or the bible or the public or anything else.
If you really want to fulminate against science fraud, why not go after the tobacco companies that denied the havoc their product perpetrated on the public for decades after they knew it to be fact, quashed any science that contradicted them, and paid for pet scientists to do bogus research and publish bogus findings (and continue to do so).
[edit on 14/7/2009 by rnaa]
