Scientific Fraud?

So what kind of comments can we stir up over this?

"Most people have seen those&nbsp;pictures of developing human embryos next to developing animal embryos, and they look virtually indistinguishable. <I>(The Haeckel embryo sequence shown purported to show – left to right – a hog, calf, rabbit and human).</I> This has long been said to demonstrate that humans share a common ancestry with these animals and thus prove the theory of evolution. These pictures were designed by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. What few people know – and one of many surprises in the evolution debate reported in the July edition of Whistleblower magazine (formerly WorldNet) – is that they were fakes. At Jena, the university where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court. His deceit was exposed in "Haeckel’s Frauds and Forgeries," a 1915 book by J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull, who quoted 19 leading authorities of the day.


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</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>"It clearly appears that Haeckel in many cases freely invented embryos, or reproduced the illustrations given by others in a substantially changed form," said anatomist F. Keibel of Freiburg University. Zoologist L. Rütimeyer of Basle University called his distorted drawings "a sin against scientific truthfulness." Yet, despite Haeckel’s fraud conviction and early exposure, Western educators continued using the pictures for decades as proof of the theory of evolution. The matter was settled with finality by Dr. Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George’s Medical School in London. He found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel’s claims by systematically comparing human and other fetuses during development. So Richardson assembled a scientific team that did just that – photographing the growing embryos of 39 different species. In a 1997 interview in The Times of London, Dr. Richardson stated: "This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It’s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. ... What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t. ... These are fakes." Today – believe it or not – Haeckel’s drawings <I>still</I> appear in many high school and college textbooks. Among them are "Evolutionary Biology" by Douglas J. Futuyma (Third Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1998), and also the bedrock text, "Molecular Biology of the Cell" (third edition), whose authors include biochemist Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences. "

Comments? Why is this still in high school and college textbooks?

Doc

Are you sure it is?

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Any belief worth having must survive doubt.

Outside of the fact that it's blasted all over the internet no. I don't have on hand any current college or high school textbooks.

I posted this to find out the truth.

Doc

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If you can´t back up your claim, why do you make it?

__________________
Any belief worth having must survive doubt.

Again because it's posted all over the internet. Just do a search for "evolution fraud" you'll see it posted a million times (est).

Like this:

http://http://www.restoringamerica.o...ion_fraud.html

Don't that make you wonder? I'm fishing for someone who can help with this claim or debunk it.

Doc

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It is common knowledge that Haekel did lie. If Haekel´s&nbsp;lies&nbsp;are repeated in textbooks it´s not the fault of the scientific community in general but of the publishing companies and those scientists that helped spread the lies.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Haekel.html

__________________
Any belief worth having must survive doubt.

Posted 'all over the net?'&nbsp;&nbsp; I'm not sure that this helps very much, but as your own reference indicates, the only place that Haeckel's drawings are published to any extent is on creationist websites.&nbsp; I have not heard a single evolutionist make this argument in decades.&nbsp;&nbsp;This&nbsp;issue has been resolved.&nbsp;

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Quote from http://www.restoringamerica....tion_fraud.html

"Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings are just one of evolution’s pillars now under spectacular scientific assault. "

Why are creationists never ashamed to lie?

__________________
Any belief worth having must survive doubt.

Can you show me one single pro-evolution site onthe net that uses Haeckels drawings as evidence (not proof) of evolution?

Choccy

The reason creationists harp on Ernst Haeckel is because creationists are still busily debunking Haeckel's misguided notion of the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. Someone needs to tell the creationists that what they are busily debunking in the 21st century was already debunked in the 19th.

Today we have scanning electron microscopes and are capable of directly observing the comparative embryological development among vertebrates, which, by the way, is compelling evidence for common ancestry.

Does anyone in their right mind believe that biologists need to present as evidence handmade woodcuts from the mid-19th century? One of the things that makes me laugh about creationists is the high degree of ignorance they must assume among their disciples.

If Haeckel's embryos have been reproduced in biology texts over the last 75 years or so, they are presented in a discussion of the history of evolutionary biology, and to show that Haeckel's idea of recapitulation was wrong, and often to show how not to do science.

That Ernst Haeckel's name is plastered all over the creationist internet sites is strong evidence of the complete and utter lack of ammunition they have at their disposal with which to attack evolutionary biology.