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Prothero's book has a lot of details that make me want to throw things
I have that book... any other examples you would like to share with us?
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Apparently it could ruin scientists’ reputation in Haeckel’s time also. In the “false proofs” thread, I quoted a book from 1915 about what eventually happened to Haeckel because of this:
Point taken.
Originally Posted by Aggie
I would like to know what other recent evolution books there are that still use these drawings, but I think I’ve reached the limit of what’s possible with the evolution books that I own. If anyone else has access to some well-known modern books about evolution that I haven’t mentioned, I’d be interested to know what the answer is for them.
The books I have are the aforementioned "Evolution" by Futuyma and "Evolution" by Barton, Briggs, Eisen, Goldstein and Patel, and neither appear to have the drawings.
Originally Posted by Aggie
In any case, it seems to be a common assertion among supporters of evolution that no modern books about evolution present these drawings as something that’s accurate, but I think I’ve shown that claiming this is the same kind of wishful thinking that Haeckel demonstrated with the drawings themselves. As beneficial as it is that Futuyma realized nine years ago that they were inaccurate, that’s still over 100 years after Rutimeyer first demonstrated this fact; a biologist of Futuyma’s stature never should have made this mistake to begin with. Hopefully after this thread, people here won’t continue to claim that modern books don’t use these drawings.
Agreed.
It's not a claim I've ever made myself, but it does indeed pop up from time to time.
Prothero's book has a lot of details that make me want to throw things
What else is there like this? I was thinking of recommending Prothero’s book in my own book that I’m working on, but if it has a lot of other inaccuracies also, maybe I shouldn’t.
Originally Posted by Naraoia
Something that I can also see as contributing is availability. I'm pretty sure Haeckel's drawings (or derivatives) are very easy to obtain - is the same true of more accurate comparative pictures?
Probably not, but that’s mostly just a result of how bad this problem is. Haeckel’s drawings (and especially Romanes’ reproductions of them) have appeared in a huge number of biology books—probably more than any other comparison between embryos, including more accurate ones. And the more biologists continue to reproduce these drawings because they’re well-known, the worse this problem gets.
What Evolution Is is the only book by Ernst Mayr that I own, but I suspect that it’s not the only one of his books to contain these drawings. Mayr was the author of around 25 well-regarded biology books, and What Evolution Is was the second-to-last of them, having been published when Mayr was 97. Unless he discovered the inaccuracy of Haeckel’s drawings between then and the time when his final book was published, it seems like he probably didn’t realize this about them at any point during his life.
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Ernst Mayr's book has embryo drawings but they aren't Haeckel's; according to my copy they are drawings of embryos from Strickberger and Monroe's 1990 book Evolution.
If you see pictures of embryos in a modern evolution text why would you assume they were Haeckel's? People didn't stop making drawings of embryos because Haeckle exaggerated his.
I would assume that the other books similarly use drawings of embryos that aren't Haeckels, I find it bizarre that you think all these embryo drawings in modern texts are after Haeckel when he has been known to have been a fraud for over a century
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I must say I never thought this was as big a problem as it obviously is. I've never encountered a book reproducing the drawings without describing them for what they actually are: decent approximations, but not scientific, but it seems there are quite a few text-books out there that perpetuate the fallacious drawings.
Thankfully, every time someone takes a look at this and contacts the authors in question pointing the inaccuracies out, we can collectively improve the scientific literature. I hope you're actually taking this step next.
Edit: Reading Baggins' post above, it occurs to me that his scenario is more likely to be true than Haeckel's drawings having been reproduced. Are you, OP, certain that the drawings you have seen are Haeckel's drawings?
By the way, the article by Kenneth Miller that Naraoia linked to gives a fairly good explanation about this problem:
This idea has been pushed back into the news recently by the news that Haeckel's drawings of embryonic similarities were not correct. British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleages published an important paper in the August 1997 issue of Anatomy & Embryology showing that Haeckel had fudged his drawings to make the early stages of embryos appear more alike than they actually are! As it turns out, Haeckel's contemporaries had spotted the fraud during his lifetime, and got him to admit it. However, his drawings nonetheless became the source material for diagrams of comparative embryology in nearly every biology textbook, including ours!
The emphasis is mine. Apparently, before the publication of Richardson’s 1997 paper about this, most biology books made this mistake, and it’s only within the past 12 years that this has begun to change.
This looks like it’s an example of something that creationists were getting right before supporters of evolution were. I’ve seen creationist material dating back to the 1970s that points out the inaccuracies of Haeckel’s drawings, including tracts by Jack Chick.
Originally Posted by Baggins
Ernst Mayr's book has embryo drawings but they aren't Haeckel's; according to my copy they are drawings of embryos from Strickberger and Monroe's 1990 book Evolution.
If you see pictures of embryos in a modern evolution text why would you assume they were Haeckel's? People didn't stop making drawings of embryos because Haeckle exaggerated his.
I would assume that the other books similarly use drawings of embryos that aren't Haeckels, I find it bizarre that you think all these embryo drawings in modern texts are after Haeckel when he has been known to have been a fraud for over a century
I know Strickberger’s book is what they’re sourced from, but look at the drawings themselves, and compare them to this image at Wikipedia of Haeckel’s embryo drawings. Even though Haeckel isn’t mentioned as the source, it’s the same image.
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Edit: Reading Baggins' post above, it occurs to me that his scenario is more likely to be true than Haeckel's drawings having been reproduced. Are you, OP, certain that the drawings you have seen are Haeckel's drawings?
In order to show that these authors are reproducing the same image that’s been shown to be inaccurate, I’m going to post a comparison between them. This is a scan of the embryo comparison in Futuyma 1998:
This is a scan of the diagram in Mayr 2001:
And this is a scan of the diagram in Prothero 2007:
They’re all the same image, aren’t they? If they’re not, they’re copies of it that are so exact as to preserve all of the same inaccuracies that are present in the original.
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Last edited by Aggie; 7th September 2009 at 05:58 PM.
Ernst Mayr died in 2005, and according to Plindboe in post #5, Douglas Futuyma found out about this mistake in 2000. I could try contacting Donald Prothero, though. Does anyone know how to contact him?
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I have that book... any other examples you would like to share with us?
The one that literally made me scream was that he confused prokaryotic and eukaryotic flagella (p156, I believe). Let's see a few others (I have like thirty pages of notes, and I'm nowhere near finished with the booka ):
- An entire chapter about the origin of life that doesn't tackle the origin of nucleotides and doesn't even mention the RNA world hypothesis.
- The overconfidence with which he says that the phylogeny of major animal groups is no longer disputed (p136). Admittedly I've only just touched the surface of animal phylogenetics in my reading, but my impression is that the state of the field... um, doesn't warrant such confidence. Not at the phylum level, anyway. And the moment you say things like that to creationists, you can bet someone's going to find out that the solid consensus you're implying doesn't exist.
- Things like this:
"As the DNA is transcribed by tRNA, it interprets each three-letter sequence as the code for one of the twenty amino acids (plus a few codes are used to stop the transcription of DNA)" (p96)
(Well... just... *cringe*.)
- Another bit about DNA that looks thoroughly confused (p98):
More importantly, the fact that 80-97 percent of DNA in most organisms codes for nothing at all (so far as we know) says that evolution and selection must work entirely on that remaining few percent of the DNA that does code for something. Those remaining few genes are known as regulatory genes. They are the master switches that control the reading of the rest of the DNA, some of which is used to make the basic structures of life (structural genes) and therefore does not differ between organisms.
(Who can spot the most mistakes?)
IOW, he seems to muddle molecular biology a lot.
- There's also a thing about the annelid --> mollusc "transition" (pp192-193). Basically, he's saying that annelid-like ancestors to "aplacophores" to monoplacophorans to other molluscs is a neat transitional series. Now, that idea bleeds... For example, "aplacophores" are not that segmented (IIRC, the only segmented thing about them is the nervous system, which shows some seriation in most bilaterians.), and they are certainly not more segmented than Neopilina. I guess we could say that if I had to pick a few convincing transitions for a book, this one wouldn't be among them.
Then there are countless minor issues like calling chitin a protein (p193), most of what he writes about Archaea (calling it Archaebacteria and a kingdom of bacteria, saying that they are the most primitive living things or that they mostly live in extreme environments), calling "worms" a phylum (p123), Pitx1 a Hox gene (p116), pterosaurs pterodactyls (*cringe*)...
Now I look like I'm bashing the book. To be fair, I don't actually think it's a bad book, but there are clearly areas Prothero is not comfortable with, and there are things that, IMO, are... cosmetically modified to make a point stronger.
(I have a distinct feeling that I'm too anal for my own good )
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