I went to a Catholic boys school. We were taught evolution in high school - in Biology.
Many of the so-called proofs for it I found out to be false. In fact, they were widely known to be frauds well before I even started school
Such as Haeckel's embryonic drawings.
And the Miller-Urey experiment - which was supposed to demonstrate abiogenesis.
Long after he was shown to be a fraud we were still given his drawings as a demonstration.
Thank you for your well-thought out response.
I was looking into this online and you are half-right, half-wrong.
Yes, there were some people who were claiming Haeckel was wrong. For the curious, Haeckel made a comparative drawing of the embryos of various species:
to make a point that there seemed, to him, to be a fundamentally identical embryonic stage. What's the logical thing to do to disprove him? Make your own set of comparative embryonic drawings, right?
Turns out nobody did that until 1997.
That year, an excellent
review by Richardson and his colleagues marked the first time that anyone had ever compared microphotographs of of a wide range of embryos. To quote the paper:
There has been no textbook of descriptive comparative embryology in English, covering all the major vertebrate groups, for over 70 years (Jenkinson 1913; Kerr 1919). Huettner’s (1941) book, purporting to be a comparative vertebrate embryology text, is typical of the textbooks available to the modern reader. It only covers Amphioxus, which is not a vertebrate; and the frog, chick and “the mammal”. To compound problems, developmental biologists use just a small number of laboratory species as model systems, and are therefore unfamiliar with the diversity of embryonic form in vertebrates (Hanken 1993; Bolker 1995; Raff 1996).
Inept? Quite. Fradulent? Evolutionary researchers can't be deceiving you if they're as clueless as you are!
This paper spawned a companion paper in
Science by different authors which basically claimed that Haeckel was a fraud.
That's when creationists latched on to it. Evidence? Google
Haeckel's embryos in textbooks from 1990 to 1996, and there are 674 results, many of which are technical papers instead of creationist articles. Google the same term
in the year 1998 and there are also 674 results - a sevenfold increase in rate! Furthermore, many more of the top results are creationist websites.
This just shows a disturbing pattern in creationist argumentation: evolutionists show definitively just how earlier evolutionists were wrong, and creationists pick up on it only
after the fact of research done not by themselves!
By the way, the fact that progmonk never heard of Haeckel's embryos while Montalban has may be an important datum. Since progmonk is still in university, it is likely that he learned college biology within the last 10 years, while Montalban probably learned it before 1997. This is entirely compatible with the fact that the first proper academic treatment of Haeckel's fraud was in that year.
Also relevant is this PDF:
Haeckel's embryos - fraud not proven. Particularly valuable is the first photograph on page 152 which shows that
Haeckel himself continually updated his drawing as more (though still scant) evidence became available, and his own drawing in 1891 looks considerably unlike both his drawing in 1874 and unthinking textbook reproductions of the latter.
Strictly speaking no it's not. However evolution begs the question of how life began and Darwin too speculated on this. However, most importantly - that's what we were taught in a course on evolution.
Evolution does not beg the question of how life began any more than chemistry begs the question of how atoms are formed. As for "what we were taught" being the most important point - what if your instructor was simply
wrong?
