So what kind of comments can we stir up over this?
"Most people have seen those 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 "Haeckels 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 Haeckels 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. Georges Medical School in London. He found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckels 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. Its 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 dont. ... These are fakes." Today believe it or not Haeckels 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
"Most people have seen those 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 "Haeckels Frauds and Forgeries," a 1915 book by J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull, who quoted 19 leading authorities of the day.
<TABLE align=right>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD width=211>
</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 Haeckels 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. Georges Medical School in London. He found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckels 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. Its 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 dont. ... These are fakes." Today believe it or not Haeckels 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
