Posted by Devolution on February 4, 2026, 11:08 am
More stuff from True.Origin:
"In a continuing attempt to locate some type of scientific evidence that “proves” evolution to be a fact, David Quammen turned to the field of embryology, and in doing so, invoked the long-ago-discarded concept of embryonic recapitulation. He wrote:
Embryology too involved patterns that couldn’t be explained by coincidence. Why does the embryo of a mammal pass through stages resembling stages of the embryo of a reptile? Why is one of the larval forms of a barnacle, before metamorphosis, so similar to the larval form of a shrimp? Why do the larvae of moths, flies, and beetles resemble one another more than any of them resemble their respective adults? Because, Darwin wrote, “the embryo is the animal in its less modified state” and that state “reveals the structure of its progenitor” (p. 13). Embryology, as its name implies, is the study of the embryo. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin did indeed employ embryology. In fact, he asserted (in a discussion occupying no less than twelve pages) that similarity among the various embryos of animals and man was a primary proof of the theory of evolution. In fact, he called it “second to none” in importance. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin devoted the entire first chapter to this line of evidence, stressing how critical it was to the success of his theory.
Then, along came Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German biologist who was such a devoted follower of Darwin that he was dubbed “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” He taught at the University of Jena, and became famous for his popularization of the so-called “theory of embryonic recapitulation” (or, as he referred to it, the great “Biogenetic Law”). [NOTE: Haeckel’s “Biogenetic Law” should not be confused with the Law of Biogenesis, which correctly states that all life comes from previous life of its kind.] Haeckel suggested that the successive stages of human embryonic development repeat the evolutionary stages of our animal ancestry. The catch-phrase he developed to popularize this idea was that “ontogeny [the development of one] recapitulates [repeats] phylogeny [the development of the race].” In other words, the human embryo passes through all stages representing its ancestors—from the one-celled stage to the human. Seeing a human embryo grow would therefore be like watching a silent, moving picture of all our ancestral history.
Today, we recognize that this argument is specious, and those who keep up with the scientific literature no longer use it. Why? To quote the late George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard: “It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny” (Simpson, et al., 1965, p. 352). Over seventy years ago, Sir Arthur Keith bluntly stated:
It was expected that the embryo would recapitulate the features of its ancestors from the lowest to the highest forms in the animal kingdom. Now that the appearances of the embryo at all stages are known, the general feeling is one of disappointment; the human embryo at no stage is anthropoid in appearance. The embryo of the mammal never resembles the worm, the fish, or the reptile. Embryology provides no support whatsoever for the evolutionary hypothesis (1932, p. 94, emp. added). A word of explanation is in order. Haeckel was an accomplished artist who used his artistic talent to falsify certain of the drawings that accompanied his scientific articles. One writer summarized the matter as follows:
To support his theory, however, Haeckel, whose knowledge of embryology was self-taught, faked some of his evidence. He not only altered his illustrations of embryos, but also printed the same plate of an embryo three times, and labeled one a human, the second a dog and the third a rabbit to show their similarity (Bowden, 1977, p. 128). Haeckel even went so far as to alter the drawings of some of his colleagues, including the famous embryologist, professor L. Rutimeyer of Basel University, and professor Arnold Bass. The two university professors, after realizing what Haeckel had done, publicly condemned his actions. In the end, as H.H. Newman of the University of Chicago put it, Haeckel’s works “did more harm than good to Darwinism” (1932, p. 30).
Haeckel’s falsified drawings were published around 1866. One of the major points stressed by Haeckel in his “research”—and one of the items that has remained ensconced in the evolutionary literature to this very day—is the idea that the human embryo possesses gill slits that are leftovers from its past fish-like ancestor stage. Evolutionist Irvin Adler, in his book, How Life Began, wrote:
The embryo of each species seems to repeat the main steps by which the species developed from the common ancestor of all living things. All mammal embryos, for example, pass through a stage in which they have gills like a fish, showing that mammals are descended from fishlike ancestors (1957, p. 22). Fast-forward almost fifty years to the twenty-first century. In an educational program produced in 2001 by the University of Chicago for its Newton Electronic Community division, the following statement appeared: “All mammals have gill slits in their very early fetal development” (Myron, 2001, p. 1).
We have known for almost 150 years that the “Biogenetic Law” is not correct, and that human embryos do not possess gill slits (see Assmuth and Hull, 1915; Grigg, 1996, 1998; Pennisi, 1997; Richardson, 1997a, 1997b; Youngson, 1998). Even though it was common knowledge by the end of the 1920s that Haeckel’s concepts, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s words, had “utterly collapsed” (1977a, p. 216), Haeckel’s drawings and ideas still continue to turn up in modern biology texts and instructional tools as a “proof” of evolution. Modern editions of most high school and college textbooks rarely present the latest evolutionary ideas on embryology, but instead remain content to rest their case on century-old woodcuts and misnamed “gill slits.” As incredible as it seems, even today the “Biogenetic Law” still is being taught as a scientific fact in many public schools and universities. Of fifteen high school biology textbooks being considered for adoption by the Indiana State Board of Education as late as 1980, nine offered embryonic recapitulation as evidence for evolution. But advance almost two decades—to 1998. It was in that year that George Johnson and Peter Raven published their popular, Biology: Principles and Explorations, which presents the pictures of Haeckel’s embryos—without even so much as a hint to the student that they are fraudulent (and have been known to be so for more than a century)! Three years later, the eminent professor emeritus and taxonomist of Harvard, Ernst Mayr, published his book, What Evolution Is, and on page 28, used Haeckel’s original drawings—again, with no mention to the reader that they are deceptive as they are fraudulent.
Interestingly, the same year that the Johnson/Raven book was published, researcher Michael Richardson, in a letter to the editor of Science that appeared in the August 28, 1998 issue of that journal, lamented: “Sadly, it is the discredited 1874 drawings that are used in so many British and American biology textbooks” (281:1289). Yes, sadly, it is. Stephen J. Gould lamented: “We should not therefore be surprised that Haeckel’s drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of those drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks” (2000, 109[2]:44, emp. added). One would assume that a well-known publication like National Geographic would possess the ability to internally review and check such basic tenets, in an effort to present only the truth to its readers. Yet, that same long-discredited material—which even prominent evolutionists admit makes them “ashamed”—is exactly what David Quammen attempted to portray in the November 2004 issue of National Geographic as a “proof” of evolution. The question is: Why is the use of such material—which is known to be fraudulent—allowed to continue?
Evolutionists themselves have been forced to concede that the idea of embryonic recapitulation apparently has become so deeply rooted in evolutionary dogma and textbook production that it simply cannot be “weeded out.” Paul Ehrlich observed: “Its shortcomings have been almost universally pointed out by modern authors, but the idea still has a prominent place in biological mythology” (1963, p. 66). Indeed it does! Gould once wrote that embryonic recapitulation is “an evolutionary notion exceeded only by natural selection itself for impact upon popular culture” (2000, 109[2]:44). The evidence of such an assessment is obvious when one looks at just how far-reaching Haeckel’s drawings have become. America’s famous “baby doctor,” Benjamin Spock, perpetuated Haeckel’s recapitulation myth in his well-known book, Baby and Child Care. Spock confidently assured expectant mothers that
each child as he develops is retracing the whole history of mankind, physically and spiritually, step by step. A baby starts off in the womb as a single tiny cell, just the way the first living thing appeared in the ocean. Weeks later, as he lies in the amniotic fluid of the womb, he has gills like a fish (1998, p. 223). Such imagery persists in the popular media, too. As an example, consider the position of the late atheist Carl Sagan and his third wife, Ann Druyan. In an article on “The Question of Abortion” that they co-authored for Parade magazine, these two humanists contended for the ethical permissibility of human abortion on the grounds that the fetus, growing within a woman’s body for several months following conception, is not a human being. Sagan and Druyan stated that the embryo begins as “a kind of parasite” that eventually looks like a “segmented worm.” Further alterations, they wrote, reveal “gill arches” like that of a “fish or amphibian.” Supposedly, “reptilian” features emerge, which later give rise to “mammalian...pig-like” traits. By the end of two months, according to these two authors, the creature resembles a “primate but is still not quite human” (Sagan and Druyan, 1990, p. 6). Although they never mentioned Haeckel by name, their point was clear: abortion in the first few months of pregnancy is acceptable because the embryo or fetus is a lower form of life during this period. Their conclusion, therefore, was that the killing of this tiny creature is not murder. And what was the basis for this assertion? Sagan and Druyan argued their case by subtly employing the concept known as “embryonic recapitulation.” When, three years later, USA Today published an article on genetic similarities as proof for evolution, the author’s analogy and sole illustration invoked the icons of comparative embryology (Friend, 1993).
The cover story of the November 11, 2002 issue of Time magazine detailed what were at the time the latest findings in human fetal development. Juxtaposed between the illustrations and the article were photo-captions that contained throwbacks to the outdated concept of embryonic recapitulation theory: “32 days: ...The brain is a labyrinth of cell-lined cavities, while the emerging arms and legs still resemble flipper-like paddles. 40 days: At this point, a human embryo looks no different from that of a pig, chick or elephant. All have a tail, a yolk sac and rudimentary gills” (Nash, 2002, 160[20]:71). The article itself presented a “marvelous,” seemingly “miraculous,” and “vastly complicated” embryonic process. But the glossy pictures that accompanied the article—the ones that people tend to remember—had captions that painted an entirely different picture."
