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Fraud Rediscovered
by Russell
Grigg

First published in:
Creation Ex
Nihilo 20(2):49–51,
March–May 1998

It has long been known that one of the most effective
popularizers of evolution fudged some drawings, but only now has the
breathtaking extent of his deceit been revealed.

Most people have heard of or been taught the idea that the human
embryo goes through (or recapitulates) various evolutionary stages, such as
having gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc., during the first few
months that it develops in the womb.

The idea has not only been presented to generations of
biology/medical students as fact, but has also been used for many years to
persuasively justify abortion. Abortionists claimed that the unborn child being
killed was still in the fish stage or the monkey stage, and had not yet become a
human being.

This idea (called embryonic recapitulation) was vigorously
expounded by Ernst Haeckel from the late 1860s to promote Darwin's theory of
evolution in Germany, even though Haeckel did not have evidence to support his
views.1

Data manufactured

Lacking the evidence, Haeckel set out to manufacture the data. He
fraudulently changed drawings made by other scientists of human and dog embryos,
to increase the resemblance between them and to hide the dissimilarities. We
reported on this particular fraud in a recent issue of Creation
magazine2
(see also online
version).

Haeckel's German peers (notably, in 1874, Wilhelm His Sr,
professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig) were aware of this fraud and
extracted a modest confession from him, in which he blamed the draughtsman for
blundering—without acknowledging that he himself was the draughtsman!2

Most informed evolutionists in the past 70 years have realised
that the recapitulation theory is false.3

Nevertheless, the recapitulation idea is still advanced as
evidence for the theory of evolution in many books and particularly
encyclopedias and by evolutionary popularizers like the late Carl Sagan.4

But wait—there's more

When evolutionists say that the recapitulation theory is false,
they usually do not mean to admit that comparing embryos gives no evidence of
common ancestry. In fact, they still frequently highlight the assumed
similarities between embryos in their early stages (called embryonic homology)
as evidence for evolution. This assumption is based on the idea that such
similarities are ‘common knowledge’.5

This alleged similarity of embryos has for years been resting,
consciously or unconsciously, on a set of 24 of Haeckel's drawings which he
first published in 1866 in his Generalle Morphologie der Organismen, and
then repeated in 1874 in his more popular Anthropogenie (See below).
These purport to show embryos of fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, cow,
rabbit, and human in three stages of development.

The various stages, particularly the earlier ones, show
substantial similarity. Ever since these drawings appeared, it has been assumed
that they have given us something close to the truth about embryos of vertebrate
species. So much so that they still appear in textbooks and popular works on
evolution.6,7

In fact, no one has bothered to check—until now. It turns
out that Haeckel's fraud was much worse than anyone realised. It did not just
affect the idea of recapitulation, it turns out that the similarities are much,
much less than anyone thought.

Fraud examined and exposed

Michael Richardson, a lecturer and embryologist at St George’s
Hospital Medical School, London, has exposed this further fraud, in an article
in the journal Anatomy and Embryology, 8
recently reviewed in Science9
and New Scientist.10

Richardson says he always felt there was something wrong with
Haeckel’s drawings, ‘because they didn’t square with his [Richardson’s]
understanding of the rates at which fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals develop
their distinctive features’.8 He
could find no record of anyone having actually compared embryos of one species
with those of another, so that ‘no one has cited any comparative data in support
of the idea’.
8

He therefore assembled an international team to do just
that—examine and photograph ‘the external form of embryos from a wide range of
vertebrate species, at a stage comparable to that depicted by Haeckel’.8

The team collected embryos of 39 different creatures, including
marsupials from Australia, tree-frogs from Puerto Rico, snakes from France, and
an alligator embryo from England. They found that the embryos of different
species are very different. In fact, they are so different that the drawings
made by Haeckel (of similar-looking human, rabbit, salamander, fish, chicken,
etc. embryos) could not possibly have been done from real specimens.

Nigel Hawkes interviewed Richardson for The Times
(London).11 In an
article describing Haeckel as 'An embryonic liar', he quotes Richardson:

‘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.’ 11

Haeckel not only changed the drawings by adding, omitting, and
changing features but, according to Richardson and his team,

‘he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among
species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further
blurred differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one
representative was accurate for an entire group of animals’.9

Ernst Haeckel’s drawings were declared fraudulent by Professor His
in 1874 and were included in Haeckel's quasi confession, but according to
Richardson,

‘Haeckel’s confession got lost after his drawings were
subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and
reproduced widely in English language biology texts.’ 9,12

Will there now be a rush by libraries, publishers and sellers of
evolutionist books to rewrite them or withdraw them from circulation, and
otherwise acknowledge the fact that the idea of embryonic similarities'
suggesting evolution is largely based on academic fraud?

Top row: Haeckel’s
drawings of several different embryos, showing incredible similarity in
their early ‘tailbud’ stage.
Bottom Row: Richardson's
photographs of how the embryos really look at the same stage of
development.
From left: Salmo salar, Cryptobranchus
allegheniensis, Emys orbicularis, Gallus gallus,
Oryctolagus cuniculus, Homo sapiens.

Many modern evolutionists no longer claim that the human
embryo repeats the adult stages of its alleged evolutionary
ancestors, but point to Haeckel’s drawings (top row) to claim that it
repeats the embryonic stages. However, even this alleged support for
evolution is now revealed as being based on faked drawings.

Click here
for larger image.

More of Richardson’s
photographs of embryos at the same ‘tailbud’ stage of development and to
the same scale, showing the huge differences between various
species.
From left: Petromyzon marinus, Acipenser ruthenus,
Bufo bufo, Erinaceus europaeus, Felis catus, Manis javanica, Canis
familiaris.

Click
here for larger image.

Haeckel's famous (infamous) set
of 24 drawings purporting to show eight different embryos in three stages

of development, as published by him in Anthropo-genie, in
Germany, 1874.

Click
here for larger image.

The embryo photos used in this article were kindly
supplied by Dr Michael K. Richardson. They originally appeared in M.K.
Richardson et al., ‘There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in
the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and
development’, Anatomy and Embryology, 196(2):91–106, 1997, ©
Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co., Tiergartenstrasse, 69121 Heidelberg,
Germany. Reproduced here with permission.

References and notes

The superficial resemblance of various embryos to one
another had attracted the attention of zoologists before Haeckel, including
J.F. Meckel (1781–1883), M.H. Rathke (1793–1860), and Etienne R.A. Serres
(1786–1868) who theorised that embryos of higher animals pass through stages
comparable to adults of lower animals, and K. von Baer (1792–1876) who was a
creationist and opposed this view as well as vigorously opposing Darwinism
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1:789, 1992). It was Haeckel who
popularised the idea with his catchy phrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’
(meaning that the development of the human embryo in the womb is a rerun of
the steps in man's alleged evolutionary rise from a primitive creature). Return to Text.

R. Grigg, ‘Ernst Haeckel: Evangelist for evolution and
apostle of deceit’, Creation 18(2):33–36, 1996 (see also online version). Return to Text.

E.g. evolutionist Stephen J. Gould has said, ‘Both the
theory [of recapitulation] and 'ladder approach' to classification that it
encouraged are, or should be, defunct today.’ ‘Dr Down's Syndrome’, Natural
History, 89:144, April 1980, cited from Henry Morris, The Long
War Against God, Baker Book House, Michigan, p. 139, 1989. Return to Text.

E.g, World Book Encylopedia, 6:409–410, 1994;
Collier's Encyclopedia, 1994, 2:138, 1994; Carl Sagan, The
Dragons of Eden, Book Club Associates, London, pp. 57–58, 1977. Return to Text.

Creationists have for many years pointed out that
similarity does not prove common ancestry, but can equally well arise from
common design, common pathways for engineering efficiency, etc. See DNA
Similarity of Humans and Chimps—does it prove common ancestry? Return to Text.

E.g. Scott Gilbert, Developmental Biology, Sinauer
Associates, Massachusetts, fifth ed. pp. 254 and 900, 1997, where Gilbert
wrongly attributes the drawings to ‘Romanes, 1901’. And George B. Johnson,
Biology, Mosby-Year Book, St Louis, p. 396, 1992. Return to Text.

E.g. Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson, The Way Life
Works, Ebury Press, London, p. 174, 1995, presents Haeckel's drawings in
full colour, no less! And Richard Leakey, Illustrated Origin of
Species, Faber and Faber, London, p. 213, 1986, where Leakey calls
Haeckel's recapitulation dogma ‘misleading’, but still reproduces the
drawings. Return to
Text.

Michael Richardson et al, Anatomy and Embryology,
196(2):91–106, 1997. Return to Text.

Elizabeth Pennisi, 'Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered',
Science 277(5331):1435, September 5, 1997. Return to Text.

'Embryonic fraud lives on', New Scientist
155(2098):23, September 6, 1997. Return to Text.

Nigel Hawkes, The Times (London), p. 14, August 11,
1997. Return to
Text.

Creationists have always been aware of Haeckel's fraud,
though not necessarily its extent. See Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men,
TFE Publishing, Toronto, pp. 185ff., 275ff., 1986; Wilbert H. Rusch SR,
'Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny', Creation Research Society,
6(1):27–34, June 1969; Douglas Dewar, Difficulties of the
Evolution Theory, Edward Arnold & Co., London, Chapter VI, 1931. Also
Assmusth and Hull, Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries, Bombay Press, India,
1911. Return to
Text.

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at:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1339.asp
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