One of the worst cases of scientific fraud or

The law that wasn't

When I went to school in the sixties, our biology textbooks showed a picture of a human embryo next to various animal embryos. The human looked almost indistinguishable from the animals. We were told this demonstrated the common ancestry we share with them.

It was further stated that embryonic development proved Darwinism, because the embryo went through various stages mimicking its evolutionary history. The fetus began as a single cell-just as life had billions of years ago. It then would undergo a tadpole stage, fish stage, amphibian stage, and so forth, en route to becoming human.

This theory was known as "embryonic recapitulation" as well as "the bio­genetic law." Although the concept preceded Darwin (he discussed it in The Origin of Species), it was popularized by Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, as we have mentioned, published baseless drawings of ape-men and "sponta­ neously generated" bacteria. He also created those famous pictures of iden­tical-looking human and animal embryos. Haeckel explained:

When we see that, at a certain stage, the embryos of man and the ape, the dog and the rabbit, the pig and the sheep, though recognizable as higher vertebrates, cannot be distinguished from each other, the fact can only be elucidated by assuming a common parentage . . . . I have illustrated this significant fact by ajuxtaposition of corresponding stages in the devel­ opment of a number of different vertebrates in my Natural History of Cre­ation and in my Anthropogeny.¹

But shamefully, Haeckel grossly altered the appearance of embryos to make his case. As Francis Hitching explained:

But as a matter of biological fact, the embryos of men, apes, dogs, and rabbits are not at all the same, and can easily be distinguished by any com­petent embryologist. They only looked the same, in Haeckel's books, because he had chopped off bits here and there, and added bits elsewhere, to make them seem identical.

Another example was his illustration of the "worm-like" stage through which all vertebrates were supposed to have passed. He published three identical drawings captioned respectively a dog, a chicken, and a tor­toise. In 1886, a Swiss professor of zoology and comparative anatomy complained that Haeckel had simply used the same woodcut (of a dog embryo) three times.
Over the years various other forgeries were exposed. To illustrate the "embryo of a Gibbon in the fish-stage," Haeckel used the embryo of a dif­ferent kind of monkey altogether, and then sliced off those parts of the anatomy inconvenient to his theory, such as arms, legs, heart, navel and other non-fishy appendages.² 

At Jena, the university where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court.³ His deceit was thor­oughly exposed in Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries ( 1915), a book by J. Assmuth and Ernest J. Hull. They quoted nineteen leading authorities of the day. F. Keibel, professor of anatomy at Freiburg University, said that "it clearly appears that Haeckel has in many cases freely invented embryos, or reproduced the illustrations given by others in a substantially changed form."⁴ L. Riitimeyer, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Basle University, called his distorted drawings "a sin against scientific truth­fulness deeply compromising to the public credit of a scholar."⁵

Julius Weisner, professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna, called Haeckel "one who in his most recent writings exhibits himself as a fanatical misleader of the people; one who, with delusive assurance, puts forth what have long been recognized as errors and mistakes as if they were verities."⁶ J. Reinke, professor of botany at the University of Kiel, wrote that "wherever biology comes in, Haeckel uncritically jumbles together proved and unproved matter, and thus creates a chaos in the mind of his readers. It is the opinion of not a few that, on account of his lack of critical disposition, Haeckel forfeits all place in the ranks of serious naturalists."⁷

Such exposure did not prevent Haeckel's "biogenetic law" and fraudulent drawings from being spread in biology classrooms throughout the world.

For decades to come, students were taught that the human embryo mani­fested reminders of man's past, such as "gill slits" from the fish stage of evolution. Actually, the "gill slits" evolutionists thought they saw were simply clefts and pouches which, as the embryo grows, develop principally into structures of the ear, jaw and neck.⁸

Many scientists knew Haeckel's theory was completely false. The human fetus is fully human at every stage. Keith Thomson, president of the Acad­emy of Natural Sciences, wrote in American Scientist: "Surely the bio­genetic law is as dead as a doornail. . . . As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties."⁹ Dr. Sabine Schwabenthan wrote:

Fetoscopy makes it possible to observe directly the unborn child through a tiny telescope inserted through the uterine wall. : . . The devel­opment of the child-from the union of the partners' cells to birth-has been studied exhaustively. As a result, long-held beliefs have been put to rest. We now know, for instance, that man, in his prenatal stages, does not go through the complete evolution of life-from a primitive single cell to a fish-like water creature to man. Today it is known that every step in the fetal developmental process is specifically human.¹⁰

Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Medical School, London, found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel s claims by systematically comparing human and other fetuses dur­ing development. He assembled a scientific team that did just that - pho­tographing the growing embryos of 39 different species. In a 1997 interview in London's The Times, Dr. Richardson stated:

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. In the paper we call them "misleading and inaccurate," but that is just polite scientific language)¹¹

Unfortunately, embryonic recapitulation's disproof is still not popularly known, and Haeckel's drawings continue to hold sway in the public mind.

What Columbia University biologist Walter J. Bock noted in 1969 still seems true today: "[T]he biogenetic law has become so deeply rooted in bio­logical thought that it cannot be weeded out in spite of its having been demonstrated to be wrong by numerous subsequent scholars." ¹² It seems the height of pretense that a theory - a fraudulent one, at that­ was designated a "law," as if it had been established with the certainty of gravity. But this is symptomatic of Darwinism, where speculative opinions routinely masquerade as facts.

Tornado in a Junkyard by James Perloff