nzarh

Sorry if this has been brought up before, but I'm interested in the Creationist claims that Ernst Haeckel "falsified" illustrations in his books on evolution. Does anyone know the real story behind this?

pz

Yes. Part of it is a dishonest misrepresentation by the creationists: they want to deny the truth of his observations, that there are real, fundamental similarities between vertebrate embryos.

Part of it is true. Haeckel...um, exaggerated similarities and minimized differences between species. He pushed it too far. He was also guilty of outright forgery. He reused some of his woodcuts, simply changing the labels.

His theory was also wrong. He was doing this work in defense of his biogenetic law, the idea that embryos literally recapitulate their evolutionary history during development. This was false. Development is not a linear echo of evolution -- there is modification and divergence of the processes at all stages.

Unfortunately for the creationists, the fakery and the theoretical failure of the biogenetic law are not problems for evolution. The reality of the similarities have long been confirmed, first by honest creationists like von Baer in the 1830s, and now by comparative embryologists like Richardson. The biogenetic law has been dead for over a century; although Darwin was interested in it, he did not incorporate it into his theory, and it was most definitely not part of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which had virtually nothing to say about development.