pseudobug

Does anyone have any reliable information concerning the history and truth concerning this issue (preferably with references or links). I'm particularly interested in whether or not Haeckel was ever "tried" in court (academic or otherwise) concerning the alledged "fraud" and the current use of his illustrations in textbooks.

The reason I ask is that my pet creationist keeps bringing this issue up like a broken record. Net searches concerning the question have yielded mostly rants from creationists (100's of them) concerning this "...heinous case of continuing deception by evolutionists". I honestly don't have the time to sift through that trash to find anything resembling truth.

tgamble

<a href="http://www.antievolution.org/people/wells_j/tdo_wells.htm" target="_blank">http://www.antievolution.org/people/wells_j/tdo_wells.htm</a>

<a href="http://inia.cls.org/~ae/Haeckels_embryos.htm" target="_blank">http://inia.cls.org/~ae/Haeckels_embryos.htm</a>

[ February 01, 2002: Message edited by: tgamble ]</p>

Kevin

The website below deals with this question. Apparently an academic court did accuse him of fraud.

Swarthmore has an excellent evo-devo site, with a section on <a href="http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/evo5.html" target="_blank">Haeckel's Drawings</a>, which contains references to the peer reviewed articles and some books about the subject. I think your creationist is making a mountain out of a molehill. There are highly conserved stages in developing embryos, and the famous Romanes illustrations are not used to show the validity of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", but instead can be and are used to demonstrate the developmental ideas of von Baer. Plus, ranting on about Haeckel does not explain why there are conserved stages in developing embryos, why <a href="http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/evo7.html" target="_blank">signal transduction pathways</a> are conserved, and why organisms that do develop very differently still show deep similarities (for example, Patel 1994).

<strong>Reference:</strong>
Patel, N.H., B.G. Condron and K. Zinn (1994). Pair-rule expression patterns of even-skipped are found in both short- and long-germ beetles. Nature 367(6462): 429-34.