Valentine Pontifex

Your submission has just appeared in the newsgroup. Feedback to it has appeared. You need to read the feedback and make appropriate revisions (or take up Chris Ho-Stuart's offer to do it for you). Several very important issues are brought up in the newsgroup that need to be addressed: another claimed source of the quote and the need to present the material more dispassionately.

tgamble

I did some more research on this quote and found the following page.
http://www.truthmagazine.com/archive...1/TM021275.htm


"What about the :recapitulation theory and the argument from embryology on "gill-slits"? The recapitulation theory (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) is an unfortunate "proof" of evolution, as it. does not agree with the facts. As Dewar pointed out, we know, from mammalian history that teeth were developed before tongues, but in the embryo the reverse is the case (Dewar, The Transformist Illusion (1957), p. 208). Darwin's old geology professor, Adam Sedgwick, said: "After fifty years of research and close examination, the recapitulation theory is still without satisfactory proof" (Sedgwick, Darwin & Modern Science, p. 176). The argument on gill-slits, so-called, is no better than the others. Dr. A. R. Short, M.D., F.R.C.S., is authority for the statement that "the 'gill-slits' are not slits at all in mammals; they are grooves between the arches that support the blood vessels necessary to supply blood to the forepart of the body, including the developing brain. In fish, these grooves become perforated, and gills are formed; in the mammalian embryo they are not perforated, and there are no gills" (A. R. Short, Modern Discovery and The Bible (1955), pp. 64, 106)"

Sedgwick, Adam,1785-1873

Haeckel, Ernst 1834-1919

Now, in 1873, it was 39 years since Haeckel was born Since it was Haeckel who came up with the theory, how could Sedgwick possibly say that it was around 50 YEARS when Haeckel had only been around around 39 years?!

I guess Math education will have to go down the shitter as well.

:boohoo: :banghead:

Or am I missing something here? It's late so maybe I really am mssing something. Dare I hope?

tgamble

Sites that use the Muller quote:

http://www.geocities.com/acts_2_38_4...on3_index.html

http://www.lapcoc.org/gat/gat731.html

http://www.networkbc.co.uk/ADD%20Cre...20Creation.htm

http://www.truthmagazine.com/archive...1/TM021275.htm

For another debunking of the quote see this site.

http://www2.ncsu.edu:8010/ncas/evolution/

Quotations concerning mutations

"I was able to find both of the publications cited, yet I could not find the quoted passages in either."
--Todd Steck, Associate Professor of Biology, UNC-Charlotte

The authors of ENCABT take issue with the statement on page 127 of G.B. Johnson’s text, Biology: Visualizing Life (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY): "Mutations act as a source of the variation that is needed for a species to adapt to changing conditions or a new environment, and, thus, evolve over time." The ENCABT response to this statement is reprinted in italics below:

Response: "Most mutations are bad. In fact, good ones are so rare that we can consider them all as bad." H.J. Muller, "How Radiation Changes the Genetic Constitution", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, vol. 11 No. 9 (November 1955, p. 331). Dr. Muller is recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work with mutation.

"Mutation never produces anything new. They [mutant fruit flies] had malformed wings, legs and bodies and other distortions, but they always remained fruit flies" (Theodosius Dobzhansky [world renowned naturalist and an evolutionist], in Heredity and the Nature of Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964. p. 126).

Todd Steck, Associate Professor of Biology at UNC-Charlotte, obtained and examined the two publications cited and responds, "…I was able to find both of the publications cited, yet I could not find the quoted passage in either. Neither quotation is accurate as cited, and neither publication contains even the sentiments of the given quotes. Misquoting articles shows a blatant disregard for the truth. Interestingly, the often quoted statement by Dobzhanski, ‘Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution,’ does appear on p. 115 of his article cited by ENCABT." (see PART II, B)

--------

On conspiracy theory claims.

It is unfortunate, but true, that many who embrace evolution do so because of a bias against the supernatural. Thus, D.M.S. Watson, British biologist writes, "Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved . . . to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." Another evolutionist, Sir Arthur Keith, confessed that while "evolution is unproved and unprovable" he believed it because creation was "unthinkable." Have you been brainwashed by evolution? The case for creation is more convincing.
http://www.truthmagazine.com/archive...1/TM021275.htm

See this site for a debunking of the quote
http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/...es/lie031.html

pz

Your error is the assumption that Haeckel came up with the theory. It was actually a popular idea (sans the evolutionary implications) among the Naturphilosophen -- people like Goethe, Okun, Meckel, and Serres -- in the first decades of the 19th century. Recapitulation was rather soundly refuted in the 1820s by Karl Ernst von Baer, and Sedgwick was echoing a von Baerian sentiment in his rejection of Haeckel.

tgamble

oh.

It all the discussions on embryology where the subject comes up, Haeckel seems to get 100% of the credit (blame) for the theory. If it was debunked before he was even born, why did he even consider it? Maybe I'm equateing two different things?

Coragyps

A little bit of an update on Muller's work from the 1950's : several recent studies of children of the Chernobyl "liquidators" shows a high rate of mutations, with almost none having currently-obvious "deleterious" effects. Look at http://www.nrpb.org/recent_articles/2002/march/article_1.htm and its next-to-last reference as well, for some details.

Of course, Muller can hardly be faulted for his conclusions, since he didn't have the tools in 1958 to look for anything but obvious phenotype changes.

Jackalope

Actually, that article refers to the decendants of people living in the Semipalatinsk area who were exposed to fallout from an aboveground nuclear test. The Chernobyl liquidators and their descendants were only mentioned in passing.

pz

Recapitulation got a second wind because of one thing: Haeckel hitched it to this new, exciting idea about evolution. You have to remember that althought Darwin did come up with a marvelous general explanation that was well-supported by the evidence, he was missing a few important specific details -- genetics being one of them. It was a big gap, with a lot of room to wander around in, and Haeckel charged in with ideas like the inheritance of acquired characters, terminal addition, etc., that were not supported by any evidence and eventually proved wrong.

Also, although von Baer showed that recapitulation was rank nonsense, that doesn't mean the idea just vanished. These things linger. Even now we can see that ideas like gene centric evolution and DNA as a blueprint for the organism still persist, despite the fact that they don't make sense. You might also be surprised at how often recapitulation gets mentioned in the popular literature even today -- it's sort of like that "we only use 10% of our brain" myth.

RufusAtticus

pz,

Strict recapitulation vanished, but isn't the term still used for similarities in embryology between vastly "different" organisms?