Replies

js1138: If you are going to make this kind of charge I'm going to ask you to back it up. Name the textbooks.

Dimensio: What textbooks are still promoting Haeckel's fraud and what is fraudulent about the peppered moth photographs?

OK, here's your answer...for starters...

Each of these recent textbooks reproduces uncritically Ernst Haeckel's series of embryos (which were found to be fraudulent during Haeckel's lifetime over a hundred years ago) :
1. Alton Biggs, Chris Kapicka & Linda Landgren. Biology: The Dynamics of Life (Westerville, OH: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1998). ISBN 0-02-8254331-7
2. Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology. Third Edition (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1998). ISBN 0-87893-189-9
3. Burton S. Gutman, Biology (Boston: WCB/McGraw-Hill, 1999). ISBN 0-697-22366-3
4. Sylvia Mader, Biology, Sixth Edition (Boston: WCB/McGraw-Hill, 1998). ISBN 0-697-34080-5
5. Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph Levine, Biology, Fifth Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000). ISBN 0-13-436265-9
6. Peter H. Raven & George B. Johnson, Biology, Fifth Edition (Boston: WCB/McGraw-Hill, 1999). ISBN 0-697-35353-2
7. William D. Schraer & Herbert J. Stoltze, Biology: The Study of Life, Seventh Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 21999.) ISBN 0-13-435086-3
8. Cecie Starr & Ralph Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, Eighth Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Comany, 1998). ISBN 0-534-530001-X

Good enough for ya? Heh.

Actually I'd like to give you citations for textbooks published more recently than the year 2000; but the paper that was the source for this info was itself published in 2000. However, I trust you will agree with me that these textbooks are "recent."

May I quote someone you perhaps admire, Stephen Jay Gould, on the subject of textbooks continuing to promote Haeckel's lie?

Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Haeckel's drawings of vertebrate embryos "exaggerated the similarites by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases -- in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent -- simply copied the same figure over and over again."...
"We do, I think, have the right," Gould wrote in 2000, "to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks."

Dimensio, I have to leave the computer and don't have time to address the peppered moths fraud now. But I'm sure you know how to do a google search.

May I quote someone you perhaps admire, Stephen Jay Gould, on the subject of textbooks continuing to promote Haeckel's lie?

So you are saying that, in addition to publishing Haeckel's drawings, they are also advancing Haeckel's failed hypothesis? Please provide excerpts from the books showing as much. I do not dispute that a number of textbooks have reproduced Hacekel's drawings where they should not have, however this is not the same as using the drawings to advocate Haeckel's hypothesis for which he falsified the drawings.

I also note that you have not explained what, exactly, was "fraudulent" regarding the peppered moth photographs.

Actually, no I don't trust you. I will, however, attempt to verify your claim that thes books pormote Haeckel uncritically.

I took biology in 1959 and was given something pretty close to the modern interpretation of Haeckel.

Would you prefer books to present photographs rather than drawings?