Free Republic

German zoologist Ernst Haeckel is perhaps most famous for defending evolution with the argument that creatures replay their evolutionary past when developing in the womb. Since Darwin's time, textbooks have reiterated that early embryos of many vertebrates, including humans, have tiny pouches that reflect an evolutionary fish stage. More recently, embryologists thoroughly refuted that concept, and others have shown that Haeckel's drawings were partially faked. And a new online video taken from 3-D scans of a developing baby's face should bury Haeckel's old and uninformed argument. Embryologist and evolutionist Michael Richardson and colleagues dropped a bomb on Haeckel's long-held concept...

15 March 2009Darwinists Tie Themselves Into Knots Denying the Obvious Some Darwinists will say anything to try to draw attention away from the obvious. The point of my “Scientific Certitude” post was to show that evolutionary theory has been used to support racist views. Darwin was a firmly committed racist, and he was not shy about expressing his racist views: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,...

Haeckel: legacy of fraud to popularise Evolution Pauli J. Ojala and Matti Leisola Embryology was once called Entwicklungsgeschichte, the evolutionary history of organisms. This history was believed to repeat itself during the development of every new individual. Ernst Haeckel’s typology combined the pamphlets of Goethe, classification schemes of Cuvier and ‘mechanisms’ of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired properties, and put them into a Darwinian phylogenetic framework. Haeckel’s fraud applies not only to the ‘fake embryos’ diagram. He constructed the first all-embracing phylogenetic tree, and described the first prehistoric man even before any evidence was found. Haeckel fabricated drawings on the spontaneous...