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...