Evolutionary Evidence? ~ Part 6

So you really thought that Darwin's theory of evolution was supported by empirical evidence, neutral facts? Well, so did Darwin. Most likely you've seen this image somewhere, supporting Darwin's theory of evolution--Haeckel's Embryos. To put it nicely, Ernst Haeckel, who drew the above picture, fibbed when he portrayed the similarities in human and animal embryo's. For a better representation, click here. Again I resort to Pearcey for an explanation.

As a junior high student, I was immensely impressed when my parents took me to a museum featuring an exhibit sure to be familiar to everyone: It showed vertebrate embryos lined up side by side--fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and human. The point of the exhibit was to show how similar the embryos are, in order to suggest common ancestry. Darwin himself said the similarity among vertebrate embryos was "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of" his theory.

But it turns out that Darwin was misled. The embryo series was created by one of his most ardent supporters, a German scientist named Ernst Haeckel. His goal was to support a polysyllabic slogan he had coined--ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny--which means each individual embryo replays all the prior stages of evolution. Shocking as it may seem, however, Haeckel fudged his sketches, making them look far more similar than they really are...

Even more shocking, in Haeckel's own day, more than a hundred years ago, scientists already knew that he had faked the sketches--and his colleagues accused him of fraud. Yet only recently has the scientific community begun to expose the falsehood publicly. An embryologist writing in the journal Science called Haeckel's drawings "one of the most famous fakes in biology." Yet the same drawings, or similar ones, continue to be used in biology textbooks.

Haeckel's principle of recapitulation (that the human embryo replays the steps of evolution) has likewise been debunked, yet it continues to live a kind of postmortem zombie existence--often in arguments used to justify abortion. ("After all, at that stage it's only a fish or a reptile.") Columnist Michael Kinsley even used it in an attempt to support embryonic stem cell research. Technically speaking, Kinsley acknowledged, the principle of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny has been discredited. Nevertheless, he argued, it contains a kernal of truth: Restated in ordinary language, in the development of the individual human being, "something similar" to evolution really does happen--namely, "that we each start out as something less than human, that the transformation takes place gradually."

But if a principle is false, then restating it in the vernacular does not make it true. Biologically speaking, it is simply incorrect to say that we all start out as something less than human. The embryo is human from day one--a self-intergrating organism whose unity, distinctness, and identity remain intact as it develops.1

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'" Ecclesiastes 12:1



1Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005.

Evolutionary Evidence? ~ Part 5

How about this image? Ever seen it used as proof of evolution?

Peppered Moths

The case for naturalistic evolution has been seriously damaged in recent years by reversals in key evidence. Take the peppered moths in England, which most of us remember from photos in our high school science textbooks. The moths appear in two variants--a light gray and a darker gray--and the standard textbook story goes like this: During the Industrial Revolution, the new factories poured out smoke and soot, which darkened the tree trunks where the moths perched and made it easier for birds to see the lighter variety and eat them. Over time this process led to a larger proportion of the darker moths. This has long been touted as the showcase example of natural selection.

In recent years, however, a small problem has come to light: Peppered moths don't actually perch on tree trunks in the wild. (They are thought to perch in the upper canopy of trees.) How, then, do we explain the photographs we see in the textbooks? It turns out that they were staged: To create the photos, scientists glued dead moths onto the tree trunks. One scientist who helped make a television documentary acknowledged that he glued dead moths on the trees in producing the film.

Why was such a shoddy piece of scientific research accepted in the first place? And how did it attain to iconic status in evolutionary biology? Because scientists desperately wanted to believe it, says journalist Judith Hooper in a recent expose. The problem with Darwin's theory is that evolutionary change requires thousands or millions of years, so we never actually see it happening. In the case of the peppered moth, however, for the first time evolutionary change seemed fast enough to be actually observed. It was just what Darwinists had been waiting for, and before long it had become "an irrefutable article of faith."

The scandal has now been thoroughly aired in the scientific literature, to the great embarrassment of evolutionists. The peppered moth was a "prize horse in our stable of examples," lamented one well-known evolutionary biologist. Learning the truth, he said, was like learning "that it was my father and not Santa Claus who brought the presents on Christmas Eve."

Yet amazingly, the moths continue to appear in science textbooks. One enterprising reporter interviewed a textbook writer who admitted he knew the photos were faked--but used them anyway. "The advantage of this example," the writer said, "is that it is extremely visual." "Later on," he added, students "can look at the work critically." Apparently even falsified evidence is acceptable, if it reinforces Darwinian orthodoxy.1

"He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power." Hebrews 1:3



1Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005