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.