Pot, kettle, black? You have demonstrated repeatedly despite being corrected to be totally incapable of decerning what data actually says even when presented in the most basic terms.
Ernst Haeckel's embryological diagrams and biology textbooks
- Thread starter A'isha
- Start date
-
- Tags
- ernst haeckel evolution
Pot, kettle, black? You have demonstrated repeatedly despite being corrected to be totally incapable of decerning what data actually says even when presented in the most basic terms.
Gawdzilla Sama
121.92-meter mutant fire-breathing lizard-thingy
And as a further aside, the battle of the Ph.D.s (at the poker game) is priceless. Buncha guys who are used to everybody shutting up when the Big Guy talks, trapped in a room with eight other Big Guys who aren't impressed with them.
So when was the last time the illustrations were used in a textbook to educate people on the phenomena? The fact that the illustrations haven't been used should tell you something. Mainly that science had moved on...
Kotatsu
Phthirapterist
I found a copy of an older book used at my university:
Biological Science - An Inquiry into Life..
Moore, Degenhardt, Hallenbeck, Kennedy, Mayer, Goodman Mayer, Deyrup Olsen, Stewart, and edited by Meyer and Buchanan.
Second edition (1968).
Still no photos, but it does have a whole page on ontogenies. It has one row of eggs, one row of eggs in various stages of development (they do not seem to be comparable, and are probably there just to have something between the egg and the fetus), a young fetus, which looks similar between the taxa, a late fetus which looks almost like the adult, and an adult. The taxa included are human, pig, salamander and chicken. The figure text reads, simply, "31-13 Comparisons of embryos of four animals". The text states that:
"Today the idea of embryonic resemblances is viewed with caution. We can see and demonstrate similarities between embryos of related groups, as shown in Figure 31-13. However, while a certain amount of recapitulation is unquestioned, the old idea that a human passes through fish, amphibian, and reptile stages during embryonic development is not correct".
Haeckel is not mentioned in the index.
Biological Science - An Inquiry into Life..
Moore, Degenhardt, Hallenbeck, Kennedy, Mayer, Goodman Mayer, Deyrup Olsen, Stewart, and edited by Meyer and Buchanan.
Second edition (1968).
Still no photos, but it does have a whole page on ontogenies. It has one row of eggs, one row of eggs in various stages of development (they do not seem to be comparable, and are probably there just to have something between the egg and the fetus), a young fetus, which looks similar between the taxa, a late fetus which looks almost like the adult, and an adult. The taxa included are human, pig, salamander and chicken. The figure text reads, simply, "31-13 Comparisons of embryos of four animals". The text states that:
"Today the idea of embryonic resemblances is viewed with caution. We can see and demonstrate similarities between embryos of related groups, as shown in Figure 31-13. However, while a certain amount of recapitulation is unquestioned, the old idea that a human passes through fish, amphibian, and reptile stages during embryonic development is not correct".
Haeckel is not mentioned in the index.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
That's the third BSCS textbook, the Yellow Book.
As with the Green and Blue Books, the drawings are not Haeckel's or copied from Haeckel (though they're also not the same drawings that were used in the other two BSCS books as pictured above), and includes stages Haeckel never drew. The Yellow Book diagram also rearranges the order of the animals depicted, to further eliminate any idea of "evolutionary progress" with lower animals at the bottom and man at the top.
Last edited:
Kotatsu
Phthirapterist
Ah, yes, I see that now. It's one of maybe 200 books I scavenged from my department's systematics and morphology library when that was disbanded a few years ago. A wonderful collection which includes the fifth edition of Haeckel's "Anthropogenie" (two volumes) from 1903, and a curious little pamphlet called (in translation) "An Attempt to show the Correspondence between Darwinism and a Rational World-view" from 1874, by some one who called himself simply "-e-". In pencil, the rest of the name (Åberg) is filled in.
GreyArea
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2009
- Messages
- 1,004
Last year I read Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, and your thread reminded me that Shubin mentions Haeckel. However, Shubin notes that "In the past one hundred years, time and new evidence have treated von Baer more kindly. In comparing embryos of one species to adults of another, Haeckel was comparing apples to oranges."
See pages 103 to 104, which may be available to you through a Google Books preview.
Is it this one?: http://books.google.com/books?id=NmvhMAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%C5berg&hl=en&ei=NDaTTeGcHu-z0QGcluHMBw
Kotatsu
Phthirapterist
Yes! Oh my, thank you! Now I can pencil in the rest of his name -- and what a curious name -- carefully. It's only 39 pages long, so it should be possible to read it in a day or so, but the language is a bit old-fashioned. And it's a bit fragile. Nevertheless, it looks very interesting.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Yeah, that seems to be the standard view of Haeckel. "He was important to the history of evolutionary theory because he came up with a good idea (the concept of examining and comparing embryos), but he drew some pretty wrong conclusions from it and nobody thinks his theories were correct."
Last edited:
I think that's the most annoying part of science to outsiders--scientists are more than willing to use the good pieces of bad ideas. Embriology obviously has evolutionary implications, despite over-reaching and flat-out misinterpretation on the part of one scientist, so scientists use the parts that are useful and discard the rest. Most people want an idea to be all right or all wrong, it seems.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
I see above that randman is repeating his claim that "evos" relied Haeckel's drawings continuously until Richardson's 1997 paper, in the face of "130 years of sustained criticism" from non-evos.
That, of course, isn't true (either in general, or in particulars). Haeckel himself didn't even continuously rely on the famous drawings that appear in my OP for this thread. Those specific images, used in pre-BSCS textbooks and the subject of Richardson's 1997 paper, are only from the first edition of Haeckel's Anthropogenie. But with each successive edition of that book, Haeckel redrew and corrected his drawings in response to his contemporary critics, and added drawings of new animals (this wasn't the first time something like this happened to Haeckel, either - in the 1868 first edition of his Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, he used the same woodcut image to represent the embryos of three different species, and even though he defended that by saying you couldn't really tell the differences betwen embryos at such an early stage, subsequent editions of the book corrected the error).
As a result, the depictions in the 1891 edition of Athropogenie barely resemble the 1874 originals, being not just far more detailed, but far more accurate at showing the differences between vertebrate embryos that his 1874 drawings masked (Richardson only examined the 1874 originals in his paper). And the 1891 edition wasn't even the last edition of the book - Haeckel made additional revisions and expansions for the 1905 edition (the last).
In other words, the classic Haeckelian textbook depictions, based off the 1874 originals, bore little resemblance to the drawings that biologists and other readers saw when they actually referenced Haeckel (and what they saw when they referenced Haeckel wasn't plagued by the problems with the 1874 drawings that Richardson identified).
Despite the use of the erroneous 1874 drawings in textbooks, anti-evolutionists made no criticism whatsoever. In fact, they flocked to the textbooks that used the drawings, ignoring the textbooks that abandoned Haeckel completely. Why?
Because of evolution. Until the BSCS completely rebuilt biology textbooks along modern scientific lines, breaking open the bio textbook industry and selling like hotcakes, the previous champion dominating high school biology classrooms was Moon's Modern Biology. That book alone commanded more than 50% of the textbook market, with the closest competitor, Smith's Exploring Biology, accounting for just 25%, with everyone else a distant, distant third.
Modern Biology was such a big hit with the types of people who campaigned for and passed the laws banning the teaching of evolution of man (such as the statute that John Scopes intentionally violated in 1925, resulting in the famed Scopes Monkey Trial) because the authors of that textbook did pretty much everything they could to ignore and/or hide the theory of evolution from their students (albeit with varying levels of success, since even post-Scopes, the evidence for evolutionary theory, especially after the Modern Synthesis, was impossible to ignore completely in biology).
For instance, the actual word "evolution" was removed from the book in 1933, not to reappear until the 1960 edition (the only term used was "racial development"). The separate chapter on human evolution was removed in 1947, its 20 pages of content cut to 8 and spread among chapters on zoology and physiology. In 1956, all the content regarding human evolution was removed.
That's right...in 1956, the high school biology textbook that dominated the market and was used by the majority of students, never talked about human evolution, never mentioned early man, and never even used the word "evolution". Religious fundamentalists and opponents of evolution (especially opponents of the idea that man evolved from primate ancestors) ate that up with a spoon!
And here's where randman's thesis runs aground. Because every single edition of Modern Biology, including the creationist-approved 1956 edition that never said the word "evolution" and discarded all discussion of human evolution, used a diagram directly copied from Haeckel's 1974 drawings. But "anti-evos" didn't care - all they cared about was that evolution, specifically human evolution, wasn't taught to kids.
That's why books such as 1950's Adventures with Animals and Plants (which used brand-new embryo diagrams taken from photos of embryos, rather than copying Haeckel) failed commercially, while the Haeckel-using Modern Biology ran strong until the BSCS toppled it. Adventures spent a lot of time talking about evolution and current (for 1950, anyway) evolutionary theory, while Modern Biology didn't.
As the Textbook History page says, "despite their recent noise, creationists and their forebears cared little about this particular “icon of evolution” during its heyday. Embraced it even (Modern Biology was shamefully popular). The only textbooks they had trouble with were the better ones."
That, of course, isn't true (either in general, or in particulars). Haeckel himself didn't even continuously rely on the famous drawings that appear in my OP for this thread. Those specific images, used in pre-BSCS textbooks and the subject of Richardson's 1997 paper, are only from the first edition of Haeckel's Anthropogenie. But with each successive edition of that book, Haeckel redrew and corrected his drawings in response to his contemporary critics, and added drawings of new animals (this wasn't the first time something like this happened to Haeckel, either - in the 1868 first edition of his Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, he used the same woodcut image to represent the embryos of three different species, and even though he defended that by saying you couldn't really tell the differences betwen embryos at such an early stage, subsequent editions of the book corrected the error).
As a result, the depictions in the 1891 edition of Athropogenie barely resemble the 1874 originals, being not just far more detailed, but far more accurate at showing the differences between vertebrate embryos that his 1874 drawings masked (Richardson only examined the 1874 originals in his paper). And the 1891 edition wasn't even the last edition of the book - Haeckel made additional revisions and expansions for the 1905 edition (the last).
In other words, the classic Haeckelian textbook depictions, based off the 1874 originals, bore little resemblance to the drawings that biologists and other readers saw when they actually referenced Haeckel (and what they saw when they referenced Haeckel wasn't plagued by the problems with the 1874 drawings that Richardson identified).
Despite the use of the erroneous 1874 drawings in textbooks, anti-evolutionists made no criticism whatsoever. In fact, they flocked to the textbooks that used the drawings, ignoring the textbooks that abandoned Haeckel completely. Why?
Because of evolution. Until the BSCS completely rebuilt biology textbooks along modern scientific lines, breaking open the bio textbook industry and selling like hotcakes, the previous champion dominating high school biology classrooms was Moon's Modern Biology. That book alone commanded more than 50% of the textbook market, with the closest competitor, Smith's Exploring Biology, accounting for just 25%, with everyone else a distant, distant third.
Modern Biology was such a big hit with the types of people who campaigned for and passed the laws banning the teaching of evolution of man (such as the statute that John Scopes intentionally violated in 1925, resulting in the famed Scopes Monkey Trial) because the authors of that textbook did pretty much everything they could to ignore and/or hide the theory of evolution from their students (albeit with varying levels of success, since even post-Scopes, the evidence for evolutionary theory, especially after the Modern Synthesis, was impossible to ignore completely in biology).
For instance, the actual word "evolution" was removed from the book in 1933, not to reappear until the 1960 edition (the only term used was "racial development"). The separate chapter on human evolution was removed in 1947, its 20 pages of content cut to 8 and spread among chapters on zoology and physiology. In 1956, all the content regarding human evolution was removed.
That's right...in 1956, the high school biology textbook that dominated the market and was used by the majority of students, never talked about human evolution, never mentioned early man, and never even used the word "evolution". Religious fundamentalists and opponents of evolution (especially opponents of the idea that man evolved from primate ancestors) ate that up with a spoon!
And here's where randman's thesis runs aground. Because every single edition of Modern Biology, including the creationist-approved 1956 edition that never said the word "evolution" and discarded all discussion of human evolution, used a diagram directly copied from Haeckel's 1974 drawings. But "anti-evos" didn't care - all they cared about was that evolution, specifically human evolution, wasn't taught to kids.
That's why books such as 1950's Adventures with Animals and Plants (which used brand-new embryo diagrams taken from photos of embryos, rather than copying Haeckel) failed commercially, while the Haeckel-using Modern Biology ran strong until the BSCS toppled it. Adventures spent a lot of time talking about evolution and current (for 1950, anyway) evolutionary theory, while Modern Biology didn't.
As the Textbook History page says, "despite their recent noise, creationists and their forebears cared little about this particular “icon of evolution” during its heyday. Embraced it even (Modern Biology was shamefully popular). The only textbooks they had trouble with were the better ones."
iknownothing
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2010
- Messages
- 1,357
All completely untrue, in multiple ways, as demonstrated by the above post and this entire thread.
Why do you keep insisting on making claims that have been shown to be false?
Oh, okay.
Also, please note evos are still using the faked data in textbooks. This is from a 2010 textbook.
http://www.ideacenter.org/stuff/cont...mader_2010.jpg
Haeckel gets debunked frequently; from what I can tell in every decade since he came out with his theories and drawings, but evos still use them. This process is nothing new.
I expected and stated that they'd rehabilitate him and keep using his faked data, and that's what they have done.
http://www.ideacenter.org/stuff/cont...mader_2010.jpg
Haeckel gets debunked frequently; from what I can tell in every decade since he came out with his theories and drawings, but evos still use them. This process is nothing new.
I expected and stated that they'd rehabilitate him and keep using his faked data, and that's what they have done.
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/textbook-fraud-embryology-earnst-haeckel-biogenetic-law.htm#informed
Of course that didn't stop Richardson from writing or lending his name to a paper in 2002 that said Haeckel's faked drawings were "evidence" for evolution and good "teaching aides."
I'll let you speculate on why the reversal.
Of course, this was nothing new.
So besides creationists, many evos also pointed out they were fakes.
Why then did evos act so surprised in 1997?
Was there any decade plenty of scientists did not show they were fakes?
Still, evos found them useful. They are "useful" for "teaching aides" and "evidence" for evolution (Richardson 2002).
Please note my post above.
Where have I asserted any false thing at all in this discussion?
Has there been any decade since haeckel first produced his depictions that evos have not used them?
Aepervius
Non credunt, semper verificare
Oh Please. Are you speaking of the 1920 decade ?
1) evolution theory went on is long past Haeckel, you REFUSE categorically to recognize that, because that would r*u*i*n your QQing
2) wanna let me point to you the MULTIPLE error creationist make over and over and over and over ? Wanna start with isotopic dating ? geological Layer ? People pretending soft tissue was found intact ? And the hundred of other stupid stuff they say ?
Kotatsu
Phthirapterist
Ah, so these pictures are actually in Anthropogenie? Great! I'll bring my camera to work today, as I have a copy of the fifth edition of this book. I'll see if I can find the drawings and what they look like. Excellent!
ThunderChunky
Master Poster
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2007
- Messages
- 2,456
Can you point out anything demonstratively false that ANTPogo asserted in post #31 of this thread?
This is from a creationist quarterly publication in 1969.
http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/sum6_1.html
Creationists have been showing Haeckel's drawings were fraudulent for decades. I cited one book from 1910, which Gould was dismissive of due to it being "religious" in nature.
I learned of Haeckel faking his drawings in the 1980s. I used to believe in evolution. A botany professor at NC State was doing a presentation at the university I was attending and talked about it. We asked him if he ever showed and told evolutionists about it, and he said he and other creationists certainly did, but they didn't listen.
In the 90s (before 1997), the internet made it even more easier to publish this fact. This didn't stop evos on forums like this from insisting Haeckel did not fake anything.
The claim that creationists didn't argue against both haeckel's data and claims as fraudulent is simply false.
http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/sum6_1.html
Creationists have been showing Haeckel's drawings were fraudulent for decades. I cited one book from 1910, which Gould was dismissive of due to it being "religious" in nature.
I learned of Haeckel faking his drawings in the 1980s. I used to believe in evolution. A botany professor at NC State was doing a presentation at the university I was attending and talked about it. We asked him if he ever showed and told evolutionists about it, and he said he and other creationists certainly did, but they didn't listen.
In the 90s (before 1997), the internet made it even more easier to publish this fact. This didn't stop evos on forums like this from insisting Haeckel did not fake anything.
The claim that creationists didn't argue against both haeckel's data and claims as fraudulent is simply false.