Controversy Later in 1874, Haeckel's simplified embryology textbook Anthropogenie made the subject into a battleground over Darwinism aligned with Bismarck's Kulturkampf ("culture struggle") against the Catholic Church. Haeckel took particular care over the illustrations, changing to the leading zoological publisher Wilhelm Engelmann of Leipzig and obtaining from them use of illustrations from their other textbooks as well as preparing his own drawings including a dramatic double page illustration showing "early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of 8 different vertebrates. Though Haeckel's views had attracted continuing controversy, there had been little dispute about the embryos and he had many expert supporters, but Wilhelm His now revived the earlier criticisms and introduced new attacks on the 1874 illustrations.[22] Others joined in, both expert anatomists and Catholic priests and supporters politically opposed to Haeckel's views.[23]
While it has been widely claimed that Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, there does not appear to be an independently verifiable source for this claim.[24] Recent analyses (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) have found that some of the criticisms of Haeckel's embryo drawings were legitimate, but others were unfounded.[25] [26] There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and Wilhelm His.[27] The controversy involves several different issues (see more details at: recapitulation theory).
Some creationists have claimed that Darwin relied on Haeckel's embryo drawings as proof of evolution[28] to support their anti-evolution arguments while both On the Origin of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871) were published before Haeckel's double-page illustration of eight vertebrate embryos in 1874.[29]
