• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Ernst Haeckel's embryological diagrams and biology textbooks

Lowpro said:
So are you saying PZ was less intelligent but still correct? You haven't refuted the claims that RandFan quoted against your argument...
Click to expand...

Randfan hasn't made an argument. He just falsely accused Wells of error when that clearly is not true. PZ's article is propaganda. Embryology was hugely important to Darwin as evidence for evolution and he included Haeckel's fraud in his later edition of Origins. Moreover, he started with Von Baer's observations and tried to say they indicated something Von Baer claimed they did not.

Of course, you guys would call that quote-mining but be that as it may, it's not wrong to reinterpret someone else's data in light of your theory, but to pretend Haeckel's expansion (fake data and claims) did not play a huge role in advancing evo theory is silly. Wells is entirely correct on that just as he is on everything for the most part in his book, Icons of Evolution.

Where does PZ show any comments by Wells that are incorrect when taken in context?
 
Lowpro said:
No*:



Feel free to read that over, but if Wells is going to pass of this crap he's a devious liar who misrepresents textbooks and evolution theory in general. Don't need us to smear him when he gave himself enough rope to hang himself with, just like you are randman


*to be fair this is part of a MUCH larger article http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/haeckel.html which you should read in its entirety so as to grasp overall context of the article.
Click to expand...

Show me a specific quote of Wells in context where he lies or makes a serious error, please.

Or retract your smear.

That article contains one quote of Wells showing where he was wrong and actually blatantly misrepresents Wells. Wells shows where Haeckel was used despite some showing Haeckel was wrong and the TO propagandist has the nerve to accuse Wells of being wrong because, well, look here, all these men denounced it.
 
Last edited:
randman said:
Randfan hasn't made an argument. He just falsely accused Wells of error when that clearly is not true. PZ's article is propaganda. Embryology was hugely important to Darwin as evidence for evolution and he included Haeckel's fraud in his later edition of Origins. Moreover, he started with Von Baer's observations and tried to say they indicated something Von Baer claimed they did not.

Of course, you guys would call that quote-mining but be that as it may, it's not wrong to reinterpret someone else's data in light of your theory, but to pretend Haeckel's expansion (fake data and claims) did not play a huge role in advancing evo theory is silly. Wells is entirely correct on that just as he is on everything for the most part in his book, Icons of Evolution.

Where does PZ show any comments by Wells that are incorrect when taken in context?
Click to expand...

It's wrong for you to misrepresent that as part of how evolution explains development randman. No one is defending Haeckel. But you're conflating Haeckel with current theory in an attempt to invalidate it, and that's not going to fly. You're caught in your lies here.

Wells was also a complete and utter moron for tightening his sphincter over the gill slits issue (an issue he purposefully meant to misrepresent) so he's actually caught in a lie there. If this is propaganda, PZ doesn't play the role, Wells did well enough to hang himself with his own rope...
 
Lowpo, I have not lied to you. You just don't like someone telling you the truth.

And Wells is entirely correct on the fallacy of calling human pharyngeal folds gill slits. They never are, nor become, gill slits.
 
randman said:
Show me a specific quote of Wells in context where he lies or makes a serious error, please.

Or retract your smear.

That article contains one quote of Wells showing where he was wrong and actually blatantly misrepresents Wells. Wells shows where Haeckel was used despite some showing Haeckel was wrong and the TO propagandist has the nerve to accuse Wells of being wrong because, well, look here, all these men denounced it.
Click to expand...

You know what I'll leave my smear and try to find the book Icons of Evolution in PDF for you.

currently reading: http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/pap.tony.pdf

The relevant text:
Icon # 4 Haeckel’s Embryos
Slide 15: [Figure of Haeckel’s embryos]
Question to ask your biology teacher # 4: Why do textbooks use drawing of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence
for common ancestry – even though biologists have known for over a century that embryos are not most similar in their
early stages and the drawings are faked?
Wells points out that the embryo drawings shown here were actually faked by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in order to exaggerate their
similarities.
He claims that Haeckel’s drawing and the claim that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny“ was rejected by scientists over a
hundred years ago but his drawings still show up regularly in biology textbooks as evidence for evolution.
==========================================
The Scientific Response
Even though Wells identifies his own expertise in biology as embryology, his argument here rests almost entirely on the
Haeckel drawings and he virtually ignores volumes of modern embryological research that supports evolutionary
theory.
Even though Haeckel’s drawings were exaggerated (probably a better description then ‘faked’), his basic claim remains
valid, that the earlier stages of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones and the more recent a shared common
ancestor, the more similar their embryological development.
Haeckel’s drawings are seldom if ever still printed in biology textbooks and when they are, they are there for historical
reasons or as an example of the human fallibility aspect of science.
Click to expand...

I like this quote:

he virtually ignores volumes of modern embryological research that supports evolutionary
theory.
Click to expand...
It reflects you very well.
 
randman said:
Lowpo, I have not lied to you. You just don't like someone telling you the truth.

And Wells is entirely correct on the fallacy of calling human pharyngeal folds gill slits. They never are, nor become, gill slits.
Click to expand...

Fail harder please:

What's wrong with "gill slits"?

Wells is quite unhappy with the common term "gill slits." He spends several pages telling us that embryonic mammals don't have gills, and that even at the stages that fish have gill slits, they don't have gills. He is missing the point, however: nobody has claimed that they do have gills. They have "gill slits," a completely different thing altogether. He has gotten so wrapped up in a trivial etymological argument that he has lost all sight of biological reality.

Vertebrate embryos universally have prominent structures in their neck region that are called by various names in the scientific literature: branchial, pharyngeal, or visceral pouches or grooves or furrows or arches. Because they may appear as a repeating series of slits in the neck of the embryo, resembling the pattern of repeated elements in the neck of adult fish, they have also been colloquially called "gill slits" or "gill pouches." They are not, however, gills - and scientists have not been claiming that they are (Wells even quotes several authors, Wolpert and Rager, who explicitly state this simple, obvious fact). So what are they?

"Gill slits" are common structural elements of vertebrate craniofacial development. "Common" is the important term here. It turns out that all vertebrates build their face in the same, somewhat improbable and counterintuitive way; it is this deep similarity that is the root of the evolutionary argument that it reflects common ancestry.

The head of all vertebrate embryos, whether they are a fish or a human, can be simply described as a curved tube largely made up of presumptive brain (Figure 2), with a series of 4 to 7 finger-like tissues hanging down from it, the pharyngeal arches. What we consider a face, everything from just below the eyes, back to the ears, and down to the neck, is absent. Instead, we have these dangling blobs, each of which will contain a cartilaginous rod, a column of muscle, a significant branch of the circulatory system, and an assortment of other cell types. These arches are reiterated modules that will subsequently merge and rearrange themselves (along with other cranial tissues, most importantly a migrating population of cells from the top of the head called the neural crest) to form the more familiar face. They do so in similar ways in all vertebrates: the first pharyngeal arch, for instance, always forms the jaw, and the second arch always forms the hyoid. There are also differences that emerge in different classes. Pieces of the first two arches find their way into bones of the mammalian ear. The third and subsequent arches in fish end up in the gills, while those same arches in a human form a series of cartilages in the throat. The third fuses with the hyoid, the fourth forms a major part of the thyroid cartilage, and the fifth forms the cricoid and arytenoid cartilages. Non-cartilaginous elements of these structures end up incorporated into all kinds of tissues, glands and muscles and epithelia, of the neck and face.
Figure 2. Drawings of the developing human head and face between the 4th and 5th week (adapted from Nelson, 1953). The top row are side views, and the bottom row are face views of the same stages. The face develops from extensions and fusions of the pharyngeal arches, structures which are found in all other vertebrates, and which are modified in different ways in different species. Abbreviations: m, maxillary process (upper jaw); j, lower jaw; h, hyoid; n, nasal pit. embryonic face

This common pattern of development is a genuinely remarkable thing. It is one of the reasons that early evolutionary biologists, such as Charles Darwin, argued that the evidence of embryology was so important to his theory - we see such intricate processes redone over and over again in such similar ways in species after species. Given that the initial pharyngeal arches are radically rearranged over the course of development, there is no obvious reason why all vertebrate embryos begin with virtually identical structures that are equally remote from their final morphology, other than that they reflect a shared morphological foundation and a common ancestry.

Wells wants to deny all this. To do so, he focuses entirely on the terminology. He points out that "gill slits" are not gills, a fact that is well understood by every developmental biologist. He says, "they are never 'gill-like' except in the superficial sense that they form a series of parallel lines in the neck region." This is true, and no one claims any deeper significance to the term than that. However, Wells then tries to claim that "The only way to see 'gill-like' structures in human embryos is to read evolution into development" and that "there is no way 'gill-slits' in human embryos can logically serve as evidence for evolution." These statements are false and misleading. As he himself has pointed out, one way to see "gill-like" structures in embryos is to see that they form a repeated pattern of lines in the neck - that is not presuming evolution, and is a legitimate source for the name. Of course, then we have to wonder why human embryos have these strange lines, and why all other vertebrates also have them...and this commonalty of structure is the evidence for evolution, not the superficial implications of the names.

All vertebrate embryos have pharyngeal arches. Because sometimes these structures are referred to by the simpler term "gill slits" in textbooks does not mean that they do not exist or that the homology disappears, although that is the game Wells would like to play.
Click to expand...

If anything you and PZ are in agreement, the problem is that you misunderstand the context, context which was given repreatedly (especially in the Raven Johnson book that you all but ignored purposefully)
 
Last edited:
So neither you, nor PZ, can provide any actual quotes from Wells where he misrepresented anything or was wrong?

Thought so.

Yet you continue to believe....
 
he virtually ignores volumes of modern embryological research that supports evolutionary
theory.
Click to expand...

Isn't that evos always say? The problem is when dig into the data, so much of it is faked, overstated and fallaciously interpreted that there are not "volumes" of evidence in any field for Darwinism.
 
randman said:
So neither you, nor PZ, can provide any actual quotes from Wells where he misrepresented anything or was wrong?

Thought so.

Yet you continue to believe....
Click to expand...

If I can find his book for free I'll try randman, got a pdf for me? Google turns up a bunch of either "Wells was wrong and here's why PDF's or "torrent this PDF" and those make me skeptical...
 
Last edited:
randman said:
Isn't that evos always say? The problem is when dig into the data, so much of it is faked, overstated and fallaciously interpreted that there are not "volumes" of evidence in any field for Darwinism.
Click to expand...

Oh you deserve a tinfoil hat smiley for this one randman... No seriously find some faked evidence for the Hox gene please. According to your theory it is all based on fake data isn't it? The Hox gene is completely fabricated because the data for it all derived from Haeckel and we're just sheep

Have you considered that maybe Wells is actually...ignoring the many many many many studies of different disciplines of evolution, genetics, development that at the most his sphincter just got so tight he had to lie?
 
Last edited:
Mr. Scott said:
Randman makes a good point that drawings should not be presented as evidence for evolution, like these two I found:

[qimg]http://nihilobstat.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/jesusridesadinosaur.png[/qimg]



[qimg]http://nplusonemag.com/images/txp/204.jpg[/qimg]
Click to expand...

The second picture makes me angry... just as soon as I saw it it elicited rage from me somehow...

And for the first one, sure dinosaurs existed but why have an imaginary character riding it?
 
Last edited:
randman said:
Folded tissue are gills now?

I thought you guys had finally backed off such nonsense.
Click to expand...

You seem to concede that there is folded tissue in the embryo that are lost "in the course of development". I take that as an admission that embryology still has something to say about evolution. Even if you are not willing to take the next step in accepting that those same folds become gills in other animals. Because, that sure doesn't help your case for specific design.
 
Lowpro said:
And for the first one, sure dinosaurs existed but why have an imaginary character riding it?
Click to expand...

Well, I know the first picture is a forgery. If dinosaurs evolved into Jesus, why are there still dinosaurs?
 
randman said:
I've read it before. Haeckel was way smarter than PZ and yet Haeckel promoted a bunch of bs as well.
Click to expand...
Assuming we accept your ad hominem, IT DOESN'T ADDRESS THE POINT! Sheesh.

That is just dishonesty.
 
hmmm, so it appears the creotards are stating that embryology doesn't compliment the claims made for it in decades old textbooks

woah be you creotard when someone points out how out of date the bible is
theres a difference though
Science learns from its mistakes, this is whats called progress
Creationism lies to cover its mistakes, thats called dishonesty, after all, doesn't the bible say that man was created in his image, so whats with the non man looking embryo ?
:D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom