Wholly Natrualistic Alternative To Neo-Darwinism?

Problem is everyone should have known Haeckel was a fraud. Creationists and others had widely publicized the fraud for over 130 years. It was a staple criticism of evolutionists and many prominent evos themselves decried the use of Haeckel's ideas and drawings.

So why did they keep using the faked drawings?

How can you say it was mere ignorance as if no one was showing them to be a fraud. In every decade, the fraud was included in books, papers, articles by critics of mainstream evo theory. In the 1800s, it was exposed as a fraud. In 1910, it was exposed as a fraud in a book and looking into this in the past, every decade had people widely bashing it as a fraud. In the early 70s, one of the creationist journals exposed the same things Richardson did in 1997. In the 80s as a student, I heard or read several creationist publications and literature showing it to be a fraud, including a slide show by a botany professor at NC State where he not only talked about it being a fraud but had comments from evolutionist scientists where he or others brought it up to them directly, asking why they kept teaching it.

When the internet came out, articles derided Haeckel as a fraud, and I had folks like you guys here insist it wasn't. Evos stonewalled and insisted there was no fraud until 1997 and as you can see on this thread, evos are still stonewalling and smearing their critics falsely and trying to downplay the fraud both in FAKED DATA AND IDEAS.

It's taken evos 130 years just to budge a little from the use of this faked data and ideas, and as you can see here on this thread, some are still trying to perpetuate the same fraud in a watered down fashion.

Why is that?

It doesn't even matter as far definitive evidence for evolution in the first place. So it's clearly something else going on, suggesting a disturbing mentality of myth-making in the evo community that has embedded itself so deeply into it's proponents that even something so clearly a fake remains.

Some evolutionists have made the same observation in respect to being like some sort of "ghost" (artistitic) license haunting the field, but they don't take it as far as I do in suggesting that the approach of evos to rely on indoctrination has clouded their ability to reason and assess facts.
 
Krikkiter,

Thanks for those links, esp. the middle one.

This entire discussion reminds me of "Piltdown Man", and as such is a simple non sequitur and a rusty and time worn diversionary tactic.

The basic form of the "argument" is, "scientist x committed fraud, therefore..." or "scientist y was ultimately proven wrong, therefore...".

The only valid conclusions from the above are that scientists sometimes commit fraud, or that scientists are sometimes proven wrong.

Can we just stipulate to those two conclusions and move on?
 
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Fast Eddie B said:
Krikkiter,

Thanks for those links, esp. the middle one.

This entire discussion reminds me of "Piltdown Man", and as such is a simple non sequitur and a rusty and time worn diversionary tactic.

The basic form of the "argument" is, "scientist x committed fraud, therefore..." or "scientist y was ultimately proven wrong, therefore...".

The only valid conclusions from the above are that scientists sometimes commit fraud, or that scientists are sometimes proven wrong.

Can we just stipulate to those two conclusions and move on?
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Plus the fact that in the vast majority of cases, it is other scientists that find the flaws and frauds.

Considering that creationists criticise everything about evolutionary theory and even evolution itself, it is surprising they find so few of them.

Of course it is not so surprising that after having found so few aspects incorrect, and having their own lunatic theory blown apart so many times, they don't reach the conclusion that they are wrong. After all, having a few stories told by itinerant bronze age goat herders which are probably wrongly translated anyway, is far more important to them.
 
Krikkiter said:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html#haeckel-embryo

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/haeckel.html

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7814128#post7814128

ETA: I was going to post something about randman being the most banal typical creationist I've ever come across but I don't think it's worth the time.
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Quite right. Much better to spend the same ampount of time watching this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Clm6nlWxzc

and its follow-up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9P09Sj4-Xs&feature=relmfu

Kotatsu, a lovely post.
A pity it was replied to by randman with
"Problem is everyone should have known Haeckel was a fraud. ... "

Still.
 
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Fast Eddie B said:
Krikkiter,

Thanks for those links, esp. the middle one.

This entire discussion reminds me of "Piltdown Man", and as such is a simple non sequitur and a rusty and time worn diversionary tactic.

The basic form of the "argument" is, "scientist x committed fraud, therefore..." or "scientist y was ultimately proven wrong, therefore...".

The only valid conclusions from the above are that scientists sometimes commit fraud, or that scientists are sometimes proven wrong.

Can we just stipulate to those two conclusions and move on?
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Except here the fraud was being continually exposed by creationists but also others and yet evos still kept using Haeckel and relying on his claims.

Big difference.
 
randman said:
Except here the fraud was being continually exposed by creationists but also others and yet evos still kept using Haeckel and relying on his claims.

Big difference.
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Funny how you don't defend and support your assertions about how natural selection decreases diversity and variability and then go back to the old standby of Haekel, no discussion of how you can't support and defend frontloading. Then you just resort to rhetoric.

The main problem with your basic premise is that genetic variability is not as important as genetic expression in the development of life, if you actually read evolutionary theory you would know that the constraints on the genetic diversity are part of the branching structure.

Different organisms do not rely upon variation in the actual genome, but variation in the expression of the way proteins are structured, so you miss the boat and the lake. The vast majority of the genome is not as essential as the parts that tell the structure how to develop.

So your argument fails because it doesn't understand that biology does not depend upon the whole genome, but the expression of the genes that are active or possibly active. So you focus on the body of the car and ignore the engine.
 
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randman said:
Except here the fraud was being continually exposed by creationists but also others and yet evos still kept using Haeckel and relying on his claims.

Big difference.
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Except that that is a lie. A lie you repeat frequently but, however, still a lie.

Fast Eddie B said:
Gut response?

"Is that all you've got?"
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Pretty much. A few quote mined excerpts from Grasse, the Huckel lies not much else to his IDiocy.
Fast Eddie B said:
BTW, I'm still not sure what an evo is. Is it like a germo, a gravityo, a quantumo or an atomico?
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The weren't bad PCs.
 
catsmate, exactly where have I lied? The fraud was continually exposed for over 130 years, first in the 1800s from numerous scientists including the staunch opponent to Darwin and Haeckel, Louis Agassiz. This was put into a prominent book in 1910 published by Assimuth. It was a staple of creationist criticism ever since, the 20s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc,....

I am not the one lying here.

Why won't you acknowledge the truth?
 
randman said:
catsmate, exactly where have I lied? The fraud was continually exposed for over 130 years, first in the 1800s from numerous scientists including the staunch opponent to Darwin and Haeckel, Louis Agassiz. This was put into a prominent book in 1910 published by Assimuth. It was a staple of creationist criticism ever since, the 20s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc,....

I am not the one lying here.

Why won't you acknowledge the truth?
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Because we already know the truth. We've been through it in multiple threads, most of all Antpogo's thread which included the purchase of biology textbooks showing that your claim is utterly false.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=203961

You are lying.
 
In his book Natürliche Schöpfungs-geschichte (The Natural History of Creation), published in German in 1868 (and in English in 1876 with the title The History of Creation), Haeckel used the drawing of a 25-day-old dog embryo which had been published by T.L.W. Bischoff in 1845, and that of a 4-week-old human embryo published by A. Ecker in 1851–59.14 Wilhelm His, Sr (1831–1904), a famous comparative embryologist of the day and professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, uncovered the fraud.

Prof. His showed in 1874 that Haeckel had added 3.5 mm to the head of Bischoff’s dog embryo, taken 2 mm off the head of Ecker’s human embryo, doubled the length of the human posterior, and substantially altered the details of the human eye. He sarcastically pointed out that Haeckel taught in Jena, home of the then finest optical equipment available, and so had no excuse for inaccuracy. He concluded that anyone who engaged in such blatant fraud had forfeited all respect and that Haeckel had eliminated himself from the ranks of scientific research workers of any stature.15,16 [See also Encyclopedic ‘truth’ … or wordly wisdom?]

Haeckel’s Confession of Fraud
The furor in German scientific circles was so great that Haeckel found it impossible to persist in his policy of silence. In a letter to Münchener Allegemeine Zeitung, ‘an international weekly for Science, Art and Technology’, published on January 9, 1909, Haeckel (translated) wrote:

‘… a small portion of my embryo-pictures (possibly 6 or 8 in a hundred) are really (in Dr Brass’s [one of his critics] sense of the word) “falsified”—all those, namely, in which the disclosed material for inspection is so incomplete or insufficient that one is compelled in a restoration of a connected development series to fill up the gaps through hypotheses, and to reconstruct the missing members through comparative syntheses. What difficulties this task encounters, and how easily the draughts-man may blunder in it, the embryologist alone can judge.’17
Discerning readers who compare Haeckel’s doctored dog and human embryo pictures with the originals (see photographs), will readily see that Haeckel’s ‘confession’ was itself a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts and essentially an attempt to justify and perpetuate his shameful forgeries.

Despite this totally dishonest and grievously mischievous basis for the theory of embryonic recapitulation, and the fact that it has long since been discredited scientifically, the completely false idea that human beings retrace their evolutionary past in the womb has been taught as evidence for evolution in schools and universities until very recently, and it is still included in many popular science books.18,19
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http://creation.com/ernst-haeckel-evangelist-for-evolution-and-apostle-of-deceit

So right away scientists were pointing out evolutionist fraud. Note the dates 1874 and 1909. Pofessor His was not alone, btw, in this criticism. This article was published in 1996 but note the reference to the creationist book in 1984. The book which made the rounds in the 80s is cited here just to reference Haeckel's popularity but it also exposed this particular fraud among others.


Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing, Toronto, 1984, p. 184, who cites Peter Klemm, Der Ketzer von Jena, Urania Press, Leipzig, 1968. Return to Text.
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This was a standard creationist criticism for decades from the very start of evos promoting Haeckel's forgeries to this very day.

Here is a portion of the abstract from 1969 paper by the Creationist Research Society exposing

The history of the so-called Law of Recapitulation is briefly examined from its inception down to Ernst Haeckel who finalized it as the "Biogenetic Law." ....

Original criticisms of the honesty of Haeckel's arguments and illustrations are presented here, based on translated excerpts from the original German reviews by L. Rutimeyer, professor of science at the University of Basel, and early critic of Haeckel. These original sources indicate that Haeckel's woodcut series illustrating the ova and embryo were fraudulent.
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http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/sum6_1.html

So how is Miller and Levine state that they were unaware the depictions were faked? And that they found their way into nearly every texbook, including their's?

Think about it.
 
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ehcks said:
Because we already know the truth. We've been through it in multiple threads, most of all Antpogo's thread which included the purchase of biology textbooks showing that your claim is utterly false.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=203961

You are lying.
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Where am I lying? Name one instance of a lie.

That the fraud was exposed in the 1800s? That in 1909 Haeckel was forced to try to offer an explanation? That the fraud was publicized in a popular book published in 1910? That the 1969 article I show above from a creationist organization likewise exposed it? That a book in 1984 did as well? That articles in the 90s exposed it?

I have found creationist blasting this as a fraud in every single decade for the past 130 years.

So who is lying here?
 
ehcks said:
Because we already know the truth. We've been through it in multiple threads, most of all Antpogo's thread which included the purchase of biology textbooks showing that your claim is utterly false.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=203961

You are lying.
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So are the evolutionists here lying when they admit the following as I linked to a page or so back?

This idea has been pushed back into the news recently by the news that Haeckel's drawings of embryonic similarities were not correct. British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleages published an important paper in the August 1997 issue of Anatomy & Embryology showing that Haeckel had fudged his drawings to make the early stages of embryos appear more alike than they actually are! As it turns out, Haeckel's contemporaries had spotted the fraud during his lifetime, and got him to admit it. However, his drawings nonetheless became the source material for diagrams of comparative embryology in nearly every biology textbook, including ours!
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So who is lying? ANTpogo or these authors and Brown professor of biology? Btw, antpogo may not be lying as she seems to believe it, but how can you call me a liar for just telling you what experts in the field have admitted; that Haeckel was used "in nearly every biology textbook"?
 
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Well, it would be more interesting if evos didn't nearly ALWAYS resort to calling people liars whenever they bring out true information they are uncomfortable with.

It's undeniable what I am saying is true on Haeckel. Yes, it's boring in the sense that embryology does not need to be evidence for evolution in the first place. Evos should just admit that and move on, but they don't want to give it up and admit the evo community perpetuated a fraud for 130 years.
 
DD, your comments above are misplaced because you guys brought up haeckel here and accused me falsely of lying. Then, when I defend myself against spurious and libelous public smears, you pretend I was the one trying to change the subject.
 
Here is a publication from 1988 which mentions Haeckel being a debating point on college campuses where creationists frequently stated the drawings were a fraud and still being used. Anyone that was in college at that time and familiar with this debate should have known the drawings were faked. Yet according to textbook authors, Levine and Miller, one of which is or was a biology professor at Brown, they were unaware that the drawings were faked?

Note the reference to an encyclopedia below:

It is significant that the Encyclopedia Britannica in its extensive discussion of embryological development, under the section on zoology, contains only two sentences about Haeckel and his biogenetic law. In its biographical sketch of him it states, "Haeckel was the originator of the dictum that, 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,' since proved to be false."18 Strangely, it did not mention the well-known fact that Haeckel forged some of his drawings of embryos to make them appear in accord with his theory, and used the same sketches to represent several different animals. He was even accused of altering drawings of embryos made by others. For his forgery, he was convicted by a German court. His forgeries were brought to the attention of the public in 1911 in a book called Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries.19In view of the fact that the problems were well known from the very beginning, it is inexplicable that this theory of recapitulation ever gained such widespread acceptance before being debunked in the 1900s. Professor Kerkut of the University of Southampton quotes Radl as saying, "Everything that has ever been cited against the theory was known when the theory was put forward; nevertheless it was widely accepted. Today some still accept it, others do not."20
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http://www.creationism.org/books/sunderland/DarwinsEnigma/DarwinsEnigma_05MoreProblems.htm

I am not lying when I say creationists and some evolutionists pointed out the fraud for 130 years.
 
No dude, you're lying when you say that Haeckel's drawings and theories are an attempt to indoctrinate using fraud. That's just a flagrantly BS statement and a romantic delusion of which you stroke yourself furiously to.
 
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Lowpro said:
NO you twit you're lying when you say that Haeckel's drawings and theories are an attempt to indoctrinate using fraud. That's just a flagrantly BS statement and a romantic delusion of which you stroke yourself furiously to.
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So why were they used then? Moreover, why did even a Brown biology professor continue to use them in his textbooks when there was widespread criticism and evidence the drawings were fakes for over 130 years?

Let's say it's an "honest" mistake. Ok, but what does that say when evolutionists are so apparently either ill-informed of the facts or close minded that you can have sustained and pointed criticism and evidence of a fraud, and yet they continue to use it? Maybe they just don't listen to any criticism? They block it out mentally? Is it unconscious delusion or what?

ETA: Also, what I said is more subtle than your simplistic straw man. Yes, Haeckel deliberately faked the data and so sought to use faked data to popularize evo theory and succeeded. So there was an attempt and it worked. The degree which evos after him participated knowingly or should have known or were duped, that's a question per each individual.

However, evo theory in general, imo, is taught essentially via indoctrination in a manner to silence and discredit critics, even suggest they are not legit scientists, and so discourage critical thinking.

In the process of pursuing this approach which is bad science, imo, this astonishing story of how such a widely criticized fraud could be continually exposed and yet continually used suggests that in some sense evos have fooled themselves. Grasse suggests an unconscious delusion but also suggests that some must surely be conscious of the deception.

It's hard to say, but either way this should be treated much more seriously by the evolutionist community. If it takes 130 years just to get them to listen and admit some data they are using is faked, what does that say about the field in general?
 
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