Stupid Christian Article on Evolution

[A'isha]

That's even worse. How in the world could working scientists have relied on such an obvious fake. It's not like it wasn't well know already they were fake.

I told you, the obviousness of the fakery is not nearly as blatant as your argument relies on.

But what about the considerable disparity between the images in the first edition of Haeckel’s book and the photographs by Richardson and his colleagues? Even with the exculpating logical and historical considerations I have mentioned, how could a biologist of integrity represent a salamander embryo, looking like a lopsided beach ball in the photograph, as a slim, streamlined creature? It is that magnitude of difference that condemns Haeckel. But precisely here is the most dubious aspect of the case against him: several (but not all) of the photographed embryos retain the attached yolk sack and other maternal material; this exaggerates their differences from Haeckel’s images (see Fig. 1). Haeckel explicitly indicated that he pictured his specimens without yolk, allantois, and amnion (Haeckel 1874, p. 256). The bulge of the salamander is not part of the embryo; rather, it is the yolk sack, as is the case for the fish and the human embryos (though not for the chick and the rabbit, from which the yolk sacks have been removed); moreover the salamander photo is obviously not reduced to the same scale as the others (despite the assertion in the caption for the figure in Science). The chick was photographed in a highly circumflex orientation, which occurs at a somewhat later stage of development than that represented by Haeckel. Again, Haeckel expressly stated that he oriented his embryos all in the same way for ease of comparison. I have used a computer program to remove the yolks in the photographs, scale back the salamander, and straighten out the chick (Fig. 5). The result is a bit crude, but one can clearly see that the differences between photograph and illustration are not nearly as great as presented in the Science article. Shorn of yolk, the photographed embryos would not have provided the kind of graphic evidence upon which the Science article was premised.

 

[dlorde]

Modern science has not been around that long.

 

[John Jones]

It's a bit more than that. Evos still sometimes use the faked data and it was used widely until the late 90s despite creationists, IDers and some evos widely publicizing the drawings as fakes for well over 100 years.

Learn to use the quote function, or take your ball and go home.

Until you can do this, I'm not going to argue with you.

Unless it amuses me to do so.

 

[randman]

Trying to find a link to Ian Taylor's book, In the Minds of Men, from 1984 where he debunks Haeckel. The on-line version is an updated one but he wasn't the only creationist in the 80s writing about this, as they had every decade, and showing where Haeckel was used in texbooks.

Richard Leakey's Illustrated Origin of Species, published in 1979, contains Haeckel's nineteenth century diagram (Leakey 1971, 213), which, as we shall see, was shown to be fraudulent more than a century earlier. Interestingly, the diagram has been altered by a modern hand, while Leakey's text with the picture makes no reference to this but advances as truth what is acknowledged by science to be a discredited theory.

http://www.creationism.org/books/TaylorInMindsMen/TaylorIMMj10.htm
http://www.creationism.org/books/TaylorInMindsMen/TaylorIMMj10.htm

 

[randman]

“Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny”

On page 277 of my book, In The Minds of Men, the illustration shows exactly how Ernst Haeckel cheated in 1868 to make the facts fit his theory. This was exposed as fraudulent in 1874 by Wilhelm His, and the theory should have died then and there, not in 1925. For those critics who would side-track the issue by pointing out that textbooks have replaced the old nineteenth century engravings of the embryos with modern drawings, this is of no consequence whatsoever. The textbook The Way Life Works by Hoagland & Dodson, 1995 published by Ebury Press, London, still used Haeckel’s drawings but took the trouble to colour them! Most readers will recall the famous row of embryos shown in the school textbooks. The usual argument for their retention is because although it is admitted that the stages of development (the vertical sequence) do not appear as Haeckel showed them, the horizontal likenesses of the early stages of the fish, the salamander, the turtle, the chicken the rabbit and the human are all virtually the same and illustrate embryonic homology. Michael Richardson, a lecturer and embryologist at St. George’s Hospital Medical School, London has recently exposed the so-called “embryonic homology” as another fraud. In his paper published in Anatomy and Embryology 1997, Vol.196 (2), p.91-106 he shows that the early embryonic stages of 39 different creatures including the fish, the turtle etc., are nothing like the same. Haeckel had simply repeated a series of look alike drawings for his 1874 Anthropogenie and, until Richardson reported the facts in 1997, no one had taken the trouble to actually check on Haeckel’s work! May I suggest that this was because Haeckel’s theory seemed such good evidence for evolution?

http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_it_02.asp

His book was first published in 1984, long before Richardson's study.

 

[randman]

Modern evolution theory (origin of species by natural selection) is not beholden to Haekel's "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" hypothesis.

Scientific theories adapt to conform to empirical evidence. This is the self-correcting nature of the discipline of science.

I know it doesn't. I am using the saga as an example on how evos approach data.

 

[A'isha]

Randman, I told you that this is a complete irrelevancy. Even if anyone ever relied on Haeckel's drawings in phylogenetics, they never relied solely on those drawings. And they certainly don't rely on them in any way, shape, or form any more (other than perhaps students of very basic biology, and even then they're only used in an extremely simple way). And for precisely the reason you deny exists in evolutionary theory: bad data gets discarded, good data stays.

Now address the 2007 paper I linked you to about genomic evidence for phenotypic stages. Or tells us why you can't.

 

[randman]

I told you, the obviousness of the fakery is not nearly as blatant as your argument relies on.

Yes it is and it was pointed out by Ian Taylor and others in the 80s, internet articles in the 90s, and similarly all along.

A botany professor at NC State was going around in presentations on college campuses pointing our Haeckel had been called on it already; that he admitted they were faked, and I asked him if he and others were telling evos about it, and he said, yes they tell and show them these things.

They either knew and didn't listen or just didn't listen but it wasn't some secret that no one knew about until Richardson. Evos want to say that but it was all over the internet, campuses, creationist literature, etc,....and had been for decades though not the internet.

 

[John Jones]

I know it doesn't. I am using the saga as an example on how evos approach data.

It's not working.

Try another tack. Here's an idea: Argue a point of modern evolution theory.

How does that work for you?

Finding surprises or discrepancies doesn't instantly overturn scientific theories.

I referred you to Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn above. I'm going to do this about as often as I notice your arguments against modern evolution theory.

No promises, though.

 

[John Jones]

I know it doesn't. I am using the saga as an example on how evos approach data.

Stop lying. You're using your saga anecdote like a pit bull uses a bone.

Why not turn your thoughts to something closer to what you seem to consider truth?

Lysenkoism?
La Markism?

 

[dasmiller]

If I may give my perspective on the Haeckel/textbook thing,

There's a "standard" explanation for how a wing generates lift. It usually involves some discussion about how the air has to travel farther over the top of the wing than the bottom, so it has to travel faster over the top. Bernoulli's Principle tells us that as air moves faster, its pressure drops, so there's less pressure on the top of the wing and, voila! lift. It's easy to understand, makes for simple diagrams, and it's been printed in countless textbooks, encylcopedias, and science fair projects.

Of course, it's wrong. And not just a little wrong; it's stupid-wrong. Not only does it not make sense, it doesn't even fit with everyday observations. And aerodynamicists have known it was wrong since the days of the Wright Brothers (and probably longer. I suspect that Bernoulli himself would have laughed at the usual diagram).

But it kept getting put into textbooks.

Now, one possibility is that aerodynamicists are putting it into textbooks because they're trying to cover up some dark secret about lift. Or maybe they simply don't care that they're providing false information to generations of students as long as the story makes aerodynamicists look smark.

But there's another possibility:

Aerodynamicists don't write a lot of textbooks. Often, they don't even get consulted.

Aerodynamicists have had an ongoing battle against the <expletive deleted> "air has to travel farther over the top" explanation, but for most of the last century, it had been a pretty futile fight. On the rare occasions that you could get a high school science teacher to think about it, they were likely to conclude that "we really just don't understand lift like we thought we did." (yeah, I've actually had that conversation)

For what it's worth, we finally seem to be making some progress in the last decade. The internet has been a great boon; it's much easier to get someone to change a web page than to change a page in a hardcopy encyclopedia.

But if we're to conclude that "evos" are underhanded or sloppy because of some sketches in texbooks written for high school (or younger!) students . . . must we conclude the same about aerodynamicsts?

 

[UnrepentantSinner]

Now address the 2007 paper I linked you to about genomic evidence for phenotypic stages. Or tells us why you can't.

I'm going to bet that this paper on embryological comparisons and vertebrate jaw morphology will be ignored too.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571356/

Why bother addressing current, working science when one can flog a 130 year old dead horse?

 

[A'isha]

I'm going to bet that this paper on embryological comparisons and vertebrate jaw morphology will be ignored too.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571356/

Why bother addressing current, working science when one can flog a 130 year old dead horse?

Man, my grammar and spelling really suck when I'm drunk. Sorry!

Not that it really matters, since even though I can give more evidence while drunk for evolution than randman can give while sober against it, I doubt it will make even a dent in his worldview.

Oh, well.

EDIT: And look! Also no Haeckel in this paper! Why is that, randman?

 

[randman]

ANTpo, Haeckel is completely relevant to what I am talking of. Real science, at least teaching it, should be about encouraging rigorous examination of data, not some kind of brainwashing trick where you line up a bunch of fake photos to try to get people to believe that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" or that the "biogenetic law" or "recapitulation" is true. All of those are terms by Haeckel and all still used today, and perhaps even using the same dubious technique of faked data at times.

Thought I think philosophically darwinism has been bad for the world, it doesn't generally matter so much whether people believe it or most scientific theories or not. What matters in science is not the conclusion but the approach. That's my biggest beef with evos, the use of illogic, overstatement, fraud or faked data, propaganda techniques, etc, etc,....

I don't care what you believe about evolution. I care about the fact and you and nearly every evo I have talked with justifies these blatant unscientific practices, even defending the use of faked data to perpetuate the myth of the Biogenetic Law, which in some ways is as bad as the Piltdown man fiasco. At least, evos don't generally defend that and come up with a Piltdown 2.0 version they continue to maintain in their textbooks.

 

[randman]

EDIT: And look! Also no Haeckel in this paper! Why is that, randman?

Because it's not the scope of the paper.

So what?

 

[randman]

Charles Darwin's comments on Haeckel in the introduction of "The Descent of Man".

‘The conclusion that man is the co- descendant with other species ... is not in any degree new ... maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers ... especially by Häckel ... besides his great work “Generelle Morphologie” (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edition in 1870) published his “Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte”, in which
he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.’

Later editions of The Origin of the Species (chapter XIV) stated that:

‘Professor Häckel ... brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters.’6

http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_102-110.pdf
Gould comments:

The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) estimated that Haeckel’s books
‘... surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin and Huxley (by Huxley’s own frank admission), in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution.’15
Haeckel’s recapitulation concept impacted ‘hard’ disciplines like palaeontology, and ‘soft’ ones such as criminal anthropology and psychoanalysis.

To pretend Haeckel's influence was minimum is totally absurd and not in line with the facts, and yea, I am going to keep hammering away at this topic until there is some admission of the truth here.

The paper is worth reading to see some of Haeckel's illustrations and understand just how influential he was, particularly appealing to racist aspects of evo theory and seeing man as just an animal and so forth. He also coined a lot of terms still in use today.



Haeckel was good at getting people to believe in evolution, which is why he is still used for that purpose today.

 

[randman]

Here's a 2002 textbook that uses Haeckel's faked drawings to convince students that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (contrary to ANTpo's claims evos quit doing this after 1997. The textbook did though color in the drawings.

"Embryonic development of vertebrates. Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether these characteristics are retained in the adult." (pg. 1228-1229) The text states: "The patterns of development in the vertebrate groups that evolved most recently reflect in many ways the simpler patterns occurring among earlier forms. Thus, mammalian development and bird development are elaborations of reptile development, which is an elaboration of amphibian development, and so forth (figure 58.16)." (pg. 1228-1229)

The text not only discusses "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" but also affirms it, albeit in a slightly different form. This entire discussion comes from a subsection entitled "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny," in which the authors repudiate Haeckel's claim but then defend a reformulated version of it: "The developmental instructions for each new form seem to have been layered on top of the previous instructions, contributing additional steps in the developmental journey. This hypothesis, promoted in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel, is referred to as the 'biogenetic law.' It is usually stated as an aphorism: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; that is, embryological development (ontogeny) involves the same progression of changes that have occurred during evolution (phylogeny). However, the biogenetic law is not literally true when stated in this way because embryonic stages are not reflections of adult ancestors. Instead, the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors." (pg. 1228-1229, emphases in original) Earlier the text stated: "In many cases, the evolutionary history of an organism can be seen to unfold during its development, with the embryo exhibiting characteristics of the embryos of its ancestors." (pg. 450) The basis for the text's claims that the law holds is the fraudulent Haeckel-derived drawings, which obscure the differences between the embryos.

There is no indication whatsoever that Haeckel's drawings are used to merely give some kind of "historical context." Rather, the drawings are used to represent facts about development in the present day, based upon the fraudulent obfuscation of differences between early embryo stages.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/05/the_textbooks_dont_lie_haeckel_1003664.html

 

[randman]

Gould comments in 2000

We should... not be surprised that Haeckel's drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks! [Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),” Natural History, March, 2000. Emphasis added]

Haeckel's drawings were used in the following texbooks, for example. You can click on the link and see the drawings as they appeared in the following textbooks.

Haeckel’s embryo drawings in Douglas Futuyma’s widely-used college textbook, Evolutionary Biology [1998), pg. 653.

National Academy of Sciences President Bruce Alberts and his co-authors included Haeckel’s drawings in the 1994 edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell (pg. 33).

Embryo drawings adapted from Haeckel’s diagrams, found in Cecie Starr and Ralph Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (1998), pg. 317. As can be seen, the drawings blatantly re-use Haeckel’s fudged diagrams and thus minimize actual differences between vertebrate embryos.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1220

 

[randman]

Here's another ANTPogo:

According to B. I. Balinsky's classic textbook, Introduction to Embryology (1975), the Biogenetic Law states that "features of ancient origin develop early in ontogeny; features of newer origin develop late. Hence, the ontogenetic development presents the various features of the animal's organization in the same sequence as they evolved during the phylogenetic development. Ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny." [4]

http://www2.exploreevolution.com/ex...bate/2009/02/haeckel_darwin_and_textbooks.php

Note: you not being familiar with this debate quoted some NSCE claims that are demonstrably false.

The NCSE critique's claim that recent biology textbooks do not include Haeckel's misrepresentation of vertebrate embryos is false.

....
In response to Gould's essay (and to Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution, published the same year), some textbook-writers began removing the embryo drawings from new editions of their books. For example, Haeckel's drawings had appeared in the third edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell (1994), but lead author Bruce Alberts told The New York Times in 2001 that they would be removed from the fourth edition. [13]

Yet fully half of the 36 textbooks cited by the NCSE Critique were published after 2000--the year the drawings finally began to disappear. And the list omits the following textbooks published between 1998 and 2004 that do include Haeckel's drawings or a re-drawn version of them:

• Biggs, Kapicka & Lundgren, Biology: The Dynamics of Life (Glencoe, 1998)
• Johnson, Biology: Visualizing Life (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1998)
• Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (Sinauer, 1998)
• Miller & Levine, Biology, 4th Edition (Prentice Hall, 1998)
• Miller & Levine, Biology: The Living Science (Prentice Hall, 1998)
• Raven & Johnson, Biology, 5th Edition (McGraw-Hill, 1999)
• Schraer & Stoltze, Biology: The Study of Life, 7th Edition (1999)
• Miller & Levine, Biology, 5th Edition (Prentice Hall, 2000)
• Padilla, Focus on Life Science, California Edition (Prentice Hall, 2001)
• Raven & Johnson, Biology, 6th Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2002)
• Donald & Judith Voet, Biochemistry, 3rd Edition (Wiley, 2004)

Not only does the NCSE's list selectively omit many textbooks, but it also misrepresents the textbooks it includes. For example, the list cites the following textbooks and claims that they do not contain Haeckel's drawings; yet all three contain either Haeckel's drawings or a redrawn version of them:

• Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts & Watson, Molecular Biology of the Cell (Garland, 1994)
• Starr & Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, 8th Edition (Wadsworth, 1998)
• Guttman, Biology (McGraw-Hill, 1999)

The NCSE's false claims about the contents of recent biology textbooks are similar to those made by Darwinist Randy Olson in his 2006 film Flock of Dodos. [14] Like Olson, the NCSE is clearly more committed to protecting Darwinism from critical challenges than to acknowledging the truth.

You probably read TalkOrigins rehashing their false claim, right? That only 8 of 36 or whatever it is contained Haeckel's drawings. The excluded examples if Haeckel's drawings were drawn in, and they picked over half, it appears, from books published after 2000 and Well's famous book "Icons of Evolution" and Gould's comments condemning the practice. So the textbooks were not from the 80s.

It's worth noting, however, that some textbooks tried to keep or put Haeckel back even during the last decade.

Are you going to finally admit that Haeckel's drawings were widely used until the late 90s and perhaps later in textbooks for decades, including the 70s and 80s, or do I have to keep providing more examples?

Moreover, you went to school. Surely you recall these depictions in your textbook.

 

[Halfcentaur]

Not that this makes any difference, but I went to elementary school in the 1980s and high school in the 1990s. Haeckel's drawings were never included in my text books, and for that matter evolutionary theory was barely alluded to. Everything was spoken of as adaptation, and for the most part the finer points were vague. Perhaps this is because I went to school in Oklahoma.

I learned about the finer mechanics of evolution to the point of realizing it's a fact by looking at all the evidence and it's correlations in my own time later in life, and by realizing too many things that work would not work without the basic concept of common descent being a fact. I was not indoctrinated.

This is nothing but a glorified strawman you're obsessed with, epic in it's breadth and scope.