eliminated from scientific literature, but it is still being presented
as a scientific reality by some evolutionist publications. The
term"recapitulation" is a condensation of the dictum"ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny," put forward by the evolutionary biologist
Ernst Haeckel at the end of the nineteenth century.
This theory of Haeckel's postulates that living embryos re-experience
the evolutionary process that their pseudo-ancestors underwent. He
theorized that during its development in its mother's womb, the human
embryo first displayed the characteristics of afish, and then those of
a reptile, and finally those of a human.
It has since been proven that this theory is completely bogus. It is
now known that the "gills" that supposedly appear in the early stages
of the human embryo are in fact the initial phases of the middle-ear
canal, parathyroid, and thymus. That part of the embryo that was
likened to the "egg yolk pouch" turns out to be a pouch that produces
blood for the infant. The part that was identified as a"tail" by
Haeckel and his followers is in fact the backbone, which resembles a
tail only because it takes shape before the legs do.
These are universally acknowledged facts in the scientific world, and
are accepted even by evolutionists themselves. Two leading
neo-Darwinists, George Gaylord Simpson and W. Beck have admitted:
Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now
firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny.1
The following was written in an article inNew Scientistdated October 16, 1999:
[Haeckel] called this thebiogenetic law,and the idea became popularly
known as recapitulation. In fact Haeckel's strict law was soon shown
to beincorrect. For instance,the early human embryo never has
functioning gills like a fish, and never passes through stages that
look like an adult reptile or monkey.2
In an article published inAmerican Scientist, we read:
Surely the biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail. It was
finallyexorcised from biology textbooks in the fifties. As a topic of
serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties…3
Another interesting aspect of"recapitulation" was Ernst Haeckel
himself, a faker who falsified his drawings in order tosupport the
theory he advanced.Haeckel's forgeries purported to show that fish and
human embryos resembled one another. When he was caught out, the only
defense he offered was that other evolutionists hadcommitted similar
offences:
After this compromising confession of 'forgery' I should be obliged to
consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation
of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner's dock hundreds of
fellow-culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and
most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in
the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in
the same degree the charge of 'forgery,' for all of them are inexact,
and are more or less doctored, schematized and constructed.4
In the September 5, 1997, edition of the well-known scientific
journalScience, an article was published revealing that Haeckel's
embryo drawings were the product of a deception.The article, called
"Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," had this to say:
The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are
exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson,an embryologist at
St. George's Hospital Medical School in London… So he and his
colleagues did their own comparative study, reexaminingand
photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those
Haeckel drew. Lo and behold,the embryos "often looked surprisingly
different," Richardson reports in the August issue ofAnatomy and
Embryology.5
Scienceexplained that, in order to be able to show the embryos as
similar, Haeckel deliberately removed some organs from his drawings or
else added imaginary ones. Later in this same article, the following
information was revealed:
Not only did Haeckel add or omitfeatures, Richardson and his
colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to exaggerate
similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences
in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the
species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an
entire group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues
note,even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a
bit in their appearance and developmental pathway."It looks like it's
[Haeckel's drawings are] turning out to beone of the most famous fakes
in biology," Richardson concludes.6
TheSciencearticle goes on to discuss how Haeckel's confessions on this
subject werecovered up from the beginning of the last century, and how
the fake drawings began to be presented in textbooks as scientific
fact:
Haeckel'sconfession got lostafter his drawings were subsequently used
in a 1901 book calledDarwin and After Darwinand reproduced widely
inEnglish language biology texts.7
In short, the fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsified had already
emerged in 1901, but thewhole world of science continued to be
deceived by them for a century.
1. G. G. Simpson, W. Beck,An Introduction to Biology, Harcourt Brace
and World, New York, 1965, p. 241.
2. Ken McNamara, "Embryos and Evolution,"New Scientist, vol. 12416, 16
October 1999. (emphasis added)
3. Keith S. Thomson, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated,"American
Scientist, vol. 76, May/June 1988, p. 273.
4. Francis Hitching,The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong,
Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1982, p. 204.
5. Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,"Science,
5 September, 1997. (emphasis added)
6. Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,"Science,
5 September, 1997. (emphasis added)
7. Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,"Science,
5 September, 1997. (emphasis added)
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