The facts about German biologists and fervent eugenicist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings

One acquires a feel for the size of that absolute mountain of scientific evidence they keep telling us about, when one realises that before Ernst Haeckel’s artistic embryo drawings were exposed as frauds, they constituted one of the main arguments for the theory of evolution!

Essay by: Graham Moorhouse, with aknowledgement to Ann Coulter

Even today, as they have for the past century, biology textbooks include pictures of embryos drawn by German biologists and enthusiastic eugenicist, Ernst Haeckel.  Thanks to Darwinian diviners we know that these pictures are supposed to demonstrate the amazing similarity of fish, chickens, pigs and humans in the womb.  We must be grateful to the Darwinian seers, for without them on hand to interpret the drawings, it would never have been very clear what these drawings were intended to prove. 

It appears that it was an article of Haeckel's Darwinian faith that the development of the embryo mirrored the organism’s evolutionary development as a species.  As a scientific theory it is the equivalent of making a teddy bear out of plastecine, and then claiming that you have just demonstrated how God made mammals.

I remember back in the sixties when secular liberals where campaigning for the legalisation of the murder of the most innocent and weakest members of society, unborn children, one MP argueing that this was okay because we would only be killing fish, newts, etc. - as they say, “You can’t get the staff these days.”

Haeckel's other contribution to science (which you will not find mentioned in Darwinian textbooks) was the claim that "woolly-haired Negroes" were nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) then to civilised Europeans and that therefore a totally different value should be placed on their lives.  Whether or not he also deduced this from his embryo drawing is not recorded.

If Haeckel's screwball theory was true, we could figure out what human beings looked like 500 million years ago by pointing to a fertilised human egg.  And we could show what human beings looked like say 100 million years ago, by looking at a baby in its second trimester.  This caused enormous excitement in Darwinian circles because Haeckel had just "proved" that all vertebrates had involved from a similar looking organism around 500 million years ago.  The last scientific theory to create this much buzz was probably alchemy.  Unfortunately, the theory stopped somewhat short of explaining why some of Haeckel’s embryonic wormlike lookalikes became human beings, while others never progressed beyond dung beetles.

Amazing though, according to Haeckel's drawings, the embryos of vertebrates did look very similar!  One acquires a feel for the size of that "absolute mountain of scientific evidence" supporting the theory of evolution they keep telling us about, when one realises that before these drawings were exposed as frauds, they constituted one of the main arguments for the theory.  Indeed, Charles Darwin himself stated that these "facts" of embryology were by far the strongest argument for his theory.  Indeed, if you read Wikipedia's article on Ernst Haeckel, it seems that some still believe this insanity.

Michael Richardson, a British embryologist, whilst looking at vertebrate embryos through a microscope in the 1990s noted that they looked nothing like Haeckel’s drawings.  Richardson and his team published actual photos of the embryos in the August 1997 issue of the journal Anatomy & Embryology.  It turned out that Haeckel had doctored his drawing to support his screwball theories.  The drawings were a prime example it turns out of “intelligent design”.

“It looks like,” stated Richardson, “it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology” - which in a field awash with bogus proofs was no small claim.  After Richardson published his photos, the Darwinian establishment demonstrated it fearless commitment to science by completely ignoring them.  It later transpired that some had known that Haeckel’s drawings were counterfeits for a century!  Stephen Jay Gould announced in the March 2000 edition of Natural History that he had been aware that the drawings were fakes all along!  The guardians of the secular liberal religion had been keeping tight-lipped - presumable for altruistic reasons, they didn't wish to disturb the faith of the pious.

In 2005 the New York Times lamented that biology textbooks were still hawking Haeckel’s drawings.  The Times cited the third edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, “the bedrock text of the field” as one of the evildoers.  Caught red-handed, “the bedrock text of the field” justified the use of Haeckel’s scams with the sort of arrogant crap that is the stock-in-trade of sect members: it imperiously dismissed the storm by announcing that Haeckel’s drawings were being “over interpreted.”  Scientific simpletons were left scratching their heads and pondering why, if they were fakes, they were being interpreted at all.  But to be fair, it took evolutionists fifty years to admit that the baseball cap on Piltdown man was significant, so it would hardly be fair to expect them to give up on Haeckel’s drawing this side of the twenty-second century.