Ernst Haeckel was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. He tried to help him find evidence for his theory of evolution, since the transitional fossils Darwin expected to be found were not found then, and haven’t been found in the 140 years since. In fact, the fossils that were then hoped to have been transitional have been ruled out, so there are even less proposed transitional fossils now than there were then.
Haeckel popularized the theory “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, that an embryo repeats the stages of evolution during the mother’s pregnancy. He did the famous drawing on the front of this tract alleging that the embryos all started alike and later diversified in their development. For instance, it was wrongly proposed that humans went through a fish stage, where they had gill slits. The supposed slits develop into the jaw and throat glands. They never were involved in breathing.
This folly was soundly refuted by Heilbronn’s 1908 pamphlet, “The Latest About Haeckelism” and the 1915 book, “Haeckel’s Frauds and Forgeries” by Assmuth and Hull. Despite this, Haeckel’s forgeries have been included in countless evolutionary sources unto the present.
The final nail came with evolutionist/embryologist Michael Richardson’s actual photographs published in 1998 in “Science” magazine and other places. Some embryos are fat, others thin, some are straight, others curled – they are clearly not alike, as Haeckel drew them. If pictures don’t lie, this one proves Haeckel did.
This can hardly be considered an honest mistake, especially coming from a man with a history of such fraudulent attempts to manufacture evidence. Compare again for yourself Haeckel’s artwork with the real photos.
In a 1997 interview in The Times of London, Dr. Richardson stated: “This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It’s shocking to find that somebody once thought to be a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. … What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t. … These are fakes.”
Today – believe it or not – Haeckel’s drawings still appear in many high school and college textbooks. Among them are “Evolutionary Biology” by Douglas J. Futuyma (Third Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1998), and also the bedrock text, “Molecular Biology of the Cell” (third edition), whose authors include biochemist Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Some texts which don’t use Haeckel’s forged drawings, still use his discredited theory. One of those is the current (1998) National Academy of Science teacher’s guide, “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science”. This guide is designed for teachers to teach evolution to their students. There is no excuse for cramming such faulty information down the throats of American children – and taking taxes from their parents to fund it! It is immoral to require parents to pay for their children to be indoctrinated with something they disapprove of.
This link provides detailed descriptions of the textbooks which include theories similar to Haeckel’s(including cnas of the pages.)
http://www.discovery.org/a/3935#text1
Here we see Haeckel apply his artistic talents again to distort Huxley’s skeletal drawings. It’s no wonder why Haeckel was rebuked by Jena University (where he taught) on charges of fraud. He confessed that some of his drawings were “falsified” in a letter to M�nchener Allegemeine Zeitung, published 1-9-09. Haeckel also lived near the archaeopteryx fossils, and it would not be unreasonable to suspect foul play involved with those as well.
The theory of evolution is rife with such deception including Piltdown man, archaeoraptor, peppered moths, and others.
Amoeba-to-man evolution is not science, it is a faith. It has never been observed, it does not appear in the fossil record, and it would violate scientific laws including conservation, entropy, and spontaneous generation.
Humans are not mutant apes that evolved from prebiotic pond scum that came from nothing exploding into everything in a big bang. You will eventually give account to God – the Creator of the universe. It will not matter what any church or other group taught, what any pastor or other person said, what established science taught, or whatyou or anyone else thought (unless it agreed with God’s word, the Bible). Ultimately, the only thing that will matter is what God said.