Evolution: Haeckels fake news (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 26, 2019, 15:33 (1580 days ago) @ David Turell

Alteration of facts in drawings:

https://quillette.com/2019/12/21/the-many-faces-of-scientific-fraud/

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel was convinced that, according to his famous maxim, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—in other words, that over the course of its embryonic development, an animal passes through different stages comparable to those of the previous species in its evolutionary lineage. In Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (1874), Haeckel published a plate of his drawings showing the three successive stages of the embryonic development of the fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, rabbit, pig, and human being. A single glance at the drawings reveals that the embryos are very similar at an early stage in development.

As soon as the book was published, these illustrations met with serious criticism from some of Haeckel’s colleagues and rival embryologists. Yet it would take a full century and the comparison of Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of embryos of the same species for it to become clear that the former were far closer to works of art than scientific observation. Today, we know that ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, and that the highly talented artist Ernst Haeckel drew these plates of embryos to illustrate perfectly a theory to which he was deeply attached.

Comment: I am so old, I was taught in school that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Is it possible it is taught today?