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What do Modern Textbooks Really Say about Haeckel's Embryos?
By: Casey Luskin
Many Darwinists are scurrying around on their blogs and at movie screenings, trying to rewrite history by claiming that Haeckel’s embryo drawings were never used in modern textbooks. In a contradictory claim, some then concede that modern textbooks have used the drawings but argue that Haeckel’s work was only cited to provide some historical context to evolutionary theory—they assert that Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings have not been used to promote evolution in modern textbooks. They are wrong on both counts.
To avoid confusion, let me point out that we are not claiming that Haeckel's embryo drawings and recapitulation theory are the bedrock of evolutionary biology in 2007. Nor are we arguing that every textbook that has used Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings (or some near-identical colorized version) therefore promoted the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” As Jonathan Wells points out in his recent article, The Cracked Haeckel Approach to Evolutionary Reasoning, “Many modern biology textbooks inform students that Haeckel’s dictum, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ has been discredited, but the same textbooks often use Haeckel’s drawings (or modern versions of them) to persuade students that human embryos provide clues to our evolutionary history and evidence for Darwin’s theory.” Therefore, what we are claiming is that various modern textbooks have used Haeckel’s embryo drawings in precisely the manner that Darwinists now deny:
(1) They show embryo drawings that are essentially recapitulations of Haeckel's fraudulent drawings — drawings that downplay and misrepresent the actual differences between early stages of vertebrate embryos;
(2) They have used these drawings as evidence for evolution — in the present day — and not simply to provide some kind of historical context for evolutionary thought;
(3) Even if the textbooks do not completely endorse Haeckel’s false “recapitulation” theory, they have used their Haeckel-based drawings to overstate the actual similarities between early embryos, which is the key misrepresentation made by Haeckel. They then cite these overstated similarities as still-valid evidence for common ancestry.
Some Darwinists continue to deny that there has been any misuse of Haeckel in recent times. If that is the case, why did Stephen Jay Gould attack how textbooks use Haeckel in 2000?
Gould wrote: “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!” (emphasis added) Similarly, in 1997, the leading embryologist Michael K. Richardson lamented in the journal Anatomy and Embyology that "Another point to emerge from this study is the considerable inaccuracy of Haeckel’s famous figures. These drawings are still widely reproduced in textbooks and review articles, and continue to exert a significant influence on the development of ideas in this field." (emphases added)
Below are listed a number of such modern textbooks which have used Haeckel's embryo drawings in the fashion stated above. The list includes an analysis of each textbook, with documenting graphics:
I. Peter H Raven & George B Johnson, Biology (5th ed, McGraw Hill, 1999)*
II. Peter H Raven & George B Johnson, Biology (6th ed, McGraw Hill, 2002)*
III. Textbook III. Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed, Sinauer, 1998)
IV. Cecie Starr and Ralph Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th ed, Wadsworth, 1998)
V. Joseph Raver, Biology: Patterns and Processes of Life (J.M.Lebel, 2004, draft version presented to the Texas State Board of Education for approval in 2003)
VI. Cecie Starr and Ralph Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (Wadsworth, 2004, draft version presented to the Texas State Board of Education in 2003)
VII. William D. Schraer and Herbert J. Stoltze, Biology: The Study of Life (7th ed, Prentice Hall, 1999)
VIII. Michael Padilla et al., Focus on Life Science: California Edition (Prentice Hall, 2001)
IX. Kenneth R Miller & Joseph Levine, Biology: The Living Science (Prentice Hall, 1998)
X. Kenneth R Miller & Joseph Levine, Biology (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998)
*Note: some paragraphs are the same because some textbooks re-use the same material in different editions.