The final famous fraud that we will look at is Ernst
Haeckel’s drawings of embryo development:
Haeckel sketched the development of several species from
embryo to adulthood. He traced the development of a salamander, fish, turtle,
rabbit, chick, hog, calf, and human. The point of the chart was clear: to prove
common ancestry by showing the similarities among each study in the embryonic
stage.
How important is this chart to evolution? Charles Darwin,
who was a close friend of Haeckel, said the chart was, “by far the strongest
single class of facts in favor of” evolution. [1]
Haeckel’s theory was that human embryos replay each stage of
the evolutionary process before becoming human. We now know that his sketches
were fake.
Even his peers accused him of fraud. Not only was he a liar,
he was wrong. His theory, which he called “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,”
has also been scientifically debunked. And yet his theory is used to justify
abortion and embryonic stem cell research.
(Part 3)
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