"Known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog on the Continent’ and ‘the Huxley of Germany’, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel is notorious as the scientist who perpetrated fraud upon fraud to promote the theory of evolution.
Born at Potsdam, Prussia (now Germany), on February 16, 1834, Haeckel studied medicine and science at Würtzburg and the University of Berlin, and was professor of zoology at Jena from 1865 until his retirement in 1909. The turning point in his thinking was his reading of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which had been translated into German in 1860.
In a letter to his mistress, written when he was 64 and had acquired the nickname of ‘Der Ketzer von Jena’ (the gadfly of Jena), he explained how he began as a Christian but after studying evolution became a free-thinker and pantheist.
Born at Potsdam, Prussia (now Germany), on February 16, 1834, Haeckel studied medicine and science at Würtzburg and the University of Berlin, and was professor of zoology at Jena from 1865 until his retirement in 1909. The turning point in his thinking was his reading of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which had been translated into German in 1860.
In a letter to his mistress, written when he was 64 and had acquired the nickname of ‘Der Ketzer von Jena’ (the gadfly of Jena), he explained how he began as a Christian but after studying evolution became a free-thinker and pantheist.
‘He became Darwin’s chief European apostle proclaiming the Gospel of evolution with evangelistic fervor, not only to the university intelligentsia but to the common man by popular books and to the working classes by lectures in rented halls.’
In these he used enormous backdrops showing embryos, skeletons, etc., which has led to his presentation being described as a sort of ‘Darwinian passion play’!
Haeckel’s enthusiasm for the theory of evolution led him to fraudulently manufacture ‘evidence’ to bolster his views. He was the first person to draw an evolutionary ‘family tree’ for mankind. To fill the gap in this between inorganic non-living matter and the first signs of life, he invented a series of minute protoplasmic organisms which he calledMonera (plural of Moneron). These, he said, were
‘not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simple homogeneous matter … nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combination of carbon.’
In 1868, a prestigious German scientific journal published 73 pages of his speculations, with more than 30 drawings of these imaginary Monera, as well as scientific names such as Protamoeba primitivia, and the process of fission by which they allegedly reproduced, even though his detailed descriptions and elaborate drawings were totally fictional, as these ‘life particles’ were entirely non-existent.
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s champion in England, reported finding something that fitted Haeckel’s descriptions in mud samples that had been dredged from the bottom of the north Atlantic and preserved in alcohol. Huxley named them Bathybius haeckelii.
Unfortunately for Huxley, Haeckel, the Monera, and the theory of evolution, in 1875 a chemist aboard the expeditionary ship discovered that these alleged protoplasm specimens were nothing more than amorphous gypsum, precipitated out of sea-water by alcohol! Haeckel refused to be moved by this confuting evidence, and for about 50 years the public continued to be duped by unrevised reprints of his popular The History of Creation (1876), complete with drawings of the Monera, until the final edition in 1923.
Unfortunately for Huxley, Haeckel, the Monera, and the theory of evolution, in 1875 a chemist aboard the expeditionary ship discovered that these alleged protoplasm specimens were nothing more than amorphous gypsum, precipitated out of sea-water by alcohol! Haeckel refused to be moved by this confuting evidence, and for about 50 years the public continued to be duped by unrevised reprints of his popular The History of Creation (1876), complete with drawings of the Monera, until the final edition in 1923.
Everything aboutPithecanthropus alalus, or the ‘speechless apeman’ was the product of Haeckel’s imagination.
To Haeckel, human reasoning was much more important than facts and evidence. He believed that the only major difference between man and the ape was that men could speak and apes could not. He therefore postulated a missing link which he calledPithecanthropus alalus (speechless apeman) and even had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw the imagined creature, although there was not a scrap of evidence to support a single detail in the drawings.
A contemporary of Haeckel, Professor Rudolf Virchow (famous as the founder of cellular pathology and for many years president of the Berlin Anthropological Society), was scathing in his criticism—for Haeckel to have given a zoological name to a creature that no one had proved to exist was to him a great mockery of science.
Of all Haeckel’s dubious activities, that for which he is most famous, or perhaps most infamous, is his promulgation of the totally erroneous theory that the human embryo is initially identical with that of other mammals and then goes through a series of stages where it has gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc. Sometimes called ‘the law of recapitulation’ or Haeckel’s term ‘the biogenetic law’, this idea has been summarized in the mouthful, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history.
The first thing to say about this dictum, is that ‘law’ it is not! The idea is now known to be completely false. It is therefore not surprising that Haeckel could not find sufficient anatomical evidence to make his theory convincing. Never one to let lack of evidence stand in his way, Haeckel manufactured the ‘evidence’ by fraudulently changing the drawings of embryos by two other scientists.
The furor in German scientific circles was so great that Haeckel found it impossible to persist in his policy of silence. In a letter to Münchener Allegemeine Zeitung, ‘an international weekly for Science, Art and Technology’, published on January 9, 1909, Haeckel (translated) wrote:
‘… a small portion of my embryo-pictures (possibly 6 or 8 in a hundred) are really (in Dr Brass’s [one of his critics] sense of the word) “falsified”—all those, namely, in which the disclosed material for inspection is so incomplete or insufficient that one is compelled in a restoration of a connected development series to fill up the gaps through hypotheses, and to reconstruct the missing members through comparative syntheses. What difficulties this task encounters, and how easily the draughts-man may blunder in it, the embryologist alone can judge.’
Discerning readers who compare Haeckel’s doctored dog and human embryo pictures with the originals (see photographs), will readily see that Haeckel’s ‘confession’ was itself a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts and essentially an attempt to justify and perpetuate his shameful forgeries.
Despite this totally dishonest and grievously mischievous basis for the theory of embryonic recapitulation, and the fact that it has long since been discredited scientifically, the completely false idea that human beings retrace their evolutionary past in the womb has been taught as evidence for evolution in schools and universities in the past, and it is still included in many popular science books.
Despite this totally dishonest and grievously mischievous basis for the theory of embryonic recapitulation, and the fact that it has long since been discredited scientifically, the completely false idea that human beings retrace their evolutionary past in the womb has been taught as evidence for evolution in schools and universities in the past, and it is still included in many popular science books.
Even worse, the argument that ‘the foetus is still in its fish stage so you are just cutting up a fish’ is used to this day by some abortionists to convince girls and young women that killing their offspring is OK." CreationRevolution
And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth,
neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie:
Revelation 21:27