Questioning science, i.e. evolution as fact, and its right to rule our lives …

… and a look at education in Texas on the fundamental level.

“Evolution is a proven fact. There are mounds of scientific evidence supporting it. Just ask anyone who is an educated intellectual.” This is my paraphrase of the multitudes of articles and comments I’ve read in the past discussing the clash between Evolution and Creationism and whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. To lend credibility to the predictability of secular beliefs on this matter, I’m going to go find any recent article posted on the topic and look through it. I’ll be right back . . .

. . .Ok, I’m back. I searched Google News for “Intelligent Design in schools” and clicked on this article from the University of Houston’s college newspaper, The Daily Cougar. The title reads Intelligent design has no place in Texas classrooms^[1]. 

Here are some of the article's points taken verbatim:

• The scientific community is overwhelmingly supportive of the theory of evolution. The handful of objecting scientists are clearly of the mad variety.
• Evolution is observable in traits over generations and in alleles. There are no gaps in this so-called theory. Evolution is a fact.
• There is overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution, and no scientific evidence at all to support divine intervention.
• There are many religious theories about the origins of our planet and the human species. None are backed by scientific evidence. Faith is a deeply personal matter.
• If one wishes to teach their child Judeo-Christian creationism, intelligent design, or that we all live on the back of a giant turtle, they are welcome to do so in their home. One does not, however, have the right to demand that their neighbor’s child be taught the same.
• To insist that one’s own unverified beliefs are right for everyone is, by definition, bigoted. To maintain that evolution is unproven is willful ignorance in the face of fact.

The most unsettling thing to me is that these views are held by the overwhelming majority of my generation at large and anyone who has graduated from a secular university in the past two decades. Secularism’s darling Theory of Evolution has taken root so deep in our society that it has effectively replaced any other roots. I’m reminded of a children’s book series written by John Christopher where invading alien tripods force all humans on the earth to wear metal, mesh caps deeply planted on their skulls. By these caps they are able to brainwash and control the behavior of society. Darwinism has done just that to our society and is continuing to do so to today’s children, all while claiming to be protecting our children from Christianity doing the same. What a paralyzing, horrible paradox!

I could go into detail making a defense for teaching Intelligent Design in schools, but that is not my purpose here. And it has already been done far more academically by thinkers such as Phillip Johnson and Nancy Pearcey. Instead, I just want to encourage people to question how much of their beliefs are dictated by “science”, to look carefully and see the cracks and flaws of Evolution that are overlooked and kept hidden from the general public and mainstream media.

Not wishing to oversimplify the myriad weaknesses of the Theory of Evolution but yet hoping to showcase its deceptiveness, I'd like to discuss an incident of this fraud in the history of the scientific community. This may not be new knowledge to many conservative thinkers, but yet perhaps it will be to some. Even though I was raised in a conservative, evangelical household, it was not until I read Nancy Pearcey’s book Total Truth^[2] in 2009 that I was made aware of the fact. The fraud is as follows.

In 1874, German scientist Ernst Haekel published an embryonic drawing of various species of animals and a human in his paper Anthropogenie in support of the theory of recapitulation. This theory claimed that as human beings and other more “advanced species” developed, they would pass through stages that are represented by the adult organisms of more “primitive species”.^[3] Haekel and other scientists alike used these drawings as proof that all living creatures are decedents of a single, prototype organism - the main tenet of Darwinism. The figure below is an exact representation of the drawing published in 1874.

 

From the Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago, I purchased on a whim an old college textbook entitled Personal and Community Hygiene at an antique store. Published in 1948, I was initially attracted to it by my love of history and the antiquated. It is fascinating to me to see where we have been as a society and to where we can trace our current roots. While pouring through it I was brought to rigid attention when the pages fell open to the same diagram as seen above. Here is a scan from the book:

          

From Personal and Community Hygiene

Underneath the caption reads “This figure represents the more or less complete agreement, as regards the most important relations of form, between the embryo of man and that of other vertebrates in early stages of individual development”. Drawing on the diagram as evidence, the text claims in the accompanying chapter on heredity that a fertilized human egg passes through “a stage predominently fish-like, with gills and a tail, another stage in which the appearance is extremely similar to that of some of the mammals, and finally a stage, perhaps at the foetal[sic] age of three months, when human characteristics become undeniably evident.” It is clear that Haekel’s ideas of evolution were the prevailing norm in academia, even long after the 1874 publication of his Anthropogenie.

And yet Haekel has faced opposition and claims of fraud over his embryo drawings from as early as 1868 by researcher Ludwig Rutimeyer and more recently by contemporary critiques Michael Richardson and Stephen Jay Gould. Today it is widely known that Haekel faked his drawings, grossly exaggerating similarities between embryos of different species. In reality, true representations of the embryonic development of the organisms in Haekel’s drawing look quite different. The following drawing by Jody Sjogren is based on Michael Richardson’s photographs of actual embryos and shows that difference in stark relief.

Copyright Jody Sjogren 2000

Even with all the evidence to the contrary and the rejection of his theory by modern biology, Haekel’s drawing or a variation of it has been widely published in all sorts of biology textbooks and scholarly articles not only throughout history but into our current age. It doesn’t surprise me too much that it was still being published in 1948. But twenty years later it was declared as fact in the 1968 Reader’s Digest Book of Facts. Yet it continued to be reproduced in biology textbooks used in public schools and is still being printed today! On June 17, 2011, Evolution News and Views published an article which revealed highly disturbing recent developments. In 2003, Haekel’s drawings were finally removed from textbooks in Texas after Jonathan Wells published his book Icons of Evolution in 2000 showcasing the fundamental flaws of Haekel’s work. Yet today in 2011, some publishers (e.g. Adaptive Curriculum and Rice University) have submitted teaching materials to the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE) that include Haeckel's inaccurate embryo drawings again.^[5]

Here is a lengthy excerpt from that article, including images of proposed material:

Adaptive Curriculum

In a section titled "Anatomical and Developmental Homologies as Evidence for Evolution," this publisher claims that the embryos of humans, birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians are "very similar and share many characteristics," thereby providing "evidence that they evolved from a common ancestor." There is no discussion of any differences between the early stages of embryonic development. To bolster the curriculum's incomplete, misleading, and inaccurate claims, it uses Haeckel's embryo drawings:

It also wrongly claims that human embryos have gill slits, stating that in fish "embryonic gill slits develop into true gills while in humans they develop into the ears and throat."

Rice University

In a section titled "Evidence of Common Ancestry," materials submitted by Rice University inaccurately state: "embryological studies also show similar developmental stages among different species indicating the evolution from a common ancestor." The materials then use Haeckel's discredited embryos to further overstate the degree of similarity between early vertebrate embryos:

Students are then asked to arrange Haeckel's inaccurate drawings in the 'right' order. The answer key is given at the end as follows:

A test question also forces students to inaccurately assent that these drawings provide evidence for evolution:

(end excerpt)

Over 130 years after the publication of this diagram, Haekel's drawings are still being used virtually unchanged despite all the evidence to the contrary. All of this shows how deeply these false concepts of evolution are ingrained in academia’s mindset. Though proven false, resolutely dismissed and finally removed, Haekel’s drawings keep coming back to haunt us. To further illustrate the pervasive and cancerous nature of these fallacious claims in modern times, I will present one more example by examining the work of one of today’s developmental biology researchers.

Daniel D. Brown is a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon and teacher at the college level. In an article on his blog he states: “Of course, we now know that in a literal sense, the theory [of recapitulation] is completely and utterly wrong. No stage of human development, or of any other organism, correlates with a discrete step in evolution. We are never fish. (Though we do have embryonic tails). However, that doesn't mean that there aren't kernels of truth to the idea, if applied loosely.” He further defends his use of Haekel’s drawing in his response to a commenter on his article “I simply used the drawings as a quick illustration of the very basic concept for people who haven’t a clue what early embryos look like across species. … I would never use that picture when writing to a scientific audience. Hopefully my writing made it clear that I was targeting people who know next to nothing about development.”^[6]

My dear friends, it is this type of erroneous scholarship that is most dangerous to the impressionable minds of today’s young scholars. Human beings are very responsive to visual representations and are far more likely to hold as truth in their adulthood what they were taught as truth in their childhood. We need to be very careful what kind of “science” we believe in and how its implications play out in our lives. May we question our basic scientific assumptions in the light of demonstratively true and healthy scholarship, not the fundamentally flawed lies that some, perhaps even well-meaning folks, are trying to feed us. And we must do our best to expose current and future generations to the mistaken claims of evolution.

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1. Brookes, Emily. “Intelligent Design has no place in public classrooms” August 24, 2011 http://thedailycougar.com/2011/08/24/intelligent-design-has-no-place-in-texas-classrooms/

2. Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth. 2004
3. “Recapitulation Theory” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
4. Smiley and Gould. Personal and Community Hygiene. 1948
5. Luskin, Casey. “Haeckel's Embryo Drawings Make Cameos in Proposed Texas Instructional Materials”. June 17, 2011 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/haeckels_embryos_make_multiple047321.html#fn5
6. Brown, Daniel D. “Adaptation of the Week: Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory”. February 25, 2009 http://biochemicalsoul.com/2009/02/adaptation-of-the-week-flatfish-recapitulation/