A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 2)

When I was growing up, the “fact” of evolution was so embedded in my beliefs that it was virtually unquestionable. It seemed solid and monolithic. In my mind, it was analogous to a towering skyscraper—like a spotless gleaming super-structure filled with massive evidentiary I-beams, supporting countless floors of proofs of what I considered to be a scientific theory.

It was only when I decided to peel back the shiny veneer from that tower of evidence and examine the individual interlocking supports that I began to see it for what it was. This colossal monument was actually like a Jenga tower.1 As I kept pulling out the individual pieces to examine them, I realized they simply weren’t sound enough to be re-inserted as support.

Eventually, the entire structure collapsed into a heap of ruins for me. Its materialistic pylons were laid bare, sticking out of its ultimate foundation—the unseen and unproven concept of millions of years of earth’s history.

Taking a Closer Look

As I mentioned in Part 1, discovering that specific pieces of evolutionary evidence I was taught in school had been debunked and thrown out was quite a shock when I first looked into origins more deeply.

But what continued to amaze me over the years was watching reports of highly educated scientists (many of whom believe in evolution) discover this for themselves.

What About Those Embryo Drawings?

Dr. Michael Richardson, a lecturer and embryologist at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London, was a perfect example. In 1997, after doing a comparative analysis of various embryos at different stages of development, Richardson said, in contrast to the infamous forged embryo drawings produced by Ernst Haeckel in the late 1800s,

This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It's shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry . . . . What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it . . . . These are fakes.2

If you are unfamiliar with this particular argument for evolution, these embryo drawings (produced in the later 1800s by the rabid evolutionist Ernst Haeckel) had been originally used to teach the idea that the human embryo “re-lives” or “recapitulates” various evolutionary stages (such as having gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc.) during their early development in the womb.3 This reinforces the idea that humans are just evolved animals.

This idea had not only been presented as fact to students in high schools but also to biology and medical students in universities.4 However, once the medical community dismissed this idea as untrue (due to the lack of observational data), the argument became more about highlighting embryonic homology—the supposed similarities between fish, salamanders, turtles, chickens, pigs, cows, rabbits, and humans in three specific stages of development—emphasizing that humans share a common ancestry with animals.

And this was founded on the “common knowledge” that these close similarities were supposedly real, based on the set of 24 drawings Haeckel produced in 1866 and reproduced in countless textbooks afterward.5 However, Richardson and his international team of experts showed that even the similarity argument is false, stating that Haeckel’s drawings added, omitted, and changed many features of the creatures he drew:6

. . . he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an entire group of animals.7

Richardson, an expert in his field, was offended to learn of such fraud. In the same way that I, a layperson, had been upset to learn about how students like myself were lied to for years.

But the kicker is that Haeckel’s fraud of embryonic recapitulation and embryonic similarity had been known soon after he first published his work and was easily discoverable by anyone who took the time to do a modicum of medical and historical research.

History shows that in 1874, Wilhelm His Sr. (professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, and Haeckel’s boss) confronted him about the obvious discrepancies in the embryo drawings, demanding an explanation. Haeckel’s excuse was that the person who’d drawn the pictures must have made the error, but of course, he was the one who’d drawn them!

After realizing the extent of this fraud, Dr. Richardson did some digging into its origins; he commented on Haeckel’s sidestepping confession:

Haeckel’s confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and reproduced widely in English language biology texts.8

Use It as Long as It Works

Having presented at many events over the years, I’ve had many attendees remark about how they’d been taught about embryonic recapitulation as a strong argument for evolution in school, or how they had seen the diagrams in textbooks recently.

I could relate, as it was as recent as 2008 that my daughter came home with her science textbook, and what awaited my perusal inside? There they were, Haeckel’s original drawings from 1886; they were unchanged, just colorized to suit a modern audience.

After hyperventilating for a few minutes, I picked up my phone to make an appointment with her teacher—the resulting encounter was simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. After providing clear documentation that the scientific community acknowledged the diagrams as fraudulent, the teacher confessed she was completely unaware this was the case and was just “teaching what was in the book.”

Looking at the evidence, she seemed genuinely concerned about such misinformation. However, when I asked her if she or the school would be contacting the curriculum provider to complain, she shrugged it off by saying that it really wasn’t her or the school’s responsibility.

In effect, she said it was her responsibility to teach children, but not her responsibility to decide what to teach them. This begs the question: who gets to decide what young minds should be taught?

Materialistic influencers have been continually inserting themselves into our educational institutions for years now, and the effects can be clearly seen in culture.

Self-Perpetuating Falsehoods

The encounter confirmed what I had come to realize a long time ago. Misinformation has been inserted into school curriculums and has trickled down into popular culture via the intellectual treadmill of our educational institutions, media outlets, and personal popularizers in the West, and then continually propagated; it has been unquestioned, believed, and regurgitated to the next generation by students who became teachers of the same falsehoods they had earlier accepted.

These people are seen as experts, and often exert a tremendous influence due to that perception. For example, the famous child-rearing expert Dr. Benjamin Spock was an American pediatrician who wrote one of the best-selling books in 1957 (over 50 million copies by his death in 1998). Let’s see what he was teaching:

Each child, as he develops, is retracing the whole history of mankind, physically and spiritually, step by step. A baby starts off in the womb as a single tiny cell, just the way the first living thing appeared in the ocean. Weeks later, as he lies in the amniotic fluid of the womb, he has gills like a fish . . . .9

As you can see, the so-called expert was simply doing what my daughter’s science teacher had done—regurgitating completely unscientific drivel—but with the voice of authority.

Popular news sources do the same. Here is a quote from a 2002 front-page Time magazine article:

40 days: At this point, a human embryo looks no different from that of a pig, chick or elephant. All have a tail, a yolk sac and rudimentary gills.10

Of course, these statements are completely false. Human embryos do look different than the creatures mentioned, as Dr. Richardson confirms. Humans never have a tail or gills; that’s just evolutionary gobbledygook attempting to explain that our spine has to stop at some point and that at a specific stage in our development, human embryos have arch-shaped folds/pouches near the throat that develop into very specific structures.

The first pouches form the palatine tonsils, the middle ear canals come from the second pouches, and the parathyroid and thymus glands come from the third and fourth.11 So, these pharyngeal arches never act as “gills” (a respiratory organ for aquatic organisms that extract dissolved oxygen from water—something humans have never done).

However, the average Joe is unlikely to do any homework on the topic and simply accepts what the experts at Time magazine have to say. So, he gets the impression that the mountain of evidence for evolution keeps piling higher and higher, which means the idea of creation seems more “far out,” unscientific, and illegitimate than ever.

Although some may say that it’s not such a big deal if a few wrong ideas somehow squeak through, the fact is (as we will see later on in this series), it’s not just one or two discrepancies (i.e., lies) that have been promoted repeatedly over the years.

Lies can lead to horrific consequences—especially this one we’ve discussed. Why? Because the idea of evolutionary recapitulation has been persuasively used for many years to justify abortion by “experts” claiming the unborn child being killed was still in the “fish stage” and was not yet fully human.12

Thoughts do have consequences, and actions are often brought about because of ideologies.

We’ll walk through the huge pile of evolutionary evidence in more detail next week in “A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 3)—Making a molehill out of the mountain.”