Scientific vs Creationist Frauds and Hoaxes

What do you mean a hoax perpetrated by scientists? And 'some argument' that Christians perpetrated it on themselves?As your link explains, this was a hoax perpetrated by a convert to Christianity called Harold Hill, who wrote books and articles about his faith and lied about being a consultant to NASA so as to spread this fiction.What does this have to do with any scientists?

It's become a matter of common knowledge widely accepted that Haeckel's drawings were fraudulent, but it's not at all clear that it's true.The first thing to bear in mind, is that the picture presented by Portillo above is from a book published in 1874 (Anthropogenie: oder, Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen), the first edition of said work. Microscopy at the time was not what it is today, and embryos in their earliest stages are small. It was not possible to determine the level of detail we're quite capable of today. What's more, Haeckel was a marine biologist - he hadn't studied all of these vertebrate embyros in detail before drawing them. Some of the images were copied from the work of experts in the relevant field. Anthropogenie was intended for the general public, created out of lecture notes he used in public lectures. As the years went on, he revised the work as he revised his lecture, adding more detail, clarifying points, and improving accuracy. The pictures of the embryos grow more detailed, and accurate, as each edition goes on. Better microscopes and more available information allowed him to improve his crude sketches.And they aren't shockingly inaccurate. The picture below is taken from Haeckel’s embryos: fraud not proven, by Robert J. Richards, which was also the source of all the info in this post (via Josh Rosensau on scienceblogs). It compares the more accurate drawings Haeckel used in the fourth edition of Anthropogenie, with modern photographs. Considering the equipment available at the time, they're not that bad.

Not having a bunch of high-school science textbooks lying around this is difficult to answer. I don't recall them being in our high school books. Neither embryology or evolution were given any significant time at school under the curriculum I studied.I've been trying to find out through use of the wide world of web how much, if at all, they're used in modern textbooks used in the USA, and it's difficult to tell. The only article I've found that investigates in any detail is on Pharyngula, on account of him teaching embryology and thus having many textbooks to hand. The answer appears to be no, not much.

Just to clarify RAZD's response, this one is simply untrue. I can find claims by scientists that the thigh bone originally attributed to Java Man (which was found along with the skullcap and teeth) does not belong with the others and is actually the thigh bone of an anatomically modern human; but no-one seems to be classifying the
skullcap and teeth fossils as anything but Homo erectus. Encyclopoedia Britannica says:

quote:

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Java man, extinct hominin (member of the human lineage) known from fossil remains found on the island of Java, Indonesia. A skullcap and thighbone discovered by the Dutch anatomist and geologist Eugène Dubois in the early 1890s were the first known fossils of the species Homo erectus.

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