Is talkorigins.org a propoganda site?

There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development.

We regard the phylotypic stage as an archetype and not a real entity.

What is the phylotypic stage?
Darwin said, "Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the Origin as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class." Early in the 19th century, von Baer noted that the embryos of different species could not be as easily distinguished from one another as are the adults. This is a simple observation that has been made numerous times in the past few hundred years, an observation that is not tied to any particular theory, whether of creation or evolution -- von Baer himself made these observations 30 years before Darwin published, and did not accept evolution then or later. That is, while vertebrate adults may look very different from one another, vertebrate embryos all go through a period in development in which they all resemble each other more strongly. This period is called the phylotypic stage.

“Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny”
Thank you Andrew for your nice remarks. I want to comment on your comment that the Recapitulation Theory died about 1925 and that it has not appeared in school textbooks for years. Almost ten years ago in Ontario, Canada, creationists had a successful campaign to remove this theory from the High School curriculum. It was removed but then slipped right back in again the following year. To my knowledge it is still there. If the theory died in 1925 would you not agree that this is a disgraceful move on the part of certain people in the Ontario Ministry of Education and would you be willing to help remove the nonsense from Ontario’s school textbooks?On page 277 of my book, In The Minds of Men, the illustration shows exactly how Ernst Haeckel cheated in 1868 to make the facts fit his theory. This was exposed as fraudulent in 1874 by Wilhelm His, and the theory should have died then and there, not in 1925. For those critics who would side-track the issue by pointing out that textbooks have replaced the old nineteenth century engravings of the embryos with modern drawings, this is of no consequence whatsoever. The textbook The Way Life Works by Hoagland & Dodson, 1995 published by Ebury Press, London, still used Haeckel’s drawings but took the trouble to colour them! Most readers will recall the famous row of embryos shown in the school textbooks. The usual argument for their retention is because although it is admitted that the stages of development (the vertical sequence) do not appear as Haeckel showed them, the horizontal likenesses of the early stages of the fish, the salamander, the turtle, the chicken the rabbit and the human are all virtually the same and illustrate embryonic homology. Michael Richardson, a lecturer and embryologist at St. George’s Hospital Medical School, London has recently exposed the so-called “embryonic homology” as another fraud. In his paper published in Anatomy and Embryology 1997, Vol.196 (2), p.91-106 he shows that the early embryonic stages of 39 different creatures including the fish, the turtle etc., are nothing like the same. Haeckel had simply repeated a series of look alike drawings for his 1874 Anthropogenie and, until Richardson reported the facts in 1997, no one had taken the trouble to actually check on Haeckel’s work! May I suggest that this was because Haeckel’s theory seemed such good evidence for evolution?

In a 1997 interview in The Times of London, Dr. Richardson stated: "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, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t. ... These are fakes."

Using modern techniques, a British researcher has photographed embryos like those pictured in the famous, century-old drawings by Ernst Haeckel--proving that Haeckel's images were falsified. Haeckel once admitted to his peers that he doctored the drawings, but that confession was forgotten.

Evolution, the overarching concept that unifies the biological sciences, in fact embraces a plurality of theories and hypotheses.

Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.This is a good working scientific definition of evolution; one that can be used to distinguish between evolution and similar changes that are not evolution.
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One can quibble about the accuracy of such a definition (and we have often quibbled on these newsgroups) but it also conveys the essence of what evolution really is. When biologists say that they have observed evolution, they mean that they have detected a change in the frequency of genes in a population. (Often the genetic change is inferred from phenotypic changes that are heritable.) When biologists say that humans and chimps have evolved from a common ancestor they mean that there have been successive heritable changes in the two separated populations since they became isolated.
Unfortunately the common definitions of evolution outside of the scientific community are different. For example, in the Oxford Concise Science Dictionary we find the following definition:"evolution: The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years."This is inexcusable for a dictionary of science.

evolution: The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years