I have two A level/First year degree Biology text books to hand.
On the subject of Haeckel, Roberts 3rd Ed (1982) (shows how long ago I was at school) says:
quote:
Although embryology can be indispensible in establishing phylogenetic relationships, there has been a tendency in the past to take it too far. Thus Ernst Haeckel suggested that during its embryological development an organism repeats its ancestral history...There is a grain of truth in thus: the presence of branchial grooves and segmental myotomes in the human embryo, for example, bears witness to a fish ancestry. But it is quite wrong to assume that an animal literally 'climbs up its family tree' during its development.
Translation - Haeckel was wrong.
Campbell - Third Ed. (1993)
quote:
"...many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"....The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement. What recapitulation does occur is a replay of embryonic stages, not a sequence of adultlike stages of ever more advanced vertebrates. Although vertebrates share many features of embryonic development, it is not as though a mammal first goes through a "fish stage", then an "amphibian stage" and so on."
Same conclusion.
Can you post corresponding parts of the textbooks you accuse of fraud on this issue so that we can examine them?
[This message has been edited by Karl, 05-16-2003]