With regard to my statement that the fraudulant nature of Haeckel's
drawings was not convincingly and widely known until relatively recently, I
will again quote from Richardson ("Haeckel, embryos, and evolution,"
Science 280 (1998): 983-984).
"We are not the first to question the drawings. Haeckel's past accusers
included His (Leipzig University), Rutimeyer (Basel University), and Brass
(leader of the Keplerbund group of Protestant scientists). However, these
critics did not give persuasive evidence in support of their arguments. We
therefore show here a more accurate representation of vertebrate embryos at
three arbitrary stages, including the approximate stage which Haeckel
showed to be identical."
In his original article ("There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in
the vertebrates: Implications for current theories of evolution and
development" in Anatomy and Embryology (1997), vol. 196, p.91-106),
Richardson and coautors give a summary of the history of embryology. There
has simply been very little work on embryos outside of the common
laboratory animals. I will again quote a short passage from that
discussion.
"The debate is hindered by the scarcity of comprehensive comparative
studies of vertebrate embryos, and the great practical difficulties in
obtaining embryos for study from a wide range of vertebrates. Keibel
(1906) provided figures, redrawn from published studies, of embryonic
development in a wide range of vertebrates. However, with a few notable
exceptions (Bellairs 1971) modern textbooks rarely consider species other
than the common laboratory animals. There has been no textbook of
descriptive comparative embryology in English, covering all the major
vertebrate groups, for over 70 years (Jenkinson 1913, Kerr 1919). .... To
compound problems, developmental biologists use just a small number of
laboratory species as model systems, and are therefore unfamiliar with the
diversity of embryonic form in vertebrates (Hanken 1993, Bolker 1995, Raff
1996)."
Again, I urge anyone who hasn't, to read the Richardson et al. paper. They
make their arguments much better than I can.
Keith
Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
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