Re: Johnson and "Icons"

From: George Hammond (ghammond@mediaone.net)
Date: Wed May 16 2001 - 21:49:34 EDT

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    Keith B Miller wrote:
    >
    > 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/

    [Hammond]
      There is even more scarcity of data on the geometry of the first
    3 (cartesian) cleavages of the Egg (Von Bayer's Laws etc.) and
    their relation to the 3 body axes in the human.
      Hammond (1994) published the thesis that Roux (1888) and
    Conklin (1905) conclusively proved that the body axes derive from
    the first 3 cleavages, which was certainly the initial scientific
    reaction, before Speman and Dreisch championed "totipotency"
    in the first wave of "reactionary" academic challenge to his
    discovery at the turn of the century.
      Fact is, it seems that there are "mosaic" and "regulative"
    eggs. 1/2 and 1/4 axially symmetric embryos can easily be
    created by separating mosaic eggs at the 2 and 4 cell stage,
    however the more modern "regulative" eggs do not exhibit this
    (as Speman and Driesch showed Roux).
      However, modern fate cell mapping and Horse Radish Peroxidase
    staining of the 2, 4 and 8 cell stage shows that the same
    structural isomorphism also holds for regulative eggs vis a
    vis the creation of the body axes.
      However, as pointed out by the above author, the heyday of this
    kind of research was a long time ago, in the 20's and 30's, and
    conducted by people who had little reason to believe it would
    become so vital and controversial in the 21st century.
      For instance, the Cartesian 3-axis structure of the brain,
    which is caused by all this, leads directly to a mathematical-
    physics proof of God, it that it causes the same Cartesian
    3-axis geometry to appear in the eigenvector space of Psychometry.
      The "curvature" of this space (measured Factor Analytically)
    turns out to be the scientific explanation of God.
      Little did Wilhelm Roux imagine such a thing, the night he
    first heated a sewing needle in a candle flame and killed one of
    two frogs eggs from the local pond, in the 2-cell stage, and
    to his amazement, watched it grow into half a frog.

    -- 
    BE SURE TO VISIT MY WEBSITE, BELOW:
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    George Hammond, M.S. Physics
    Email:    ghammond@mediaone.net
    Website:  http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ghammond/index.html
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