Re: [Phys-l] Another alternative theory horror

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Yes, the human embryo never has gills, but it does have ridge structures
that resemble structures in fish embryos that develop into gills.  The human
ridges develop into completely different things.  It is not clear whether
Haekel intentionally fudged or just "prettied" his drawings.  Unfortunately
Haekel's original ideas have been taught to countless students and still may
appear in some texts despite the fact that the problem was found not long
after he released his drawings.  So never use the "gill" idea in front of
anti-evolutionists because they know the truth about it and claim that no
gills disproves evolution.

But then there are also serious problems with other science texts such as
biology claiming that breaking bonds releases energy.  And of course Newton
put an indistinguishable color into the spectrum.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> On 2011, Aug 30, , at 16:25, John Clement wrote:
>
> > I would be fairly careful about mentioning the "gill 
> stage".  This comes
> > from the long discredited Haekel theory.  There are some 
> similarities in
> > structures in early embryonic development, but these 
> similarities diverge
> > with time.  See:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
> >
> > Recapitulation theory is a hot button item with 
> anti-evolutionists because
> > Haekel "simplified" or "prettied" his pictures and they 
> ignore differences
> > between various species embryos.  These erroneous pictures 
> have been used in
> > many biology texts and anti-evolutionists claim that this discredits
> > evolution.  But Darwin's view of embryonic development is 
> closer to the
> > modern view.  In either case Haekel's view is not really 
> important to the
> > modern evolutionary model.
>
>
> coincidence.  I'm just at that section in "Corrupted Science" 
> (John Grant).
>
> Grant also claims that both Galileo and Newton did a bit of fudging.
>
> bc
>
> "Michael Richardson happened to notice that a particular 
> diagram by Haeckel seemed curiously , well wrong."