Do biology textbooks lie to prove evolution?

Lately, a lot of people have been stopping by the blog to learn about the how left-leaning scientists are producing faked evidence of global warming in order to support President Obama in his efforts to pass cap and trade.

…and so on.

You might even see evidence against global warming being suppressed. Michelle Malkin writes about the suppression of an EPA report that would have undermined the rationale for the cap-and-trade bill.

Excerpt:

The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion-dollar, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.”

It’s important to understand that  left-leaning scientists have many reasons for doing things like this. Some of the reasons are political.

Here are just two examples.

  1. Many academics spend their entire lives in academia working on esoteric research of marginal utility. They depend for their livelihoods in large measure on research money awarded by the government. They therefore tend to want to prove their importance to the public and the government by inventing crises that require more research money and bigger government budgets.
  2. In additional, many academics are jealous of hard-working entrepreneurs in private industry, who are able to earn more money by pleasing customers with useful products and services than they can by talking and writing papers on topics of marginal utility.

For these reasons and others, it is common for a “scientific consensus” to emerge among  left-leaning scientists to prove things that are not true in order to achieve certain social and/or political results desired by these left-leaning scientists. (Note: you can verify that the majority of university professors are left-leaning by looking at their political donations – which are overwhelmingly Democrat)

Evolution

Evolution is virtually identical to global warming. Naturalists embraced evolution for many reasons, none of them related to actual evidence.

Among these reasons are the following:

  1. As Cornelius Hunter has documented, naturalists felt that if God were the designer of life, then he wouldn’t have done it in a way that involved so much suffering and waste.
  2. Naturalists, like everyone else, are resentful of the demands of the moral law on their autonomy. Rather than wasting time on theology and religious observances, they would prefer to be doing whatever they want – without any social disapproval. A theory like evolution could be foisted on the public in order to marginalize God, and his obligations, in one swoop.

Let’s learn about one of the ways that naturalists lie to the public in order to achieve desired social and political ends.

Lies my biology textbook told me

Jonathan Wells, a biologist with Ph.Ds from Yale and UC Berkeley, writes about one example of fake evidence here:

Charles Darwin thought that “by far the strongest” evidence that humans and fish are descended from a common ancestor was the striking similarity of their early embryos. According to Darwin, the fact that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar… reveals community of descent.” 2 To illustrate this, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel made some drawings in the 1860s to show that the embryos of vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) look almost identical in their earliest stages.

But Haeckel faked his drawings. Not only do they distort vertebrate embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are (in a way that Stephen Jay Gould wrote “can only be called fraudulent” 3), but they also omit classes and stages that do not fit Darwin’s theory. Most significantly, Haeckel omitted the earliest stages, in which vertebrate embryos are strikingly different from each other. The stage he portrayed as the first is actually midway through development. Yet according to Darwin’s logic, early dis-similarities do not provide evidence for common ancestry.

Haeckel used his faked drawings to support not only Darwinian evolution, but also his own “Biogenetic Law,” which stated that embryos pass through the adult stages of their ancestors in the process of development.

…Haeckel’s drawings were exposed as fakes by his own contemporaries, and his Biogenetic Law was thoroughly discredited by 20th century biologists. It is now generally acknowledged that early embryos never resemble the adults of their supposed ancestors. A modern version of recapitulation claims that early embryos resemble the embryos of their ancestors, but since fossil embryos are extremely rare, this claim is little more than speculation based on the assumption that Darwin’s theory is true.

Now the standard response from Darwinists: no textbooks are still using the fraudulent embryo images. Is it true? It’s as true as global warming!

You can see the actual faked pictures from the modern textbooks here. These textbooks were being produced as late as 2004, even though the fraud was detected in the 1800s! Is this the vaunted self-correction of science, or science being twisted to support social and political goals?

And this excerpt from that article is interesting:

Some Darwinists continue to deny that there has been any misuse of Haeckel in recent times. If that is the case, why did Stephen Jay Gould attack how textbooks use Haeckel in 2000? Gould wrote: “We should… not be surprised that Haeckel’s drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!” (emphasis added) Similarly, in 1997, the leading embryologist Michael K. Richardson lamented in the journal Anatomy and Embyology that “Another point to emerge from this study is the considerable inaccuracy of Haeckel’s famous figures. These drawings are still widely reproduced in textbooks and review articles, and continue to exert a significant influence on the development of ideas in this field.” (emphases added)

And you can read about the 700 scientists who doubt that natural selection and mutation are sufficient to produce the diversity of life here.

6 thoughts on “Do biology textbooks lie to prove evolution?”

  1. Francis Schaeffer, in How Should We Then Live, wrote of a scientist who chose one theory of evolution because of the racist implications of the other. Where would we be now if the driving curiosity to discover the truths of our world had not been stifled by the closed minded presuppositions of the self proclaimed “open minded”? Who knows, perhaps a discovery that could have fueled our car from solar power, or a cure for cancer, if scientist had persevered in discovering truth rather than creating it.

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    1. I cotaught a biology class two years ago at a high school in Georgia, and they were still presenting these pictures as real evidence of evolution. I had no idea initially that they were faked. The textbooks with this illustration are still in the classrooms. I just checked today!!! Something is wrong with this picture.

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  2. I had a letter in the Times of London on this a couple of years ago. Haeckel was actually found guilty of fraud by a University Court in Jena over this. Nor is he alone. One of my University lectures is on scientific fraud. At Elsevier they tell me that every week one of their scientific editors is involved in investigating some element of scientific fakery. Why shouldn’t scientist’s hearts be as corrupt as the rest of mankind’s?

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  3. I don’t doubt that there is a lot of fraud when it comes to scientific discoveries today. And while I do believe that the news ‘cherry-picks’ certain facts in order to give the public a desired ‘truth’, this has done the same by not giving all of the evidence. Although you’ve said that global warming is a myth, think back to the ice age when the entire earth was covered in ice. Obviously, the earth has warmed considerably since those days. There is physical evidence of large glaciers having existed that have since melted, and therefore physical evidence that the earth has been warming and cooling for a very long time. We happen to be in the midst of a very gradual warming. And although scientists may be playing up global warming, automatically it is assumed that they are doing this is a way that they may better themselves, or that it is a ploy to get research money. Perhaps it is just a way to get consumers to listen up and start cutting back on green house gas emissions, which we all should be concerned about whether or not global warming is a serious matter. As for evolution, even though embryology may not be definite proof for evolution, there is other evidence supporting evolution, such as vestigial organs like our appendix. Why would we be created the way we are, with an imperfect design? But that said, why can evolution not be true without some divinity still playing a role in our creation? It was a long shot for the human race to end up where it is today from an organism far less advanced. It could be that God, if you believe so, guided our species down the path of evolution so that we may be here today. Of course, no one can know for sure exactly how anything is, but by looking at the clues (the ice age, fossils, etc.) we can see that the earth and its inhabitants are constantly changing.

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