Tag Archives: Fraud

Polemics

Did your science textbook tell you that embryo drawings prove evolution?

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When you learned about evolution in public school, what did they show you for evidence to support the theory? Some people say finch beaks changing size, some people say a feathered dinosaur, some people say similar features in different animals, and some people say embryo drawings. Let’s take a look at that last one and see if it’s good evidence for evolution.

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.

Haeckel's embryos and scientific fraud
Haeckel’s embryos and scientific fraud

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)

Here is a link to the peer-reviewed journal Science, where there is an article talking about the fraudulent embryo drawings. Yes – the drawings really are fraudulent.

And finally, Casey Luskin has a post up at Evolution News that lists all the textbooks that contain the fraudulent drawings. One is dated 2013! The drawings just keep getting recycled over and over as a “proof” of evolution.

By the way, if you were told that finch beaks prove evolution, then read this post.

News

Why did a transgender gay rights activist burn down his own home?

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

Didn’t we just have a case where a gay activist faked a hate crime against himself in order to shame his political enemies for disagreeing with him on policy and morality? Well, that was last week. This week it’s another gay activist,. The fake hate crime was arson and five animals were killed in the burning home.

The Daily Wire reports:

Michigan prosecutors charged 54-year-old Nikki Joly — a transgender person — for allegedly burning down their own home in 2017 in what investigators appear to believe was intended to be a fake hate crime.

The LGBT activist — whose five pets were killed in the fire — had allegedly received threats in the past and was instrumental in leading a battle for LGBT rights in Jackson, Michigan.

“Authorities later determined the fire was intentionally set, but the person they arrested came as a shock to both supporters and opponents of the gay rights movement,” The Detroit News reported on Monday. “It was the citizen of the year — Nikki Joly.”

It was two dogs and three cats, by the way.

He lied to the police, perhaps hoping that someone else would be blamed for the crime that he committed:

Two weeks after the fire, Joly was questioned for four hours by a city police detective and two FBI agents.

During the interview, he drooped his head, staring at the floor, not looking at his interlocutors, according to the report. He didn’t admit setting the fire and didn’t deny it, either.

This MLive article speculated about two possible motives:

Joly’s church set him and Moore up in a hotel room and aided in collecting clothes and money as the couple lost everything and had no insurance. Joly received more than $50,000 in donations after the fire, according to the report.

[…]A $60,000 insurance claim was paid to the owner of the home, Stephen Carlson. Joly was in the process of buying the home for $57,000 through a land contract, paying $621.54 a month beginning in June 2015, the report says.

Security footage confirmed Carlson was shopping at Meijer at the time of the fire, ruling him out as a suspect, according to police.

Joly missed about a year of payments on the house before receiving aid from St. John’s Church, which paid $6,700 to help get Joly caught up and settle a lawsuit with Carlson.

[…]Joly, witnesses told police, also had a volatile temperament and would often call people who did not agree with him a bigot, or homophobic.

While dozens of people told police Joly loved his pets and would never willfully harm them, some believed Joly thought there was a lack of controversy following the city’s inaugural Pride Parade, and may have started the fire to spark outrage, according to the report.

Burning down your own house is pretty extreme, but I found another fake hate crime that was even more shocking, in my opinion. It just makes me feel bad for the person who did this – except that he was trying to blame innocent people who disagreed with him for the crimes he committed against himself.

Here is another story from the left-wing Associated Press.

They write:

A man who reported someone beat him and carved a homophobic slur into his arm staged the attacks, authorities in rural Utah said Tuesday.

Millard County Sheriff Robert Dekker said Rick Jones, 21, could face charges after officers investigating the series of reported attacks found inconsistencies in the evidence. The Delta man eventually acknowledged faking the harassment, Dekker said.

[…]Jones has since begun mental health treatment, the lawyer said.

The purported attacks began with a beating at his family’s pizza business in April that left Jones with head and facial bruising.

Five days later, the family’s home was found spray-painted with a homophobic slur. On June 10, a rock and a molotov cocktail were thrown through the window of the home. That same day, the business was spray-painted, broken into and robbed of $1,000.

Jones told KSL-TV earlier this month he believed he was targeted because he is gay.

Dekker said prosecutors are considering possible charges including filing a false report and reckless burning.

I wonder if we’ll get another one of these fake hate crimes next week?

By the way, there was a news story about an actual hate crime committed this week, reported by The College Fix. This one has a video of the actual hate crime being committed. But it was not national news, because the victim was a Trump supporter.

Polemics

Did your science textbook teach that embryo drawings prove evolution?

13 Comments
Haeckel's embryos and scientific fraud
Haeckel’s embryos and scientific fraud

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.

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)

Here is a link to the peer-reviewed journal Science, where there is an article talking about the fraudulent embryo drawings. Yes – the drawings really are fraudulent.

And finally, Casey Luskin has a new post up at Evolution News that lists all the textbooks that contain the fraudulent drawings. One is dated 2013! The drawings just keep getting recycled over and over as a “proof” of evolution.