The image above is Haeck­el’s famous draw­ing of embryos, a series of images which he pre­sent­ed to illus­trate his now dis­cred­it­ed notion of reca­pit­u­la­tion. He fudged the details to make the whole thing look more con­vinc­ing, which was unde­ni­ably a bad choice.

This fig­ure was repro­duced by some text­books as an inter­est­ing and his­tor­i­cal demon­stra­tion of broad sim­i­lar­i­ties between relat­ed species espe­cial­ly in their ear­ly devel­op­ment, a pat­tern more sim­i­lar to von Baer’s laws than Haeck­el’s ideas. Nonethe­less, cre­ation­ists like Jonathan Wells like to com­plain about teach­ing evo­lu­tion because of this fig­ure’s dubi­ous his­to­ry. Wells does not con­tend that the pat­tern itself is invalid. He can’t. And most mod­ern text­books have stopped using this fig­ure, replac­ing it with pho­tographs of the same embryos or with draw­ings from photographs.

That style of illus­tra­tion is shown in the sec­ond image here, copied from this post by the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s John West. You’ll note that, despite West­’s claim that this is “a ver­sion of Haeck­el’s draw­ings,” they are actu­al­ly quite dif­fer­ent in their details. These are clear­ly redrawn pho­tographs of actu­al embryos, and as such do not bear the taint of any errors Haeck­el made, inten­tion­al­ly or oth­er­wise. Try­ing to smear biol­o­gist and film­mak­er Randy Olson because West does­n’t under­stand the sub­ject is hard­ly honest.

West also lies when he claims that “Haeckel’s dia­grams are on their way out because of the efforts of Darwin’s crit­ics.” Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book address­ing not just the tech­ni­cal issues with Haeck­el’s draw­ings, but the philo­soph­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal prob­lems with Haeck­el. It was­n’t crit­ics of Dar­win who spiked Haeck­el’s draw­ings, it was crit­ics of Haeckel.

Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos will be shown at KU’s Woodruff Audi­to­ri­um on Feb­ru­ary 12, at 7:45, as part of KU’s Dar­win Day cel­e­bra­tion.