Evidence for Creationism and Against Evolution

[GrayMouser]

Originally posted by Sheeana
Will have to get back to you on that one, Rian as I have a class in... 7 minutes! *Yikes*

Recapitulation is not a word that I am familiar with. Is this the same as the biogenic law?

Recapitulation is the long-discarded idea that "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny" ( sometimes referred to as Haeckel's Law.)

Haeckel noticed that vertebrate embryos pass through a series of similar stages in early development, and argued that there was a good reason for this. As an organism evolves, he reasoned, it does so by tacking on new stages to its process of embryonic development. Therefore, as an organism passes through embryonic development it actually re-traces every stage of its evolutionary ancestry. This idea became known as "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," which literally means "Development is a replay of Ancestry."

As you read this, you may wonder why evolution should be limited to changes tacked on at the end of the process of development. So did evolutionary biologists, and Haeckel's idea was quickly discarded.
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This idea has been pushed back into the news recently by the news that Haeckel's drawings of embryonic similarities were not correct. British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleages published an important paper in the August 1997 issue of Anatomy & Embryology showing that Haeckel had fudged his drawings to make the early stages of embryos appear more alike than they actually are! As it turns out, Haeckel's contemporaries had spotted the fraud during his lifetime, and got him to admit it. However, his drawings nonetheless became the source material for diagrams of comparative embryology in nearly every biology textbook, including ours!

http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/ev...s/Haeckel.html

And of course the authors immediately revised their textbook, because they know that to keep publishing information that has been shown to be false is a grave scientific sin.