Page 117 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

In the human embryo, the slits that Haeckel represented
as gills were really the beginning of the middle ear canal, the
parathyroid, and the thymus glands. Haeckel's other compar-

isons are also now known to be deceptions; what he made
look like a "yolk sac" in the embryo is actually a sac that pro-
duces blood for the baby. The structure that Haeckel and his
followers called the "tail" was actually the human spine,
which resembled a tail only because it formed before the legs
did.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it came to light that

Haeckel had falsified his drawings and he openly confessed
to this, saying:
After this compromising confession of "forgery" I should be
obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had
not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the pris-
oner's dock hundreds of fellow-culprits, among them many of
the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The
great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological text- Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)
books, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree
the charge of "forgery," for all of them are inexact, and are
more or less doctored, schematized and constructed. 57
But despite his avowal, Darwinists liked his propaganda

material and refused to give up using it. They ignored the fact
that the drawings were false and for decades, textbooks and
much evolutionist literature presented them as authentic.
The fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsifications was
loudly expressed only in the second half of the 1990s. The
September 5, 1997 edition of the Science magazine published
"Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," an article by

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