Page 506 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

In fact, it was the drawings, not these creatures, that came from a
common root. Haeckel made a drawing of one embryo and then,
after making slight changes to it, presented them together as em-
bryos of a human being, an ape and a dog. When the same drawings

were printed side by side, naturally they looked the same. 55
This was the "work" that Darwin used as a source in The Descent of
Man. However, even before Darwin wrote his book, some noticed a
major distortion in Haeckel's "work" and wrote about it. In 1868, L.
The book "The Origin of Rutimeyer published an article in the science periodical Archiv für
Species" led Haeckel into seri-
ous errors. Anthropologie (Archives of Anthropology) that revealed Haeckel's falsifica-
tions. Rutimeyer, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Basle
University, examined the embryo drawings in Naturlische Schopfungsgeschichte and Über die Entstehung und

den Stammbaum des Menschengeschlechts and demonstrated that the drawings in both books had nothing to
do with reality. As Rutimeyer wrote:

Haeckel claims these works to be easy for the scientific layman to follow, as well as scientific and scholarly. No
one will quarrel with the first evaluation of the author, but the second quality is not one that he seriously can
claim. These works are clothed in medieval formalistic

garb. There is considerable manufacturing
of scientific evidence. Yet the author has
been very careful not to let the reader
become aware of this state of affairs. 56

Despite this, Darwin and other biol-

ogists who supported him continued to
accept Haeckel's drawings as a refer-
ence. And this encouraged Haeckel to
try to make embryology a strong sup-
port for Darwinism. His observations

produced no such support, but he re-
garded his drawings as more impor-
tant than his observations. In

following years, he made a series of
comparative drawings of embryos
and composed charts comparing
the embryos of fish, salamanders,
frogs, chickens, rabbits and human

beings. The interesting thing about
these side-by-side charts was that
the embryos of these various crea-

tures closely resembled one an-
other, at first, but slowly began to
differentiate in the course of their
development. Particularly strik-
ing was the similarity between

the embryos of a fish and a
human being; so much so that
in the drawings, the human

embryo had what looked like
gills. On the so-called scientific there were similarities between the embryos of different living things.

Counterfeit drawings by Haeckel intended to give the impression that

504 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3