Page 507 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

basis of these drawings,
Haeckel proclaimed his theory
that "Ontogeny recapitulates

phylogeny." This slogan repre-
sented his belief that in the
course of its development, ei-
ther in the egg or in its
mother's womb, every crea-

ture repeats the history of its
own species, from the be-
ginning. For example, a

human embryo first resem-
bles a fish, in later weeks a
salamander, then it passes
through the reptilian and
mammalian stages before

"evolving" into a recog-
nizable human being.
The concept con-

veyed in the slogan
"Ontogeny recapitu-
lates phylogeny"
quickly became known
as the "recapitulation

theory," and in a very
Ernst Haeckel
short time this myth
became one of the

most important proofs
for evolution. Throughout
the 20th century, countless students saw the
chart of the human embryo's imaginary progress from fish,
through salamander, chicken and rabbit; and the myth that the human embryo had gills

for a while became an accepted fact. Even today, many supporters of the theory of evolution, if asked,
would cite this as one of its proofs.
However, this is pure fabrication. In fact, the embryos of various creatures did not at all resemble one

another. Haeckel's drawings made all sorts of misrepresentations. To some embryos, he added imaginary
organs, removed organs from others, and showed larger and smaller embryos as all the same size.
In the human embryo, the slits that Haeckel represented as gills were really the beginning of the mid-
dle ear canal, the parathyroid, and the thymus glands. Haeckel's other comparisons are also now known
to be deceptions; what he made look like a "yolk sac" in the embryo is actually a sac that produces 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 anni-

hilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner'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 textbooks, 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

Adnan Oktar 505