Abscheulich!

Natural History, March, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould

We should therefore not be surprised that Haeckel's drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks! Michael Richardson, of the St. George's Hospital Medical School in London, a colleague who deserves nothing but praise for directing attention to this old issue, wrote to me (letter of August 16, 1999):

   If so many historians knew all about the old controversy [over Haeckel's
   falsified drawings], then why did they not communicate this information to
   the numerous contemporary authors who use the Haeckel drawings in their
   books? I know of at least fifty recent biology texts which use the drawings
   uncritically. I think this is the most important question to come out of
   the whole story.

The recent flap over this more-than-twice-told tale--an almost comical manifestation of the famous dictum that those unfamiliar with history (or simply careless in reporting) must be condemned to repeat the past--began with an excellent technical paper by Richardson and six other colleagues in 1997 (Anatomy and Embryology, vol. 196), following a 1995 article by Richardson alone (Developmental Biology, vol. 172). In these articles, Richardson and his colleagues discussed the original Haeckel drawings, briefly noted the contemporary recognition of their inaccuracies, properly criticized their persistent appearance in modern textbooks, and then presented evidence (discussed below) of the differences among early vertebrate embryos that Haeckel's tactics had covered up and that later biologists had therefore forgotten. Richardson invoked this historical tale in order to make an important point, also mentioned below, about exciting modern work in the genetics of development.

From this excellent and accurate beginning, the reassertion of Haeckel's old skulduggery soon spiraled into an abyss of careless reporting and self-serving utility. Elizabeth Pennisi's news report in the September 5, 1997, issue of Science told the story well, under an accurate headline ("Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered") and with a textual acknowledgement that Haeckel's work was first "found to be flawed more than a century ago." But the shorter squib in Britain's New Scientist of September 6, 1997, began the downward spiral by implying that 1Richardson had discovered Haeckel's misdeed for the first time.

As so often happens, this ersatz version, so eminently more newsworthy than the truth, opened the floodgates to a torrent of sensationalist (and nonsensical) assertions: a primary pillar of Darwinism, and of evolution in general, had been revealed as fraudulent after more than a century of continuous and unchallenged centrality in biological theory. If evolution rests upon such flimsy support, perhaps we should question the entire enterprise and give creationists, who have always flubbed their day in court, their day in the classroom.