These Evolution Examples Are Staged | Textbooks Still Use Them - FAS2626

Now, in the chapter, it mentions about Haeckel's embryo drawings, and these were actually exposed as fraudulent way back in the 1800s.

Um, but they still appear in textbooks in the 1900s.

So give us a bit of background on that story, as well as why you think these images are remaining in education even after being debunked.

Yes, this is a, a very, very interesting, uh, question.

I guess for, uh, listeners to, and viewers to understand, um, we know that when, uh, Darwin put out his original thesis-

Mm

...

he, you know, grew this, uh, uh, you know, the set out this, uh, phylogenic tree, um, and essentially showed where you have, you know, fish evolving into, uh, amphibians evolving into reptiles evolving into, to birds and, and so forth.

Um, a- and eventually up into humans.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and it's, uh, in- interesting, I was out, uh, visiting the, um, the dinosaur area at Winton in New South Wales-

Hmm

... a couple of years ago.

Um, and they have displays there, a number of dinosaur remains, and particularly marine, large marine creatures have been found out in the area in North, uh, Western, uh, Queensland there.

And, um, there was a book on the shelf, Grandmother Fish.

Oh.

And it was for, you know, little children, sort of kindergarten-type children.

Uh, and I thought, "This is, this is so wrong." But this is this picture that is painted that essentially we evolved from fish-

Hmm

... you know, through this, through this chain.

And, um, so one of the things that came up after this whole scenario when Darwin published his whole sequence of, of evolution there, uh, Haeckel, uh, really got onto this.

And, um, he, uh, supposedly looked at the embryos of different types of animals, you know, rabbits, chickens, so forth, and, um, and showed that they went through this, this stage, and human embryos as well, and essentially showed that human embryos went through these different stages.

So at a very early stage, they looked like a, a fish, and so forth, developed on through, uh, the different stage.

Then later they looked more like a reptile, and then, and so forth like this.