[When I started this weblog, one of the hot topics in the Creationist Wars was Jonathan Wells, a Moonie who had trained as a developmental biologist and written a screed against evolutionary biology titled Icons of Evolution. This book purported to document serious flaws in some of the major examples of evolutionary biology, although what it actually did was parrot old creationist arguments and get much of the science wrong. One of the subjects he focused on was the pharyngula—the embryonic stage that exhibits a common morphology across all vertebrates. This fascinating developmental period has an unfortunate history, in that Ernst Haeckel published some fraudulent drawings of it, and also made exaggerated claims about it. One of Wells’ strategies was to condemn every biology textbook that illustrated homologies in pharyngula stage embryos, tarring them with the broad brush of Haeckelism. This got to the point where he was absurdly damning books that even included photos of embryos, and one of the things I’ve tried to do is document the way he misrepresents science teaching.]
I got a request to document some of Wells’ claims from his execrable book, Icons of Evolution. Specifically, Wells chastises several textbook authors for using modified versions of Haeckel’s drawings:
Starr & Taggart, 10th ed and this was mentioned in
Well’s testimony, p. 315, “slightly simplified version of
Haekel’s original fraudulent drawings”Raven & Johnson, Biology, 6th ed
“modified version … exaggerates actual similarities” p. 450
I don’t have all of the textbooks he describes, but I do have the 5th and 9th editions of the above books, and I suspect the figures haven’t changed. Below, I’ve scanned in several of the figures that Wells finds objectionable, and for the most part, they aren’t bad at all, and actually make useful pedagogical points. I suspect that the real reason Wells and other creationists dislike them is that they reveal deep homologies that support evolutionary explanations of the origins of animal diversity.