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"During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks," Wells recounts. "I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was being taught was substantially true."
But then he made a troubling discovery.
"As I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology," he writes, "I noticed that all of my textbooks dealing with evolutionary biology contained a blatant misrepresentation."
The texts contained drawings of embryos that supposedly provide compelling evidence of evolution.
But there was a problem, says Wells: "As an embryologist, I knew they were false."
Although he didn't stir up a ruckus, the discovery weighed on his mind. He began to notice that other illustrations were also wrong--important illustrations depicting evidence that Darwinists have long touted as "proof" of evolution. These pictures included such perennial favorites as Haeckel's embryos, peppered moths, the evolutionary "tree of life," Darwin's finches, the ape-to-man transition and others.
These images--and their accompanying evolutionary stories--are so widely used in textbooks that some have been called "icons of evolution." In his book, Wells examines 10 of the most common icons, showing that each of them seriously misrepresents the truth--either by presenting assumptions as observed facts, concealing raging scientific controversies or directly contradicting well-established scientific evidence.
Wrong From the Start
Among the most blatantly false icons are the embryo drawings that attracted Wells' attention. The pictures were drawn in the 1800s by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (pronounced heckle), an enthusiastic supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution.
Haeckel proposed that the development of an organism's embryo replays the evolutionary history of that organism's species. He believed that as new organs or structures evolved, these features were tacked onto the end of an organism's embryonic development. As a result, we can virtually see the organism's evolutionary history in the embryo's development. At the beginning of its development, the embryo looks like its earliest ancestor. But as it develops and more recent features appear, it resembles later ancestors--until it finally reaches the point where it resembles its own species. Haeckel called this the biogenetic law.
On the basis of this law, he reasoned that the embryos of various organisms should look virtually identical early in development, but grow increasingly different over time--reflecting their evolutionary descent from a common ancestor. And when he made drawings of the embryos of several backboned animals, this is exactly what his drawings showed.
Unfortunately, Haeckel had more enthusiasm for his theory than for reality, and faked many of his drawings.
"In some cases," Wells says, "Haeckel used the same woodcut to print embryos that were supposedly from different classes [of animals]. In others, he doctored his drawings to make the embryos look more alike than they really were. His contemporaries repeatedly criticized him for these misrepresentations, and charges of fraud abounded in his lifetime."
In addition to doctoring his drawings, Haeckel also misrepresented the embryos' development. The stage of development that Haeckel called the "first" stage actually occurs about midway through the embryos' development. And although the embryos at this midway stage look faintly similar (if you squint hard and step back a bit), embryos at the earlier stages differ greatly.
Thus, instead of starting out virtually identical and then diverging, the embryos differ from the very beginning. About midway through development they converge to a vague similarity. Then they diverge again to their final forms.
Wells points out that biologists have known this for over a century. In 1894, for example, embryologist Adam Sedgwick rejected the idea that embryos start out similar and diverge over time, stating that this view is "not in accordance with the facts of development."
Sedgwick noted that he could distinguish between a chicken and a duck as early as the second day of development.
"Every embryologist knows that [early differences] exist and could bring forward innumerable instances of them," he said. "I need only say with regard to them that a species is distinct and distinguishable from its allies from the very earliest stages all through development" (emphasis in the original).
Sedgwick's observations are confirmed by modern embryology.
In spite of this, Wells found that Haeckel's drawings are almost universally touted in biology textbooks as powerful evidence for evolution. This is even the case in some advanced college texts written by eminent scientists.
Haeckel's drawings appear, for example, in the latest edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, written by National Academy of Sciences president and distinguished cell biologist Bruce Alberts and his colleagues. The text states that "early developmental stages of animals whose adult forms appear radically different are often surprisingly similar," and that Darwinian evolution explains why "embryos of different species so often resemble each other in their early stages and, as they develop, seem sometimes to replay the steps of evolution."