Many may not know but Haekel's work were adopted by Nazism following his racist views. Haekel said that the Germans were members of a biologically superior community (akin to Nietzsche's 'super-man'). More about Haekel here.
New Scientist reviewed a book by Bob Hopwood, a science historian, who had his book recently published. The full review can be found here and reproduced in part below.
-----------------------------
Some of the most iconic images in biology hold a dark secret. Haeckel's Embryos: Images, evolution, and fraud delves into their history
IT's embarrassing but true: some of the most influential drawings in the history of biology are wrong, exaggerated to fit a thesis.
As we discover in Haeckel's Embryos, German biologist Ernst Haeckel included illustrations of the embryological stages of vertebrates in a series of books published between 1868 and 1908. Fudging the data, he placed the drawings into a comparative grid, highlighting similarities between species and blurring differences. The results are highly inaccurate.
Haeckel wanted to convince his readers that all vertebrates share a common ancestor, and that, as he put it, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" – our embryonic development repeats our evolutionary past. This aphorism was soon disproved, but the use of Haeckel's drawings persisted, particularly in education. There were waves of criticism, from the 1870s when the drawings were published, up to 1997 as Haeckel's "fraud" was rediscovered and exploited by creationists.
No comments:
Post a Comment