Evolution's Endless Fraudulent 'Probabilities'

Following are some statements that others have made regarding evolution’s propensity for maintaining the necessity of endless fraudulent probabilities.

As we read any book today written by an Evolutionist on Science, Philosophy, History, or Theology we are struck with the lack of real scientific and logical thinking. With few, if any exceptions, Evolutionists rest their foundation arguments for their false conclusions on a mere mass of probabilities. The expressions "we may suppose," "it is likely," "it is probable," "the probabilities are," "probably," "perhaps," "doubtless," or "apparently," "we may guess or infer," "it may be, or may have been," or "it is quite understandable," "it would seem or appear," "it must have been," or "it is quite conceivable," etc., abound in all their works... In Darwin’s two principal books we find the expression “we may well suppose” over 800 times. (See Herald and Presbyter, Nov. 22, 1914.)  

All Darwin’s physical, mental, and moral chasms are bridged by mere probabilities and assumptions.  In fact he requires nothing else from which to draw all his stupendous conclusions. Men may call him a scientist, but most assuredly he was not a scientific scientist...

No wonder Dennert says in his excellent book, At the Deathbed of Darwinism” p.23: “The reader of Haeckel and other Darwinians will frequently find laws put forward to establish facts: whereas other men of science prefer to have facts establish laws.”  As we have stated, this is true in every work written by Modernists, for they are all Evolutionists.  Coming from Dennert, one of Germany’s leading scientists, one too, who was until very recently an Evolutionist, his words deserve consideration.

Where mere assumption and probabilities will not suffice, Evolutionists will manufacture the evidence they require to substantiate their false assertions.   

Prof. M. de Cyon, in his great book, “God and Science,” tells how Dr. Arnold Brass and Prof. Semper, of Wurtzburg, celebrated zoologists discovered that Haeckel was picturing the fetuses of a dog, a chicken, and a mole with a single plate labeled in three different ways. Yet, for decades, Haeckel’s books have been given to students for consultation by our American professors. 

“For decades, says De Cyon, this mountebank has imposed on the international public as a king in the world of thought...”  For this one reason alone, because all Modernists are Evolutionists, and all Evolutionists are content to accept conclusions based on mere probabilities and assumptions, their words against the inspiration of the Bible should have no weight whatsoever with earnest seekers after truth.

[The Bible: Its Christ and Modernism, T.J. McCrossan; (The Christian Alliance Publishing Company), New York, 1925], 182-184.           

To Haeckel, human reasoning was much more important than facts and evidence. He believed that the only major difference between man and the ape was that men could speak and apes could not. He therefore postulated a missing link which he called Pithecanthropus alalus (speechless apeman) and even had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw the imagined creature, although there was not a scrap of evidence to support a single detail in the drawings.

A contemporary of Haeckel, Professor Rudolf Virchow (famous as the founder of cellular pathology and for many years president of the Berlin Anthropological Society), was scathing in his criticism — for Haeckel to have given a zoological name to a creature that no one had proved to exist was to him a great mockery of science...

Of all Haeckel’s dubious activities, that for which he is most famous, or perhaps most infamous, is his promulgation of the totally erroneous theory that the human embryo is initially identical with that of other mammals and then goes through a series of stages where it has gills like a fish,¹³ a tail like a monkey, etc. Sometimes called ‘the law of recapitulation’ or Haeckel’s term ‘the biogenetic law’, this idea has been summarized in the mouthful, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history.

The first thing to say about this dictum, is that ‘law’ it is not! The idea is now known to be completely false. It is therefore not surprising that Haeckel could not find sufficient anatomical evidence to make his theory convincing. Never one to let lack of evidence stand in his way, Haeckel manufactured the ‘evidence’ by fraudulently changing the drawings of embryos by two other scientists.

In his book Natürliche Schöpfungs-geschichte (The Natural History of Creation), published in German in 1868 (and in English in 1876 with the title The History of Creation), Haeckel used the drawing of a 25-day-old dog embryo which had been published by T.L.W. Bischoff in 1845, and that of a 4-week-old human embryo published by A. Ecker in 1851’59.¹⁴ Wilhelm His, Sr (1831–1904), a famous comparative embryologist of the day and professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, uncovered the fraud.

[Russell Grigg: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/380.asp]

[Carl Sagan] is also a doctrinaire "pro-choice" advocate in regard to the issue of abortion. In Parade Magazine April 22, 1990, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan co-authored an article in which they advocated that an embryo developing in its mother's womb is not a real human until perhaps the sixth month of development. Thus they were insisting that babies could be aborted up until the third trimester. The astonishing thing about this article is the so-called "scientific" justification used as a major part of the argument. What did the man voted as the "smartest man in America" say in this article?

He and his co-author used the old, discredited idea of embryonic recapitulation to assert that an embryo in its mother's womb is not a real human for the first six months. What is this recapitulation idea?

A German scientist at the time of Darwin, Professor Ernst Haeckel, said that when an embryo develops, it passes through the various evolutionary stages that reflect its evolutionary history. As the embryo develops, it supposedly goes through a worm-like state, then a fish stage with gill slits, then an amphibian stage, and so on, until it becomes human. This view once was prevalent in biology textbooks in schools and colleges around the world. Many students became convinced of evolution because of this idea—an idea that was even illustrated with diagrams to "prove" that it was true.

However, it is now a well-known fact that Haeckel doctored his illustrations to support this erroneous view. For instance, in the book The Neck of the Giraffe, by Francis Hitching (an author who is critical of Darwinian evolution but nonetheless is an evolutionist and not a creationist), the following statements are made:

"Although Haeckel's theory fell into disrepute during the peak years of neo-Darwinist supremacy, the revival of interest in embryonic development has led a number of today's biologists to look upon his ideas more favorably. The trouble is, Haeckel was a rogue. Time and time again, Haeckel doctored his illustrations outrageously to support his biogenetic law." 

Hitching goes on to talk about Haeckel's forgeries and deception. Haeckel even admitted that he falsified the diagrams." What is so disturbing is that the man voted the "smartest man in America" still promotes ideas like Haeckel's. Read what the article in Parade Magazine, co-authored by Sagan, stated concerning the developing human embryo:

"By the third week . . . it looks a little like a segmented worm. By the and of the fourth week . . . it's recognizable as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian have become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks something like a newt or a tadpole.... By the sixth week . . . the eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be.... By the end of the eighth week the face resembles a primate's but is still not quite human."

Although Sagan doesn't mention Haeckel, this article, which is cleverly written, clearly uses Haeckel's discredited recapitulation theory to justify abortion!  

Any person who had been taught recapitulation at school or college would immediately think that Sagan is also promoting Haeckel's ideas. How sad that many thousands of people (many of them young women), will have read this article thinking that what they read from this "smart" scientist must be trustworthy. Many may even abort a baby on the basis of this misleading information.

[Ken Ham: The Smartest Man in America; http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-a/btg-048a.htm].

"Another Evolution Fraud Exposed"

Biblically based scientists have always known that the theory of evolution is fraught with false evidence. Whether in the form of deliberate hoaxes or misinterpretations of the facts based on preconceived biases, practically every "proof" of evolution supplied by Darwin’s supporters has turned out to be false. 

A notable example of this was provided by German scientist Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s staunchest supporter in nineteenth-century Europe. Like most proponents of evolution, Haeckel was less than honest and accurate in his scholarship. Stephen J. Gould, professor of biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard and the world’s leading supporter of the evolution myth, admitted in an article in the March, 2000 issue of Natural History:

“Haeckel’s forceful, eminently comprehensible, IF NOT ALWAYS ACCURATE, books appeared in all major languages and surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin…in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution (p. 42, emphasis added).”

To "prove" the greater myth of evolution, Haeckel invented the lesser myth known as "ontology recapitulates phylogeny." In a nutshell, he claimed that evolution was proved by the fact that, from its conception to its birth (or hatching), every animal passes through an evolutionary "climb" identical to the worldwide process of evolution from one-celled animals to advanced life-forms over eons of time. In other words, every animal embryo "evolves" from a microscopic mass of cells to a fish, then to an amphibian, then to a reptile, and so on. 

To prove his claim, Haeckel created numerous drawings of embryonic fish, salamanders, tortoises, chickens, pigs, dogs, and humans, all placed side by side. His drawings showed each species starting its fetal existence looking exactly like all the others, and then undergoing an individual evolutionary ascent identical to that which Darwin had proposed for the entire animal kingdom.

The problem with Haeckel’s "proof" of evolution was that his drawings were a hoax. Even Dr. Gould admitted that Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities [between embryos of different species] by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases — in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent — simply copied the same figure over and over again.…Haeckel’s drawings never fooled expert embryologists, who recognized his fudging right from the start (p. 44).

Most of the scientific establishment, eager to reject the Book of Genesis and embrace Darwin’s myth, uncritically accepted Haeckel’s artwork. Of the very few who knew them to be fraudulent, the most vocal figure was one of the greatest Creation scientists of all time, Louis Agassiz. A professor of zoology at Harvard and the first scientist to discover that the Earth had once been under a "Great Ice Age," Agassiz had vigorously opposed the introduction of evolutionary teaching at Harvard. The Swiss-born scientist made no bones about Haeckel’s pro-evolution dishonesty. When he examined the book in which Haeckel’s bogus drawings first appeared, Agassiz wrote in the margins that the drawings were "artistically crafted similarities mixed with inaccuracies," and that "these figures were not drawn from nature, but rather copied one from the other!" He then wrote the word "Atrocious" (p. 48). 

In the fight that erupted between the two scientists, Gould admitted that Agassiz generally sticks to the high road, despite ample provocation, by marshaling the facts of his greatest disciplinary expertise (in geology, paleontology, and zoology) to refute Haeckel’s frequent exaggerations and rhetorical inconsistencies. Agassiz may have been exhausted and discouraged, but he could still put up one whale of a fight, even if only in private (pp. 47-48).

Despite the fact that Haeckel’s embryo drawings have long since been exposed as fraudulent, the profoundly dishonest pro-evolution movement is, astonishingly, STILL presenting his artwork as "proof" of Darwin’s theory. Ironically, no one has been more vigorous in exposing this travesty than Dr. Gould, the world’s staunchest proponent of Darwin’s great myth. He wrote:

Haeckel’s drawings, despite their noted inaccuracies, entered into the most impenetrable and permanent of all quasi-scientific literatures: standard student textbooks of biology (p. 44)….Once ensconced in textbooks, misinformation becomes cocooned and effectively permanent, because …textbooks copy from previous texts (p. 45). Prof. Gould then made this absolutely startling admissions...

“[W]e 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! (p. 45, emphasis added) He then goes on to quote a colleague, Michael Richardson of the St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London, who stated, "I know of at least fifty recent biology texts which use the drawings uncritically" (p. 45).”

These facts are both frightening and heartening. They are frightening because they demonstrate the colossal dishonesty of the evolutionary movement, as well as the widespread nature of this dishonesty. However, it is heartening to know that even a militant anti-Creationist such as Dr. Gould would admit in the pages of a respected journal like Natural History that one of the major pieces of evidence for evolution is not only fraudulent, but is shamefully being propagated among the world’s youth to this very day. With hope, this might serve as a wake-up call for people who have been deceived into believing Darwin’s theory as scientific fact beyond the scope of doubt or question.

[Stephen Caesar, Investigating Genesis Series; http://www.creationism.org/caesar/haeckel.htm].

One of the most popular and familiar pieces of evidence used to bolster the theory of evolution – reproduced for decades in most high school and college biology textbooks – is fraudulent, and has been known to be fraudulent for nearly 100 years. Most people have seen those drawings of developing human embryos next to developing animal embryos, and they look virtually indistinguishable. (The Haeckel embryo sequence shown purported to show – left to right – a hog, calf, rabbit and human). This has long been said to demonstrate that humans share a common ancestry with these animals and thus prove the theory of evolution.

These pictures were designed by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. What few people know – and one of many surprises in the evolution debate reported in the current edition of WorldNet magazine – is that they were fakes. At Jena, the university where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court. His deceit was exposed in "Haeckel’s Frauds and Forgeries," a 1915 book by J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull, who quoted 19 leading authorities of the day.

"It clearly appears that Haeckel has in many cases freely invented embryos, or reproduced the illustrations given by others in a substantially changed form," said anatomist F. Keibel of Freiburg University. Zoologist L. Rütimeyer of Basle University called his distorted drawings "a sin against scientific truthfulness."

Yet, despite Haeckel’s fraud conviction and early exposure, Western educators continued using the pictures for decades as proof of the theory of evolution. The matter was settled with finality by Dr. Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George’s Medical School in London. He found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel’s claims by systematically comparing human and other fetuses during development. So Richardson assembled a scientific team that did just that – photographing the growing embryos of 39 different species.

In a 1997 interview in The Times of London, Dr. Richardson stated: "This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It’s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. ... What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t. ... These are fakes." 

Today – believe it or not – Haeckel’s drawings still appear in many high school and college textbooks. Among them are "Evolutionary Biology" by Douglas J. Futuyma (Third Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1998), and also the bedrock text, "Molecular Biology of the Cell" (third edition), whose authors include biochemist Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings are just one of evolution’s pillars now under spectacular scientific assault.  There are many others.

[http://sermonaudio.com/new_details.asp?8360]