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Does their current teaching differ from the (actual) discredited Recap Theory in any significant way? Not at all! Do they maintain it's evidence for evolutionism? You bet!


I have to admit I was wondering what your point was while I was reading your post. Got there in the end. You're saying that evolution has discredited Haeckel while secretly still believing his ideas. OK . . .

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For example, Haeckel believed that the human embryo with gill slits (pharyngeal arches) in the neck not only signified a fishlike ancestor, but represented an adult "fishlike" developmental stage.
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This is the very same straw man I presented in the opening post of this topic. I maintained that nobody could ever have believed this nonsense, and I expect everyone can readily see that this is so.


Genetics was unknown in Haeckel's time. Embryos do have similarities to each other, and human embryos do exhibit tails and pharyngeal arches (marks which look like, but are not, gill slits). At the heart of this was an attempt to explain the reason why this is. Haeckel was over-keen to show evolution in embryology. Scientists never universally accepted Haeckel's ideas either; Adam Sedgwick, for example, who was a well-known and respected scientist of the time, rejected it in 1894.

If you were genuinely curious about what science knows now, you would have seen the following paragraph at the end of the article I linked you to:

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Evolutionary theory is not founded on Haeckel's observations or theories. Haeckel's work was discredited in the 19 th century, and has not been relevant to biology since the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of genetics. That the biogenetic law is false has been the consensus of biologists for over 100 years, and developmental biologists have been working constructively to provide alternative explanations, which have so far all been evolutionary in nature.

The similarities between vertebrate embryos are real. We must distinguish between observations of those similarities and hypotheses about their causes. The similarities are not in doubt; there are worthwhile studies of the degree and timing of the similarities, but none that question their overall existence. What Wells has described is one hypothesis about the cause, Haeckel's biogenetic law, which failed early and spectacularly. He has not addressed any modern hypotheses, nor has he provided a better alternative.

Evidence for common descent lies in the unity of form and process. We do not use Haeckel's outmoded, invalid mechanism to argue for evolution. Instead, we look at the marvelous convergence of disparate organisms on common principles: all animals use the same genes to define regions of their bodies, all vertebrates build their faces by unlikely rearrangements of odd pharyngeal protrusions, and even tailless mammals like us have to start with tailed embryos. The best explanation for these phenomena is that they are a consequence of a common heritage.


The article describes how hox genes are involved in "blueprinting" the way an organism develops. The remarkable similarity in how they work, in different species, is actually good evidence that they have a common ancestor.

You can find here an extract from a biology textbook which explains hox genes, how they control embryological development, and how they fit with evolution. This quote may be of particular interest here:

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Hox genes evidently duplicated twice during the evolution of invertebrates into vertebrates, justas there were multiple duplications of the globin gene. Instead of one cluster of about 10 genes on 1 chromosome like the fruit fly, the mouse has 4 clusters of about 10 genes each, on 4 different chromo-somes. Hox genes in mice and humans are very similar in number and chromosomal arrangement. It isremarkable that only about 40 genes out of a total of about 100,000 control most of the development,architecture, and appearance of the body plan of complex mammalian species.


Please can I ask you again to research these topics and try to gain some degree of understanding before you criticise them. It is nonsensical to criticise something you know little about. It makes perfect sense, and is quite scientific, to admit you don't know, and ask questions.