Recap Theory, also called "Biogenetic Law", and encapsulated in the phrase "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny" is widely known to be a fraud. What I venture to ask here is how anyone could ever have been fooled in the first place.

How could anyone fail to see the most obvious implication of such a proposal? Namely, stillborn children should emerge as fish, salamanders, and chickens. Nobody should have been unaware if children were born with feathers and proceeded to strut around the yard and crow in the morning.

I maintain the fact that such things have never been observed should have conferred common-sense immunity to anyone who did not intend to be fooled by Häckel.

In case anyone's unfamiliar, and lest I be charged with failing to support what I say, here is a link to some evolutionist propaganda on the subject. If recap theory were true, it should most surely have been discovered long before Häckel and his phony evidence.

*In case I'm not around tomorrow, Happy Atheist Day, everyone!<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

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You put up a Princeton undergraduate physics student's artwork as evidence that evolutionists still agree and teach Hackel's recapitulation hypothesis? You're a real piece of work. What? Couldn't just throw something in from Dr Dino?

this is a joke...right?<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laughroll.gif" alt="" /><img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laughroll.gif" alt="" /><img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laughroll.gif" alt="" /><img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laughroll.gif" alt="" />

You are trying really hard to make creationists look bad. What is it you have against them?

I suggest you address the hanging questions in other threads before you start new ones. Furthermore, I suggest you refrain from pasting PRATTs as new threads. If it is a Point Refuted a Thousand Times, then it behooves you to find out why this is.

The biogenetic law is not Darwinism. Poking holes in the biogenetic law is easy to do, it's been done repeatedly in the scientific literature, and it does not damage modern evolutionary biology at all.

What's more, in trying to emphasise the differences in embryological stages, Wells (the one responsible for this particular PRATT) neglects the similarities. Molecular biology has been showing us that there is a greater degree of similarity between species than previously suspected; this can be seen in studies done on hox genes (pattern-forming genes).

Read here to learn about the role of embryology in evolution, what Wells and Haeckel got wrong, and what we know and are learning about today.



This is what I was asking myself when I was reading the answersingenesis site. If you'd like me to provide evidence from there of how people are being fooled, I can give it in abundance.

Linda,

I recommend that you remember the Linear hypothesis:

CTD = Continuous Trolling Dedication

It is a valid hypothesis since it could be falsified by some sort of intelligent response by CTD.

So far it is supported by CTD's actions in 4 threads that he started and his participation in 3 other threads. I don't count the Evo-woman and Circle Boy thread because it was not about evolution, except as a joke.

When he has warned or kicked people off of forums here before, Russ has stated the number of posts out of the total posts that were trolling. I'm quite serious about tallying CTD's trolling posts. If he keeps it up then he may find that even creationists can get kicked out of here. Who knows, stranger things have happened.

He's a creationist? I thought he was having mercury problems and just posted gibberish at random.

Watch it, you. You've had a warning from Russ already. Some people here are free to sprinkle insults all over the forums but I don't think you're included on that list.

I'd really welcome Russ here to be honest. It would make a welcome change from our resident troll who is rampaging here like a toddler at a playground.

Yeah probably it is a joke. Just like the 500 at least PHD's who earned their degrees by writing thesis' on the piltdown man are a joke too.


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Jokes on you I guess. One after another.

Did I say this is evidence that evolutionists still agree & teach recap theory? No. But you're welcome to take it however you choose. At face value, I'd say someone taught this person something; but I won't venture to argue about that just yet.

Looks like my point went over your head - or did you duck? Recap theory should never have been considered anything other than a joke in the first place, if it claims human babies develop into fish, salamanders, and chickens. There was a simple, ample method available to disprove it: open one's eyes!

Truely such practice is anathema to evolutionism, as you continue to demonstrate.

Due to the absolute absence of fishbabies, chickenbabies, etc. such nonsense could never have honestly fooled many people at all - unless they wanted to be fooled. Right, oh willing one?

Gosh, how weird. I was just reading this claim on answersingenesis this morning. Then I cross-checked the facts. Guess what -- someone made this up. It may have been twisted out of an edition of Nature, where it is stated "More than five hundred articles and memoirs are said to have been written about Piltdown man." [Nature editors 1954; Harter 1996].

Thanks for providing this first piece of inaccurate information from that website. I hadn't expected a creationist to be helping me with that.

To CTD: Read my own post about this above. Click on the link. The practice of constantly repeating your absurd claims while ignoring what everyone else says, is getting old. The link I gave clarifies this issue and I would expect you to take it on board or at least respond to it in some way, if you indeed are intent on any form of serious discussion.

Name one. (You I take seriously)

Hi CTD,

Again with the accusations that evolutionists are foolish or stupid. Looks like you are just trying to egg me on with the blatant accusation that I want to be fooled. Typical of your tactics.

The idea that, even if Hackel's hypothesis had merit, there should be chicken and fish babies in human miscarriages is the height of creationist foolishness. That is, if I actually thought you were a creationist.
The worst thing about this is that your trying to make creationists look foolish puts you on the side of evolutionists. With that knowledge, I have to denounce your tactics against the creationists and Christians of this site. Your actions are below despicable and atrocious in the extreme. If I were a creationist, I would be extremely offended at the horrid parody that you are portraying.

You should offer your apologies to them.

I don't think it is "creationist foolishness" at all. If Häckel & co. claim the baby becomes successively different animals, how does one reconcile the failure of these animals to turn up when pregnancies go wrong? Not just human pregnancies - all mammals were thought to pass through stages. But no dog's ever produced a fish. How obvious is that!?

Did this just "slip by" without notice, or did people "let it slide" due to a desire to believe the untrue? Or is it a case of "everything's okay now that we know better"? A blunder like that is inexcusable. It's not okay. If it was accepted, it could only be accepted by idiots and liars.

Have you evidence that says otherwise?

Do you mean to say I'm missing stuff likefrom your link? That's not my point. Neither is my point obscure or subtle.

What was that song Weird Al wrote? Dare to be stupid, or something? Is that the only evostrategy left? Fine by me. I have seen it before, you know.

I think Linda already gave us the answer referring to numerous articles which had been published concerning it. Peer review journals are stocked full of thesis'.

At any rate since most of those once enterprising young men and women would now be dead trying to find their papers on the net would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But to say it did not happen would be equivalent to saying that what was considered one of the most important finds and proofs for evolution for over 40 yeasr was never discussed or mentioned.

this is one of the well known people who umade the fraud public btw:

Weiner, Prof. J.S. PhD, DSc, MRCP, FIBiol
MRC Environmental Physiology Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Eugenics Society Member 1947, 1957 Fellow 1977
Personal: 1957 Dept. of Human Anatomy, University Museum, Oxford; Fellow, Institute of Biology
Pubns:
The Piltdown Forgery. 1955 (exposed Piltdown fraud); International Biological Program - Convener, Section D (Human Adaptability) 1963; "Major Problems in Human Population Biology" in Biology of Human Adaptability., Weiner and Baker 1966; "Human adaptability: its world wide study within the International Biological Program", 1968 Darwin Lecture in Human Biology for the Eugenics Society
Source: ER 1947, 1957, 1977 list

And Arthur Smith Woodward, as we know as one of the original perpetrators of that fraud was keeper of geology at the British (now Natural History) Museum for many years.

What is taught in academia is written about in academia and thus people get degrees based on their knowledge of certain areas and teach about those things again. No way around it.

But it would be nice to find out which well known 'scientists' did use that for their PHD's and some of the articles. I'm pretty sure Teilhard de Chardin was one and research could certainly turn up more specifics. but again, the internet didn't come along till 1992 for the most part in any real sense of the word even 1995 with win 95 and most of those people were dead by then, not publishing their wok on the net, especially thesis project work that was now rejected.

At the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man. It was an open question as to what that missing link would look like. Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor. Scientists were generally not as skeptical as they should have been, for this reason, though from the start there were significant numbers who objected quite vociferously to the supposed find.

The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time could have immediately revealed the hoax. This failure to adquately examine the fossils went unmarked and unnoticed at the time - in large part because the hoax admirably satisfied the theoretical expectations of the time. Do scientists sometimes make mistakes? Yes.

However, during the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopithecus, the Peking man discoveries, and other Homo erectus and australopithecine finds. Piltdown man did not fit in with the new discoveries.In the period 1930-1950 Piltdown man was increasingly marginalized and by 1950 was, by and large, simply ignored. From time to time it was puzzled over and then dismissed again. The American Museum of Natural History quietly classified it as a mixture of ape and man fossils. Over the years it had become an anomaly.

The following quote comes from a "The Evolution of Man", a 1927 book by Grafton Elliot Smith:

"Yet it [the skullcap] was found in association with the fragment of a jaw presenting so close a resemblance to the type hitherto known only in Apes that for more than twelve years many competent biologists have been claiming it to be the remains of a Chimpanzee."

Piltdown man has been discussed time and time again by creationists because they seem to want us to think that because one hoax was accepted by the general scientific community for a period of time (and not by all of them, see above), that this therefore means that all of the thousands upon thousands of fossil finds in the world could just as easily be hoaxes. Such an illogical conclusion is clearly absurd, and it would also necessitate proving that all scientists are either incompetent gullible fools, or liars who are involved in an elaborate conspiracy to hoax everyone about evolution.

As for the "500 PhDs," this claim is clearly in error. When one considers the small number of PhDs in paleontology being granted currently and the even smaller number 80 years ago and the diversity of topics chosen for PhD theses a figure of half a dozen seems generous; in all probability there were none whatsoever. John Rice Cole notes that in the 20s there were about 2 dissertations per year in physical anthropology in the entire US on ANY topic.

Robert Parson made a systematic search of the bibliographies of The Piltdown Forgery by Weiner, The Piltdown Inquest by Blinderman, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery and The Piltdown Papers by Spencer, The Antiquity of Man (1925) and New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931) by Sir Arthur Keith. Spencer and Keith's works have extensive references and bibliographies of the primary research literature. There are no references to any doctoral dissertations.

The above information comes from here. But if you think you can do better, and uncover a Piltdown man PhD, then go for it.

I said above that the link I gave explains how Wells and Haeckel were both wrong, as well as what we know and are learning today. You appear to have done nothing but cherry-picked a paragraph that explains how Haeckel was wrong. Did you bother to read anything else there? Wells was wrong too, and embryology is an important part of evolution. You are wrong too, as LinearAQ told you, because you have made a very silly strawman out of what Haeckel actually said.


I've seen this before too: two of you now, here, who seem to think that calling me stupid is going to blow everything I've said out of the water. Is that honestly the best reply to the evidence that you can come up with? You're also aware, presumably, that others are reading this and judging you accordingly?

I think that what she is trying to say is that, at this point in time, the study of evolution is very concerned with studying itself to try to figure out what is true and what is not and who did what where.

Over a span of 40 years, the piltdown jawbone only got the serious attention of 20 people per year or so. Not very many really. Considering it got much more attention after it was proven to be false, that might be worth something. Well there's a notch in your cookie jar... the study of evolution has proven something false. So it's not completely unfalsifiable afterall.

Did I call you stupid? Gosh I'm so sorry I don't recall calling you stupid, maybe you read my mind.

But Hackel's hypothesis didn't say that. It was about the similarities between the embryos of different species and how they diverged from each other during development. Hackel's mistake was that he hypothesized that the similarities were indicators of actual evolution going on in the embryonic development. Additionally, he "fudged" the drawings of early stage embryos to support the theory and over-emphasize similarities.

See evidence above and at: Wikipedia

Since your understanding of Hackel's hypothesis is incorrect, any subsequent accusation of stupidity and gullibility on the part of evolutionists is invalid.

I find it increasingly difficult to believe that you can continually make mistakes in understanding of this magnitude. A simple google search resulted in the correct information displayed right in front of me. I had to really dig deep to find that one physics student's artwork and poetic description of the development of the human fetus.
This is another indicator to me that you are purposefully providing any information no matter how obscure in order to make creationists look bad. Have you no shame?

But it has nothing at all to do with what we were saying about Thomas Huxley and the club, whichever club that is, my fingers are full from counting clubs.

So where does this fit into all of that?

I cannot overemphasize this enough. I do not see where this fits in with Thomas Huxley. Would you puhlllease explain the connection you are trying to make here?

How far do I have to streeettch to get you to understand?

You're trolling now too and you know it. Stop blathering about Thomas Huxley everywhere and put your comments in the relevant thread.

I'm sorry but mentioning Thomas Huxley is not trolling. Trolling means, literally, putting your hook out there and looking for bites.

I am not looking for bites. I am chasing a school. I am using a net not a hook.

Sorry, trolling does not apply.


If this is trolling then all of your posts are trolls.

OK then.

If you insist on pursuing this childish tactic then you will simply be ignored. What you think it shows about your "side" of the argument or about your willingness to engage in real discussion, I don't know.

Sure, I probably should have been more to the point.
Thomas Huxley understood a little about evolution but some of his misunderstanding was almost as poor as CTD's understanding of Hackel's hypothesis about recapitulation.
Since Huxley couldn't really explain evolution in a cogent fashion to the scientific community, he had to work in the political and art worlds to influence the acceptance of evolution. Unfortunately, Mr Huxley's misunderstandings and his bent towards atheism led to a skewed version of evolution (humans are not all on the same level, evolution acceptance requires atheism...etc) being communicated to the nonscientists. It is this skewed version of evolution that lead to the crazy stuff like eugenics and Hitler's final solution.
This is much akin to CTD's egregious misunderstandings about Hackel's hypothesis leading to his outlandishly ignorant conclusions about what the hypothesis should have predicted and his unreasonable assumption concerning the intelligence and gullibility of all evolutionists.

That is, assuming CTD is a creationist at all....which I doubt.

Does this explanation help?

From LindaLou:
From LinearAq:

It is quite true that Häckel never made the claims attributed to him in the straw-man argument I presented. I shan't try terribly hard to wring further acknowledgments of truth from hostile witnesses in this thread. Instead, I shall proceed to the point.

Suppose for a moment, one desires to be a flat-earther, and wants to be respected. Step one: invent a new label. "Non-curved environmentalist" will suffice for this example. Step two: make the new label appear distinct from that which has been discredited. How to do so, while still remaining a flat-earther?

One way would be to assign a false belief to flat-earthism, and demolish it. Claim the flat earth theory requires lead plumbing and pumps to maintain water levels, and then prove/accept that no such plumbing can be found. By use of the straw-man, proceed to claim that Non-curved environmentalsim is modern & enlightened, and flat earthism is primitive rubbish.

See how that works? See the importance of the straw man in this process? Please consider the following from the wiki link provided by LinearAq, with a little bold emphasis:And 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.

Do other evolutionists employ this very straw man? I'll add some bold to another example:
When we look at what Häckel's drawings, they do not contain adult versions of any creature! Evolutionists have created their own straw man, and they continue to push the very same thing they "disavow". See LindaLou's link to talkdeceptions for a fine example. Have they more examples, redefined terms, newly-invented terms, and elaborations? Yes. 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 . . .



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:



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:



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.

Distraction. Nothing in the rest of the paragraph deals with genetics.
And so do the fish, according to your pals.Häckel would be proud.
Just as recap theory in the past claimed that similarities in development provide a clue to ancestry, so... it still does! Whoever could have guessed?

You assume I've done no homework. I've seen my share of what talk talkdeceptions says.

So far, here's my favorite part of the speil from your link
Simply put: Häckel was biased for stressing similarities. Wells was biased for stressing differences. Talk deceptions corrects this by stressing similarities. Come on!

"The differences are superficial" = Häckel has been vindicated. Don't you speak evolutionese?

But this is trivial. This is just the start of the propaganda. In a gray box over to the right, surprise! surprise! they have a link "Ontogeny and Development of Organisms
The part of 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution," Folks will have no trouble guessing where this leads.

"Ontogeny and developmental biology" is the oh-so-cleverly-disguised section containing arguments straight from Darwin, Häckel, and the rest of the biogenetic lawyers. Talkdeceptions is pushing exactly the same thing. They say they reject recap, and turn right around an push it. I have in the past had an evolutionist or two acknowledge that talkdeceptions does this, but history does not always repeat.

Place is nasty, but good laughs are to be had as well. The "2.5" section ends:Is that bold or what?

Ah! Of course!! The definition of "represents" is "looks exactly like". The Bible represents God. So God is a book, because the the Bible must look just like Him. Well actually a set of scrolls. Is that what you mean?
My congressman represents his constituents in the government so my congressman looks just like several million people when he working.
I really didn't know this was possible!!

What would you have us believe a picture represents?

Stand by, folks. This could be good!

On the contrary, it is very much the point, even if you don't want it to be.

The fact that embryos have resemblances to each other is not in dispute. It is also a fact that human embryos go through a stage of having tails and pharyngeal pouches. You seem to be saying that because evolutionists want to study these things, they must agree that Haeckel was right. This is illogical.

What's more, it is also not in dispute that hox genes "blueprint" an embryo's development. You can deny the existence of hox genes and their function if you want but that doesn't mean their reality is going to disappear.

Most of your language here is nothing but the usual bluster about how you think it's so funny that scientists can believe any of this. Why don't you try reading up on the facts with an open mind rather that exclaiming "Ha! Those evolutionism-ists are up to their silly tricks again!" You never know, you might actually learn something about how the world works.

Source

Naturally, this is just more evidence of common design, which the evolutionist must fail to recognize. This process and its result: symmetry.

Good to note that neo-recap isn't getting so far, on account of discoveries like this. Don't want to underestimate the hard-liners, but right now they're facing an uphill battle just keeping their lies in the textbooks. Not in a good position to go on the offensive. Their best hope is to grow their numbers - lots of ignorance in this world, and plenty who hate God. Such are candidates to eagerly espouse recap doctrines for ideological reasons - just like in the past.

Please explain why you think that embryos showing differences at this stage of their development is evidence against evolution and for design. Embryos begin to develop in remarkable similar ways, so please show why arbitrarily picking a point in their development and saying "you can tell the species apart now, so they must have been designed" is evidence for your position.

I'm not inclined to keep talking on this thread because none of us here knows much about this subject, though that doesn't stop certain people from making ignorant criticisms all the same. What we would need to do is learn some real things about embryology so that we could discuss it intelligently, but I can't say it's near the top of the list of my own priorities.

The words of T.H. Huxley:


First discovered here.

Verified here.

Guess he wasn't considered enough of an authority, huh?