Wow. Are we emerging from the tunnel of post-modernism? The linked story is not from an ID site.
It’s almost as if fraud, falsehood, and fakery are a moral problem, at least in some places again:
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel was convinced that, according to his famous maxim, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—in other words, that over the course of its embryonic development, an animal passes through different stages comparable to those of the previous species in its evolutionary lineage. In Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (1874), Haeckel published a plate of his drawings showing the three successive stages of the embryonic development of the fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, rabbit, pig, and human being. A single glance at the drawings reveals that the embryos are very similar at an early stage in development.
As soon as the book was published, these illustrations met with serious criticism from some of Haeckel’s colleagues and rival embryologists. Yet it would take a full century and the comparison of Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of embryos of the same species for it to become clear that the former were far closer to works of art than scientific observation. Today, we know that ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, and that the highly talented artist Ernst Haeckel drew these plates of embryos to illustrate perfectly a theory to which he was deeply attached.
Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, “The Many Faces of Scientific Fraud” at Quillette
But wait. What happened during that full century and a lot more years?
In recent memory, we were always being told that it doesn’t really matter [that this garbage continues to appear in textbooks] because the basic idea is right? And, get this, more correct accounts would provide support for creationism?
It was pointless, in those days, to suggest that an idea like Darwinism, that supposedly underlies and makes sense of all biology, should not rely on fakery. People who built edifices of straw thought that the solution was simply to ban matchsticks.
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