Riffing off University of Calgary Jeremy Fox’s claim that Piltdown Man was the biggest scientific fraud of all time, David Klinghoffer says no, it was Haeckel’s embryos (forever in science textbooks and forever fake):
Sure, 40 years is a long time but it is a lot less than 140 years or so. Ernst Haeckel’s famous and fraudulent embryo illustrations have been in circulation a good century longer than Piltdown was, last time we checked. Despite being exposed prominently by Jonathan Wells in Icons of Evolution (2000), they continued to be featured in biology textbooks as recently as 2016. Evolution News compiled an extensive list of textbooks in 2015 and Dr. Wells reported again in Zombie Science (2017).
David Klinghoffer, “As Science Frauds Go, Haeckel Beats Piltdown Man” at Evolution News and Science Today:
More re the faked up ‘ros here.
Piltdown Man had his day in the museum and, exposed, shuffled off. The fascinating thing about Haeckel’s embryos, which do take the crown for long running fakes that actually matter, is that they were well known for a long time to be fake and even defended. But upholding Darwinism so conveniently for so long gave the faked drawings their legitimacy.
See also: Astonishing Duplicity Continues Around Haeckel’s Embryos “So stuff that isn’t true provides an “excellent foundation” and “compelling proof of the theory of common descent?” Wow. What a way to make people who never doubted common descent before start to do so…”