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    Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud
    Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud
    Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud
    Ebook372 pages11 hours

    Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud

    By Nick Hopwood

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    About this ebook

    Pictures from the past powerfully shape current views of the world. In books, television programs, and websites, new images appear alongside others that have survived from decades ago. Among the most famous are drawings of embryos by the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in which humans and other vertebrates begin identical, then diverge toward their adult forms. But these icons of evolution are notorious, too: soon after their publication in 1868, a colleague alleged fraud, and Haeckel’s many enemies have repeated the charge ever since. His embryos nevertheless became a textbook staple until, in 1997, a biologist accused him again, and creationist advocates of intelligent design forced his figures out. How could the most controversial pictures in the history of science have become some of the most widely seen?
               
    In Haeckel’s Embryos, Nick Hopwood tells this extraordinary story in full for the first time. He tracks the drawings and the charges against them from their genesis in the nineteenth century to their continuing involvement in innovation in the present day, and from Germany to Britain and the United States. Emphasizing the changes worked by circulation and copying, interpretation and debate, Hopwood uses the case to explore how pictures succeed and fail, gain acceptance and spark controversy. Along the way, he reveals how embryonic development was made a process that we can see, compare, and discuss, and how copying—usually dismissed as unoriginal—can be creative, contested, and consequential.
               
    With a wealth of expertly contextualized illustrations, Haeckel’s Embryos recaptures the shocking novelty of pictures that enthralled schoolchildren and outraged priests, and highlights the remarkable ways these images kept on shaping knowledge as they aged.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 11, 2015
    ISBN9780226047133
    Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud

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    • 3/5
      Ernst Haeckel was a 19th and early 20th-century German zoologist and artist who was well-known as a supporter of Darwin. Haeckel thought that embryological development of advanced species recapitulated the features of adults of more primitive species. This was summarized with the phrase, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Haeckel illustrated his theory with a grid-like image with different species in columns and different stages of embryos in rows, purporting to show how similar the early embryos were. This captured the imagination of a generation of scientists and the general public to whom embryos and embryology were unfamiliar; some considered it one of the principal pieces of evidence for evolution. Haeckel had many opponents including colleagues like Wilhelm His and non-scientific anti-evolutionists. Some of his colleagues claimed that his drawings had been schematized, miscopied, or even had had the species fraudulently switched. Haeckel admitted that the drawings were schematized, but claimed that this was common in material intended for education. The history of the drawings continues to the current day, long after Haeckel’s death, and has been complicated by religious objection to the idea of evolution itself, the adoption of Haeckel by eugenicists and the Nazi party, and recent discoveries about the Hox genes and new theories about possible periods of convergent embryological development in different species.
      Anyway … I thought I had to outline these points before discussing Hopwood’s book. The book was remaindered at the University of Chicago Press, so I got it for close to nothing. It is very attractive and well-illustrated. The text is not that easy to follow if you don’t know the story already, but I think that the book’s strong points are its attempt at extensive discussion of Haeckel’s diagram, their various uses up to today, and all of the historic illustrations.

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