Joy Born at Bethlehem

Ernst Haeckel: Darwin’s German Apostle

May 6, 2014

The following is from the book SEEING THE NON-EXISTENT: EVOLUTION’S MYTHS AND HOAXES. ISBN 1-58318-002-8.

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Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) promoted Darwinism enthusiastically in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He met Darwin three times and nearly worshipped the man.

Though modern evolutionists outside of Germany have largely distanced themselves from Haeckel, his theories and charts continue to influence students of evolution to this day.

Haeckel has been called “one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of his time” (Mario Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, p. 26).

His scientific writings sold in the hundreds of thousands and were translated into 25 languages. Richard Weikart says they were “probably the most popular nonfiction books in Germany” in that day (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 24).

In the March 2000 issue of Natural History Stephen Jay Gould stated:

“Haeckel’s forceful, eminently comprehensible, if not always accurate, books appeared in all major languages and surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin ... in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution.”

In 1921, physiologist Max Verworn said:

“One can state without exaggeration that no scientist has exercised a greater influence on the development of our contemporary worldview than Haeckel” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 11).

Richard Goldschmidt, a leading geneticist of the twentieth century, was one of countless individuals influenced by Haeckel. He described the effect that Haeckel’s book Natural History of Creation had on him at age 16:

“It seemed that all problems of heaven and earth were solved simply and convincingly; there was an answer to every question which troubled the young mind. Evolution was the key to everything and could replace all the beliefs and creeds which one was discarding. There were no creation, no God, no heaven and hell, only evolution and the wonderful law of recapitulation which demonstrated the fact of evolution to the most stubborn believer in creation. I was so fascinated and shaken up that I had to communicate to others my new knowledge, and this was done in the schoolyard, on school picnics, and among friends. I remember vividly a scene during a school picnic when I stood surrounded by a group of schoolboys to whom I expounded the gospel of Darwinism as Haeckel saw it” (Goldschmidt, Portraits from Memory, p. 34).

Born into a liberal Christian home, Haeckel became an evolutionist while studying medicine, but it was theological modernism that paved the way. His parents “were deeply religious, yet with a liberal inclination” (Gregorio, p. 26). In particular, they were influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher, who died the year that Ernst was born. Schleiermacher paved the way for Darwinian evolution by replacing the authority of an infallible Bible with that of human intuition and feeling. He reconciled humanistic philosophy with the Bible by downgrading the Bible to a separate, mythical level of reality. “In his separation of the intellectual content of Christianity (the objective biblical revelation) from Christian ‘feeling’, Schleiermacher seemed to provide a means whereby the essence of Christianity could remain unaffected, no matter how much of the Bible was rejected” (Ian Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, p. 11).

Schleiermacher was wrong. Once the Bible’s historicity is placed in doubt, its authority is destroyed. True Christian faith is based on a revelation from God (Romans 10:17), a revelation that claims to be divinely inspired (2 Timothy 3:16-17), the historical foundation of which are said to be “infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3). If that revelation is not factually accurate, the Christian faith is blind and non-sustainable.

Schleiermacher further paved the way for Darwinianism through his pantheistic view of God. He replaced the personal Creator God of Scripture with a vague “first cause.” He wrote, “There is no God without the world, no world without God” (Gregorio, p. 27). This “God” could easily be thought of as a god who created through billions of years of evolution.

Heresy and pagan philosophy was in the air in Germany in that day, and Haeckel imbibed deeply of it. He learned of evolution before he ever heard of Charles Darwin.

Haeckel was influenced, for example, by the philosophy of Johann Wolfgang Goethe. He first encountered Goethe in a book by Matthias Schleiden given to him by his parents as a Christmas gift. Schleiden presented an evolutionary view of life progress from simple to complex and placed a quote from Goethe at the beginning of each chapter. Haeckel later followed that practice in one of his books. Goethe taught the transmutation of species as early as 1796.

“... all the more perfected organic natural types, among which we view fishes, amphibians, birds, mammals and at the pinnacle of the latter, man, are formed according to a single archetype that only deviates around its very constant parts to a greater or lesser degree, and develops and reorganises itself on a daily basis through reproduction” (cited from Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, p. 147).

Haeckel was also influenced by men such as Bernhard von Cotta, a geologist who taught evolution from “the simplest organic cell to the human species,” and Friedrich Humboldt, who taught “virtually every corner stone in Haeckel’s system.” And there were others.

In spite of this unwholesome intellectual diet, at age 20 Haeckel still held to a semblance of Christian faith. In a “Penitential sermon of a 20-year-old boy to himself,” he exhorted himself to “hold fast to the most steadfast faith in God,” to have confidence in “his miraculous loving-kindness,” and to “confide in God; he will save you and guide you.”

Sadly, Haeckel did not go to the Bible and to the Christ of the Bible for this faith in God but instead tried to maintain a Christian faith divorced from an infallibly divine Revelation. In fact, he hated orthodox Lutheranism with its “Scripture alone” dogma.

This weak reed could not sustain, and it is not surprising that Haeckel’s life was transformed during his postgraduate studies by reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which had been published in German in 1860.

“As he explained in a letter to his mistress, written in his waning years, he began as a Christian but when he started to practice medicine and penetrate the mysteries of life and its evolution, he became--after the most desperate spiritual conflict--a free-thinker and pantheist” (Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. 180).

After obtaining his doctorate, he took a teaching position at Jena University and remained there for nearly 50 years. 

Called “the gadfly of Jena,” Haeckel was morally loose. He had many mistresses. In 1898, when he was 64 and his first wife was an invalid, he began a five-year adulterous affair with a woman 34 years his junior. His paramour beat him to the grave, committing suicide at age 35. 

Haeckel’s daughter, Emma, had to be committed to a mental institution for the final part of her life. 

Haeckel determined that man is the product of blind chance. He said that “man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature” (The Riddle of the Universe, New York: Harper, 1900, p. 14).

If this is true, and it is true if naturalistic evolution is correct, it means that there is no purpose to life and everything is the result of chance, even man’s thoughts and deductions. It means that it does not ultimately matter what man believes or how he lives. No wonder that Haeckel wrote to his father in 1864, “Personal individual existence appears to me so horribly miserable, petty, and worthless, that I see it as intended for nothing but for destruction” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 76). 

Haeckel rejected the God of the Bible, the divine inspiration of Scripture, the fall of man, heaven, and hell, and the deity, virgin birth, sinlessness, blood atonement, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Haeckel said, 

“For me the value of Darwin is that the human no longer needs to have a supernatural soul, and that one no longer needs purpose to explain creation” (Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 26). 

Haeckel became a great blasphemer, calling the Creator God of Scripture “a gaseous Vertebrate.”

Haeckel’s god was nature. He was the inventor of the term “ecology,” and he believed in a sort of metaphysical power in nature that he called Monism. He wrote, “We are compelled by reflection to recognize that God is not to be placed against the material world [as in Christianity], but must be placed as a ‘divine power’ or ‘moving spirit’ within the cosmos itself” (Haeckel, Monism: The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1895, p. 15). This is pagan panentheism, wherein God is in everything. 

Haeckel believed that the religion of nature would destroy Christianity and envisioned a time when churches would become places of nature worship. He envisioned the enthroning of Urania or Venus, the Greek goddess of astrology, love and beauty, in the place of Jesus Christ.

“The religious service of the Sunday, which will continue as the ancient day of rest, of edification and relaxation that follows the six workdays of the working week, will undergo an essential improvement in the monistic church. The mystical belief in supernatural miracles will be replaced by clear knowledge of the true miracles of nature. The temples of God as places of devotion will not be adorned with images of saints and crucifixes, but with richly artistic representations from the inexhaustible realms of beauty of natural and human life. Between the high columns of the Gothic cathedrals, which have climbing plants winding around them, slender palms and tree-ferns, graceful banana trees and bamboos, will remind us of the creative powers of the tropics. In great aquaria below the church windows, delightful jellyfish and siphonophores, brightly colored corals and starfish, will elucidate the art-forms of marine life. In place of the high altar there will be a statue of Urania, which will represent the omnipotence of the law of matter through the movements of the planets” (Haeckel, Die Weltratsel: Gemeinverstandliche Stadien uber Monistische Philosophie, 1901, pp. 462-63, quoted from Hitler and the Germans by Eric Voegelin and Brenden Purcell, p. 126). 

Known as “Darwin’s Bulldog on the Continent,” Haeckel “became Darwin’s chief European apostle, proclaiming the gospel of evolution with evangelistic fervor, not only to the university intelligentsia but also to the common man through popular books and lectures in rented halls.” 

Haeckel set up elaborate displays for his lectures, with all sorts of skeletons, fascinating drawings and charts, many of them fanciful and others out-and-out deceptive. 

Haeckel’s Racism

Haeckel believed that man evolved from apes and that some “races” are less evolved. 

He wrote, “New perfect races arise continually and improve themselves in the struggle for existence, while the imperfect races, just as frequently as they drive out the old root-forms, die out and become extinct” (Di Gregorio, p. 90).  He said the “lower races of men ... remind us of our animal ancestors, and ... seem to manifest a closer connection with the gorilla and chimpanzee of that region than with a Kant or Goethe” (p. 246). He said the tribes of South Africa “have remained, down to the present day, at the lowest stage of human development, and made the smallest advance beyond the ape” (p. 247).

Some of Haeckel’s charts depicted the supposed evolution of modern man from the lower “race” (Negroid) to the higher (Caucasians, and especially, of course, Germans). He strongly believed in racial superiority, considering it a natural product of evolution. Haeckel wrote, 

“Between the most highly developed animal soul and the least developed human soul there exists only a small quantitative, but no qualitative difference, and that this difference is much less, than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls, or as the difference between the highest and lowest animal souls” (The Natural History of Creation, 1868).

He divided man into two “species” -- the straight-haired and the wooly-haired. He looked upon Australian aborigines as closer to apes or even dogs in their reasoning faculties than to the “higher humans.”  Haeckel said that since the “wooly-haired” are “psychologically nearer to the mammals than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives” (Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctor, p. 125).

Haeckel made a drawing of a tree populated by a gorilla, an orangutan, a chimpanzee, and a Negro.

In The Natural History of Creation, Haeckel featured a series of 12 drawings depicting the alleged evolution of man from ape to Greek. There are six apes and six men. The highest ape looks much like the lowest man, who is some sort of African black man or an Australian aboriginal. The drawings are heavily modified, in that the apes are given more human features, while the “lower” humans are given more ape-like features. 

Haeckel held that “the lower species of men” are of little value. “The value of life of these lower wild peoples is equal to that of the anthropoid apes or stands only slightly above them” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 109). As Richard Weikart observes, “Haeckel’s devaluing of ‘primitive’ races, by placing them on par with animals, would be the first stop toward a genocidal mentality” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 110). 

Modern evolutionists are quick to distance themselves from the racism that was rampant among early Darwinians, but if evolution is true, then racism would also have a scientific basis. Why would all evolved men be equal? Why wouldn’t some be more recently and more highly evolved? It is only the Bible’s doctrine of divine creation, which says men are made in the image of God, that gives men real equality and refutes racism. Creation teaches us that all men and women are children of the same father, Adam, and he was not an ape!

Haeckel’s Culture of Death

Haeckel argued that as evolution, supposedly, rewards the “fittest,” man should help evolution along by eliminating the unfit. He wrote:

“The cruel and unsparing ‘struggle for existence,’ which rages--and naturally must rage--everywhere in the biosphere, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an undeniable fact; only the chosen minority of the privileged fit ones in the condition to survive successfully this competition, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably” (Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 80).

In The Natural History of Creation, 1870, Haeckel praised the Spartans, because they practiced euthanasia of imperfect babies in order to create the superior man. Later “he confessed that he had indeed supported infanticide in his earlier book” (Weikart, p. 146). Killing of the unfit was, in his estimation, the logical consequence of Darwinian survival of the fittest. 

Haeckel promoted abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia for the “inferior” and the infirm. He proposed “a dose of some painless and rapid poison” to do away with the “hundreds of thousands of incurables--lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc.” (Weikart, pp. 118, 119). Haeckel proposed that euthanasia program that would be “under the control of an authoritative commission” (p. 119). 

Hitler took Haeckel’s Darwinian philosophy to the most radical conclusion, euthanizing millions of “inferiors” and forcefully sterilizing millions more. 

Haeckel gave impetus to the abortion movement by teaching that the embryo is still in the evolutionary stage and not fully human. Even the newborn child, according to Haeckel, “not only possesses no consciousness and no reason, but is also dumb and only gradually develops the activity of the senses and of the mind” (Weikart, p. 147). Haeckel believed that the newborn infant has no soul and therefore “the destruction of abnormal newborn infants cannot rationally be classed as murder” (Haeckel, The Wonders of Life, 1904, p. 21).

For the mentally handicapped, he recommended “a small dose of morphine or cyanide” to “free this pitiable creature” from itself as well as from being a burden on its caretakers (ibid). 

Since Haeckel believed that man does not have an eternal soul, human life was considered no more significant than that of an animal. He wrote, “... we have the right--or if one prefers--the duty, to end the deep suffering of our fellow humans, if strong illness without hope of recovery makes their existence unbearable and if they themselves ask us for ‘redemption from evil’” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 148). 

“Not only did Haeckel justify infanticide, abortion, and assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, but he also supported the involuntary killing of the mentally ill. He condemned the idea that all human life should be preserved, ‘even when it is totally worthless.’ ... He complained that not only are many mentally ill people burdens to society, but so are lepers, cancer patients, and others with incurable illnesses. Why not just spare ourselves much pain and money, he asked, by just giving them a shot of morphine? ... The leading Darwinist in Germany thus gave his scientific imprimatur to murdering the disabled, both in infancy and in adulthood” (Weikart, p. 148).

Haeckel wanted to raise the German people to the status of a superior race, purified of the blood of the unfit. His disciple Alexander Tille said that their goal was “the elevation and more excellent formation of the human race,” and this would require a two-fold program: “careful selection of the best” and “merciless elimination of the worst” (Weikart, p. 45).

Hitler carried this program forth with a vengeance. His book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) presented his vision for “survival of the fittest” toward the perfection of the human race. There he proposed “a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved.” These excrescences were identified as “mongrels and negroids.” His vision was that this struggle of purification would “lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth.” 

Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess said that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology” (Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 31).

Haeckel’s culture of death did not end with the collapse of Hitler’s Nazi regime. It has made tremendous strides since then.

As for the association between Darwinism and this culture, Richard Weikart observes, 

“... even though not all Darwinists and eugenicists went along with Haeckel’s program of ‘rational’ extermination of the disabled, it is striking that the vast majority of those who did press for abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fervent proponents of a naturalistic Darwinian worldview” (From Darwin to Hitler, p. 149). 

Haeckel’s Embryo Chart and the Law of Recapitulation

It was Haeckel who devised the iconic embryo chart “proving” that at the embryonic stage man looks almost exactly like various types of embryonic animals. 

He based this on the “law of recapitulation” (also called the biogenetic law) which stated that the human embryo goes through an evolutionary cycle during which it resembles a single-celled marine organism, then a worm, then a fish with gill slits, then a monkey with a tail, and finally a human. According to recapitulation, each creature repeats or recapitulates the entire alleged evolutionary history. Thus, the human embryo passes along through various stages from a single cell to a fish to an amphibian to a reptile to a mammal to an ape to a human. Supposedly, as evolutionary progress is made by a certain creature, new stages are added to its embryonic growth. 

Haeckel summarized this “law” with the saying “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Ontogeny refers to the growth of the embryo, whereas phylogeny refers to evolutionary history.

Haeckel’s embryo chart first appeared in print in 1866 in his book Generalle Morphologie der Organismen and in 1868 in the book The Natural History of Creation, and since then it has been republished in various forms in countless textbooks, journals, popular reports, and museums. It is still appearing in textbooks in the early 21st century. One teacher said, “I have taught Jr. High Science for over 35 years. Every textbook from every major publisher I have ever seen has had Haeckel’s embryos pictured and the text usually claims this as a proof for evolution” (http://creation.com/fraud-rediscovered). 

The problem is that it is a grand scientific fraud, and it has been known by scientists to be a fraud since the 19th century! 

We have documented this in the section of this book on “Icons of Evolution.”

Haeckel’s Monera and Huxley’s Bathybius Haeckelii

Ernst Haeckel wasn’t satisfied to fabricate an influential embryo chart and thus deceive multitudes of people. He also invented a substance called “Monera” or “Urschleim” (primordial slime) to fit into his evolutionary “family tree” as the missing link between animate and inanimate matter.  

In The History of Creation (1868), Haeckel included a series of drawings showing the actual appearance, eating habits, and reproductive cycle of the mythical Monera. He said, “[They are] not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simple homogeneous matter ... nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combinations of carbon,” and, “organisms without organs, which in their perfectly developed condition form a freely moving, naked, perfectly structureless and homogeneous mass of sarcode (Protoplasm).” 

Monera, which are supposed to form “spontaneously” on the ocean floor, were thought to give rise to all other organisms “through the course of time through differentiation and natural selection in the struggle for existence” (Gregorio, From Here to Eternity, p. 138).

Haeckel even gave the Monera the scientific name Protamoeba primitivia.  

Understand that Haeckel did not present Monera as theory. He presented it as scientific reality. As Russell Grigg observes, “The extent of the detail is the measure of his fraud, as the Monera did not then and do not now exist!” (“Ernst Haeckel: Evangelist for Evolution and Apostle of Deceit,” Creation.com). 

Following is an account of this amazing story:

“He imaginatively made up the names of organisms that he thought should exist and was not beyond cheating just a little if the facts of nature did not fit his theories. Recognizing that there was a gap at the base of the family tree, a vital transition missing between the inorganic non-living matter and the first sign of organic life, Haeckel invented a series of minute organisms he called the Monera to fill it. He published details of the various kinds of Monera, with drawings of these shapeless blobs of protoplasm without nuclei that he said reproduced by a process of fission. 

“At the time of his writing, in 1868, not even a hint of the Monera had been found, but, coincidentally, later that same year Thomas Huxley, working in England, reported finding some microscopic organisms in mud samples dredged up from the depths of the North Atlantic. These small organisms appeared to be a very primitive form of organized life, although the samples had been preserved in strong alcohol so that they were not alive. Huxley recognized these organisms as Haeckel’s Monera and proposed to call the particular species he had discovered Bathybius haeckelii in honor of the professor at the University of Jena. 

“Nothing better could happen to a natural scientist than to have his name Latinized and appended to some creature, no matter how lowly. His fame spread, aided perhaps by the prophetic qualities that were flatteringly ascribed to his many other talents. Throughout the 1870s HMS Challenger continued to dredge up samples of mud containing B. haeckelii, thus confirming Haeckel’s prediction and Huxley’s observation. Meanwhile, great publicity was made of this since it implied abiogenesis and was urgently needed to prop up Darwin’s theory. Many, perhaps wavering in their faith in divine creation, at last capitulated to science when confronted with B. haeckelii. From the HMS Challenger work, Huxley confidently said that the Bathybius, this life in the making, ‘probably forms one continuous scum of living matter ... on the sea bed ... girding the whole surface of the earth.’ 

“It was customary practice at that time for living samples to be preserved for later examination by dropping them into a specimen jar of strong alcohol. This was done in a routine manner to the mud samples on board the HMS Challenger, but a chemist on the expedition, who seems to have been more committed to his chemistry than to biology, pointed out that the protoplasmic matter recognized as B. HAECKELII WAS NOTHING MORE THAN AN AMORPHOUS PRECIPITATE OF SULPHATE OF LIME (GYPSUM) WHICH FORMS WHEN SEAWATER IS ADDED TO ALCOHOL! 

“The date was 1875 and that should have been the end of B. haeckelii, then and there, but it was vitally important that those promoting the theory of evolution, not lose the public confidence by exposure of this fiasco. Scientists were defending their authority as the Roman Church leaders had their authority in the face of Galileo’s discoveries. The matter was reported somewhat obscurely in the Quarterly Journal of the Microscopical Science and at the Royal Society of London the following year, but no public comment was made on the significance of this discovery. The author is indebted to Rupke for scanning all the English and European journals of the day to find only one article, and that in French, which critically discusses the way the public had been misled over the question of Monera.

“One may well wonder how such a grand cover-up was possible. It is not difficult to surmise how when something of the conspiratorial nature of nineteenth century British science, with T.H. Huxley as the grand master, is understood. It has been exposed by Irving (1955) and by Bibby (1972). The latter describes how Huxley formed the X-Club in 1864--the members could never agree on a name--and it consisted of nine members who, with one exception, were all presidents and secretaries of learned societies; the one exception was Herbert Spencer... These nine were men at the top of their profession, hand picked for their views, and holding personal influence on almost every famous scientist in the world, as well as on many distinguished radicals. .... The members met for dinner always immediately before each meeting of the Royal Society, at which time strategy was plotted. By this means, British science was literally ‘governed’, from 1864 until 1884, by Huxley and his disciples, and, with their combined influence over the scientific press it was little wonder that the 1876 report of the demise of Huxley’s B. haeckelii was never made public” (Ian Taylor, In the Mind of Man, pp. 182-185). 

True to character, Haeckel did not apologize publicly for his gross error. In fact, he did not even pull the myth from his book! Haeckel’s History continued to be widely circulated--complete with the unrevised account of the mythical Monera--for another half century both in English and German and continued to wield an influence.

We see, then, that the enthusiastic evolutionists Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley had the same amazing powers as Percival Lowell. Whereas Lowell saw canals, Haeckel and Huxley saw Monera. 

Haeckel’s Evolutionary Tree

Ernst Haeckel was the inventor of the evolutionary “family tree,” and this was probably his most lasting and influential creation. 

Haeckel’s “family tree” depicted all of life as a single tree with the mythical “Moneren” at the bottom of the trunk and “Menschen” (people) at the top. (Haeckel was apparently the first to alliterate the evolutionary scale.) Life supposedly progressed from moneren to amoeba to fish to amphibian to reptile to mammals to man. This is the trunk of the tree, and the various types of creatures within the major categories allegedly branched off in various directions as evolution took its blind twists and turns. 

Though modern evolutionists would not agree with Haeckel about the details of the “family tree,” they do believe in “particle to people” evolution. They do believe that every living thing began as some sort of “monera.” 

But the evolutionary “family tree” is fictional. From a purely physical standpoint, we know today that every living thing is built by its amazing DNA code. To evolve from non-life to life would require the “creation” of the self-replicating cell from nothing by pure chance. It would indeed require some sort of “monera” that appeared mysteriously from non-life. And if that were to happen, by some incredible act of chance, it would then require that this self-replicating cell not only live and prosper it its un-designed, happenstance environment, but also develop into all of the myriad and most wonderful life forms that exist on earth. (It would also require that every plant life, from the tiniest blade of grass to the mighty Sequoia, would have followed the same blind path, in order to provide food and shelter and other necessities to the living creatures.)

This would require adding mind-boggling amounts of genetic information. From nothing. By pure blind chance. With no objective. Without any intelligent input.

Though evolutionists usually pretend that they don’t believe in miracles, in fact, every step of their “family tree” would have been “miraculous.” 

The evolutionary “family tree” is also disproven by the fossil record. 

In the last chapter of Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No, Dr. Duane Gish gives many quotations from evolutionary scientists that the fossil record disproves the theory of Darwinian evolution. Consider the following:

“Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery: commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms” (D. M. Raup and S. M. Stanley, Principles of Paleontology, 1971, p. 306).

“There has been no steady progress in the higher development of organic design. We have had, instead, vast stretches of little or no change and one evolutionary burst that created the whole system” (D. B. Kitts, Evolution, 28:467, 1974). 

“We are forced to the conclusion that most of the really novel taxa that appear suddenly in the fossil record did in fact originate suddenly” (F. J. Ayala and J. W. Valentine, Evolving: The Theory and Process of Organic Evolution, 1979, p. 267).

“The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would ... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, WE HAVE EVEN FEWER EXAMPLES OF EVOLUTIONARY TRANSITION THAN WE HAD IN DARWIN’S TIME. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information” (D. M. Raup, Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 50:22, January 1979). 

“But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition” (D. S. Woodruff, Science, 208:716, 1980).

“Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so” (E.R. Leach, Nature, 293:19, 1981).

In 1981, Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, made the following admission about Haeckel’s “family tree.” 

“We have access to the tips of the tree; the tree itself is theory, and people who pretend to know about the tree and to describe what went on it--how the branches came off and the twigs came off--ARE, I THINK, TELLING STORIES” (Brian Leith, The Listener, BBC, 106:390, 1981). 

According to this highly educated and well-placed evolutionary scientist, those who claim that the fossil record exhibits the “missing links” are “telling stories.” And these aren’t innocent “bedtime stories”! 

Four years earlier, in another moment of great evolutionary candor, Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould made the following amazing admission:

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as THE TRADE SECRET OF PALEONTOLOGY. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches, and the rest is inference, however, reasonable, not the evidence of fossils” (Natural History magazine, 86(5): 13, 1977, cited from Duane Gish, The Fossils Still Say No, p. 346).

A trade secret is something that is kept hidden from the public. To withhold evidence is not honest and it is NOT TRUE SCIENCE. 

Modernized editions of Haeckel’s “family tree” still appear in science textbooks. 

Haeckel’s Dumb Ape-Man

Ernst Haeckel had an incredible imagination and should have been a science fiction writer instead of pretending to be a scientist. Actually, what he did was help turn science into science fiction.

Haeckel not only devised Monera and family trees, phony laws and modified embryos, he even devised an entire race of ape-men. Reasoning that the major difference between man and ape is the former’s ability to talk, and assuming that evolution is true and that man evolved from animals, Haeckel concluded that man’s predecessor was a dumb ape-man. He even invented a scientific name for this mythical creature: Pithecanthropus alalus (“speechless ape-man”). 

Haeckel had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw the fabled creature, and Max depicted an entire Pithecanthropus family. The pot-bellied father, ape-headed but having an atypically hairy human body, stands upright and leans on a thick branch, looking as stupid as stupid can be. The dim-witted-looking mother sits cross-legged nursing a poor little ape-man baby. She has long-straggly hair but is less ape-looking than her “husband” except for her ape-like feet. 

In every detail, this drawing represents a fabricated myth that was created in an attempt to discredit the Bible and prove evolution true. 

As we will see, Java Man was supposed to be the evidence for Pithecanthropus alalus, but it failed and there is no more evidence today that such creatures existed as there was when Gabriel Max painted Haeckel’s “speechless ape-man.”

--Fundamental Baptist Information Service