Does Embryology states evidence for evolution?

Question

Some scientist still rejects an idea of evolution through embryology because Earnst Haeckel was a lier....

http://www.bible.ca/tracks/textbook-fraud-embryology-earnst-haeckel-biogenetic-law.htm

Answer 1

There are two concepts in embryology that you need to keep separate.

The first is Ernst Haeckel's "recapitulation theory" ... also known as the "biogenetic law" ... or "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."   This is the idea that an embryo goes through *STAGES* of development in which the embryo has all the characteristics of an ancestral stage of evolution (a fish phase, an amphibian phase, a reptile phase, etc.).   It is a perfectly logical idea ... but is just simply not true.   Haeckel illustrated this concept using his now infamous drawings ... in which he exaggerated features of different drawings in order to emphasize similarities where there are none, or omit features that should have been illustrated.   The embryologists of his time immediately recognized these errors, and called him on it..  

Recapitulation theory has been discredited since 1910, and yet creationists *love* to harp on it as if it is a major pillar of evolutionary theory (which has never been), and is only now being exposed as based on fraudulent data by Haeckel that all scientists have been accepting for an entire century (which they most certainly have not).

The second idea of embryology is known as "von Baer's Law."  This is the idea that embryos develop *features* (not stages), from the general to the specific.  For example, you can tell a vertebrate from an invertebrate embryo fairly early on, and later in development, the difference between a mammal and a fish (by the disappearnce of gill folds that all vertebrate embryos have), and then the difference between a carnivore vs. a rodent, and then a dog vs a cat.  These are not entire *stages* (so that it contains *ALL* the characteristics of a fish, then a reptile, etc.) but just the order in which these features develop ... like a program that is assembling an organism has to follow a logical order.

von Baer's law is very different from Haeckel's recapitulation theory.   But Creationists will insist that *ANY* lessons from embryology in support of evolution are not only invalidated by Haeckel's reputation, but that this is a continuation of a long-standing fraud perpetrated by the "scientific community" ... apparently forgetting that it was precisely the "scientific community" that exposed and discarded Haeckel's recapitulation theory all the way back before 1910.

In other words, the dishonesty displayed by a single man, Haeckel, is NOTHING compared to the *systematic* dishonesty of hundreds of Creationist writers who continue to raise Haeckel like a zombie so that they can kill him once again (as if they were ever involved in disproving him the first time).  It comes from the same bankrupt place as their constant resurrecting Piltdown ... so desperate are they to find *something* they can refute, that the continue to "refute" things that scientists have discarded for *DECADES*, and have never played much of a role in evolutionary evidence to begin with.