Talk:Embryo drawing

From PNA/Biology

 * Embryo drawings - Written as if Ernst Haeckel was the only one who drew embryos. Creationist POV, complete with quote mining. In stasis for 3 years. Phlebas 19:43, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Tried to fix it up. Could do with some clean-up by someone better at Wiki than me. Also still needs some fleshing out. --Mintie 01:48, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Comments here
Terribly POV. Any undergraduate biology student draws embryos, like they appear in the microscope slides. Phlebas 17:18, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Made an attempt to fix it up. Could still do with some work. For those with the time, I suggest the following site is a great place to start: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/haeckel.html --Mintie 01:50, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are still lots of problems. This article implies that recapitualtion theore was created by Haeckel and that few others held it. Neither is true. It does not indicate the place of haeckel's admittedly inaccurate drawings in the histroy of science, and does not indicate that the professional and poipular impressions of them were quite different. It also does not indiactate that there hade been many comparitive drawuings both before and after haeckel, although his set became part of the textbook culture for a long time. The quote from S.J. Gould is not sourced. Actually someone reading his essayu on this subject has most of the resources needed to do a better job on this article. DES 22:05, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

correct picture?
is the image on this page really drawn by Ernst Haeckel or instead cited by Von Baers (1928?)? The "schematized" (is this really such a non-scientific technique?) drawings in Haeckels's "Schöpfungsgeschichte" (Berlin 1879, between pages 272 and 273) look quite different.


 * Yes, the picture shown is from the 1828 von-Baer book "Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere". See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Baer_embryos.png . Haeckel used this drawing several times in his books, sometimes slightly modified or reordered. The "schematized" pictures in the "Schöpfungsgeschichte" look very different. 145.254.69.235 16:03, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Still terribly POV
Hardly better than a year ago. Will someone who knows English and History of Science at a nearly-native level bring this to order? Alexei Kouprianov 14:47, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Could you be a little more specific about the bias problem you see in the article? Aside from the writing issue (present tense the whole way through), I think this is a vast improvement over the earlier version, especially in the historical sections.--ragesoss 20:45, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree this article has serious problems. I have rewritten the first paragraph for scientific correctness (for example, embryonic development is not related to sexual reproduction) and also to remove redundancies and bad writing.

I'm not convinced this article needs anything like this much space. It seems like a tempest in a teapot. The drawings, formerly used in textbooks (and now mostly avoided like the plague), were mainly used for historical interest and to illustrate Haeckel's otherwise virtually ignored idea about ontongeny recapitulating phylogeny. It was never used to fake arguments for evolution in textbooks. The genetics of evo devo, which show how many genes unrelated organisms share, have now made Haeckel's general ideas more relevant, not less. Eperotao 21:14, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm removing the POV tag. Please label specific sections or sentences as being POV. Having a POV tag at the top of such a long article is almost completely meaningless. —Pengo 01:30, 11 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It needs to go back in. The article is nearly incoherent in the way it switches back from calling the drawings frauds to not, to saying they invalidate all of science to showing how it improves, and so forth.  It's not only POV, it's like eight different POVs all crammed into each paragraph with no ryhme or reason.

Confusing for Students
This DOES need to be clarified and deserves some space. Your assumption that Haeckel's drawings are no longer used in text books is very wrong - I am teaching Year 11 and 12 Biology this year, and was astonished to see that the BoS approved HSC text book (NSW Australia) has a labelled reproduction of Haeckel's original drawings in sepia!! (Mudie, K. and Brotherton, J. (2004) Heinemann Biology 2nd ed., Harcourt, Figure 6.10 p 270). These are presented as completely credible in the text!! 218.214.49.106 07:29, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Title change
I propose a move to Haeckel's embryo drawings because 80% of the article is about Haeckel, his drawings, errors he may have made, and how this affects evolution education. --Uncle Ed 01:19, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with this move. —Pengo 02:02, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Summary needed
The article needs a summary (or introduction) which simply lists briefly the grounds people opposed Haeckel's drawings, who they were, and what their backgrounds were (e.g. embryologist, creationist). And ditto for the proponents. There's far too much to read before you can start to get a picture. —Pengo 02:09, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

The section on Wells should go
The section on Wells's book "Icons of Evolution" should go. There is nothing in Wells which isn't elsewhere in the article. The fact that creationists like Wells re-hash 100 year old controversies in books shoudln't give them special status as "sourced" references when the book itself is just anti-evolution propaganda. For example Wells objects to a famous drawing of a series of apes to humans and argues as though the drawing itself is taken as evidence for evolution. Wells is attacking a straw man; the true status of recapitulation theory is described by the wikipedia page. E4mmacro 02:44, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Ten years later, Wells is back in. He is not a serious critic but a pseudoscientist. Regarding his embryo reasoning, see here: "Wells gleefully excoriates Futuyma for using Haeckel’s drawings (Figure 10a), but apparently in his fit of righteous indignation, he forgot to read the text, in which the drawings are discussed in a historical context — stating why Haeckel is wrong — and Futuyma has an entire chapter devoted to development and evolution."
 * I will remove Wells now. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:35, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

And the final section
The final section is all based on Hopwood's opinion of what others thought or did, get the original sources or delete the section- "littering their text books" Does that sound NPOV? E4mmacro 01:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC) OK I accept that Hopwood is a decent scholarly reference. But am not yet convinced the quotes used express the subtle of his opinons derived from his study of the history of Haeckel's drawings. E4mmacro 02:01, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Contemporary Drawings
Ostensibly this page is about embryo drawings. It is not a page about theory of recapitulation in eveloution - there is already a page on that. It is not a page on Haeckel, there is already a page on that. It would be interesting to see some drawings of embryos on a page called "embryo drawings" but the only drawings shown are said to be "fraudulent". Contempoary drawings are mentioned but not shown. What is the point?

The point probably, as noted by others, is that the page is really about attacking Haeckel, as a way of attacking evolution. Well, let's have the evidence. Where are some proper drawings of embryos to show where Haeckel faked it? I have seen an allegation that the fish embryo is not correct, in some unspecified way, and that some unspecifeid differences were omitted. Did Stephen Gould really complain that the scale of Haeckel's drawing was changed? Drawing the embryos to the same overall length sounds like a perfectly legimate way to comapre embryos (to see how they differ or how they are the same), and also a practical way to fit them on the one diagram as Haeckel did. To object to a scale change is like objecting to the practice of comparing skeletons, counting the bones, etc, between humans and dinosaurs, or calling a particular bone the humerus in all these different skeltons of different sizes or different species. Comparative anatomy is regularly studied in Medical schools, or so I have been told. I wonder how serious these objections to the drawings are. E4mmacro 20:52, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Here is a decent articles dealing with Haeckel'd drawings. His error was mainly to omit traits that separate the classes, like the umbilical chord in mammals and the large midbrain in birds etc. He has also omitted the yolk sac and large heart that obscure the structures in the early stages in some, but not all of these embryo. They are also straightened out and posed in the same position, positions which they would not have in life. In short, he has emphasized the similarities and neglected all those various structures like the yolk sac who would hide what he was pointing at. His drawings are "idealized", but by no means "forgeries".


 * This article need to decide whether it's about Haeckel's drawings or embryo drawings in general though. Petter Bøckman (talk) 22:51, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Which Romanes "embryo drawings"?
The caption on Image:Haeckel_drawings.jpg is "Romanes' 1892 copy of Ernst Haeckel's allegedly fraudulent embryo drawings...". There is no further mention of Romanes in the article. Is it George Romanes? However that article does not mention the drawing. CS Miller (talk) 13:10, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Archiv für Anthropogenie
I can't find this journal anywhere. Is Archiv für Anthropologie meant instead? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:53, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

"Even though Haeckel's program in comparative embryology virtually collapsed after the First World War"
Well it would. Him being dead really put a dampener on his activities.

The last section seems kinda pointless. No citations and vaguely worded with no clear message. Delete? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.22.8.20 (talk) 00:29, 30 July 2018 (UTC)