The Case for a Creator (8 page)

“But there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There’s no consistency, including with the dating. It’s all over the board. Based on all this, I think it’s reasonable for me, as a scientist, to say that maybe we should question our assumption that this common ancestor exists.”

Wells stopped for a moment. He apparently felt some elaboration was in order. “Of course, descent from a common ancestor is true at some levels,” he continued. “Nobody denies that. For example, we can trace generations of fruit flies to a common ancestor. Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly. And it’s possible that all the cats—tigers, lions, and so on—descended from a common ancestor. While that’s not a fact, it might be a reasonable inference based on interbreeding.

“So as we go up these different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy—species, genus, family, order, class—common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the level of phyla, the major animal groups, it’s a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it’s disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn’t support it.”

The facts were compelling. Nobody can claim that Darwin’s tree is an accurate description of what the fossil record has produced. Protestations from Darwinists aside, the evidence has failed to substantiate the predictions that Darwin made. Yet when I encountered the drawing as a student, I walked away with the conclusion that it illustrated the success of his revolutionary ideas.

“Is the drawing still featured in textbooks today?” I asked.

“Not only is it included in the textbooks, but it’s called a fact,” Wells replied, sounding genuinely astonished. “I don’t mind that it’s shown; I think it’s a good illustration of an interesting theory. What I mind is when textbooks call it a fact that all animals share a common ancestor. Well, it’s
not
a fact!” he declared, his voice punctuating his point.

“If you consider all of the evidence, Darwin’s tree is false as a description of the history of life. I’ll even go further than that: it’s not even a good hypothesis at this point.”

IMAGE #3: HAECKEL’S EMBRYOS

Like every young student of evolution, Wells had seen Ernst Haeckel’s comparative drawings of embryos, often described as among the best evidence for Darwinism. But it wasn’t until Wells was working on his doctorate in vertebrate embryology that he saw the sketches for what they really were.

Haeckel’s most renowned images depict the embryos of a fish, salamander, tortoise, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, and human side-by-side at three stages of development. The illustrations support Darwin’s assertion that the striking similarities between early embryos is “by far the strongest single class of facts” in favor of his theory that all organisms share a universal ancestor.

I was mesmerized by the nineteenth-century drawings when I first encountered them as a student. As I carefully compared the embryos at their earliest stage, looking back and forth from one to the other, I could see they were virtually indistinguishable. I searched my mind, but I couldn’t think of any logical explanation for this phenomenon other than a common ancestor. My verdict was swift: Darwin prevails.

The real explanation, as it turns out, would have been far too bizarre for me to have even considered at the time.

“When you saw these drawings,” I said to Wells, “did you have the same reaction that I did—that this was strong evidence for Darwinism?”

“Yes, I did, the first time I looked at them,” Wells answered. “It wasn’t until I was doing my graduate work that I began to compare actual photographs of embryos to what Haeckel had drawn.”

“And what did you find?”

“I was stunned!” he said, his eyes widening. “They didn’t fit. There was a big discrepancy. It was really hard to believe.”

As he described what had happened, I slowly shook my head in amazement at the implications of what he was saying. “I sort of rationalized by saying, well, textbooks tend to oversimplify things,” he continued. “But over time it bothered me more and more.”

I was hungry for details. “What was it specifically that bothered you?” I asked.

“There are three problems with these drawings,” he said. “The first is that the similarities in the early stages were faked.”

He leveled the accusation without emotion in his voice, but nevertheless it was a stunning charge. “Faked?” I repeated. “Are you sure?” It seemed inconceivable that the books I had relied upon as a student could have so blatantly misled me.

“You can call them fudged, distorted, misleading, but the bottom line is that they were faked,” he replied. “Apparently in some cases Haeckel actually used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he figured he didn’t have to draw them separately. In other cases he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really are. At any rate, his drawings misrepresent the embryos.”

“That’s amazing!” I said. “How long has this been known?”

“They were first exposed in the late 1860s, when his colleagues accused him of fraud.”

I cocked my head. “Wait a minute—I saw these drawings in books that I studied when I was a student in the 1960s and ’70s—more than a hundred years later. How is that possible?”

“It’s worse than that!” he declared. “They’re
still
being used, even in upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology. In fact, I analyzed and graded ten recent textbooks on how accurately they dealt with this topic. I had to give eight of them an F. Two others did only slightly better; I gave them a D.”

Anger was brewing inside of me. I had bought into Darwinism—and subsequently atheism—partially on the basis of drawings that scientists had known for a century were doctored. “This is really hard to believe,” I said. “Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“Of course it does, because I was raised on this stuff too. I was misled,” he said. “There was no excuse for it. When some biologists exposed this in an article a few years ago, the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard complained that this was nothing new. He had known about it for twenty years! It was no secret to the experts.

“But then why was it still in textbooks? Even Gould said textbook writers should be ashamed of the way the drawings had been mindlessly recycled for over a century. At least he was honest enough to call it what it was: ‘the academic equivalent of murder.’ ”
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THE SINS OF HAECKEL

Wells’s first disclosure about Haeckel’s embryos was a stunner, but he had said there were a total of three problems with the drawings. I couldn’t wait to hear him address the others. “What are the other two problems?” I asked.

“The minor problem is that Haeckel cherry-picked his examples,” Wells explained. “He only shows a few of the seven vertebrate classes. For example, his most famous rendition has eight columns. Four are mammals, but they’re all placental mammals. There are two other kinds of mammals that he didn’t show, which are different. The remaining four classes he showed—reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fish—happen to be more similar than the ones he omitted. He used a salamander to represent amphibians instead of a frog, which looks very different. So he stacked the deck by picking representatives that came closest to fitting his idea—and then he went further by faking the similarities.”

That sounded like a pretty serious breach of scientific protocol to me. “If that’s the minor problem,” I said sarcastically, “then what’s the major one?”

Wells moved to the edge of his chair; clearly, this was tapping into his passion area. “To me, as an embryologist, the most dramatic problem is that what Haeckel claimed is the early stage of development is nothing of the sort. It’s actually the midpoint of development,” he explained. “If you go back to the earlier stages, the embryos look far more different from each other. But he deliberately omits the earlier stages altogether.”

I didn’t immediately catch the full significance of this. “Why is that important?”

“Remember Darwin claimed that because the embryos are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like—sort of like a fish.

“But embryologists talk about the ‘developmental hourglass,’ which refers to the shape of an hourglass, with its width representing the measure of difference. You see, vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There’s no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it’s extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place.

“Then at the midpoint—which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage—the embryos become more similar, though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again.”

What a devastating critique! Haeckel’s drawings, which had been published countless times over more than a century, had failed on three levels. I couldn’t help but ask Wells: “If they’re so misleading, then why did scientists continue to publish them for generation after generation of students?”

“One explanation that’s often given,” he replied, “is that although the drawings are false, they teach a concept that’s basically true. Well, this is
not
true. Biologists know that embryos are
not
most similar in their earliest stages.”

With that, Wells picked up his book from the desk and flipped to the chapter on Haeckel. “Yet listen to this: one textbook shows Haeckel’s drawings and says, ‘Early developmental stages of animals whose adult forms appear radically different are often surprisingly similar.’ One 1999 textbook has a slightly redrawn version of Haeckel’s work and tells students, ‘Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other.’

“Another textbook accompanies its drawings with the statement: ‘The early embryos of vertebrates strongly resemble one another.’ Another says flatly: ‘One fact of embryology that pushed Darwin toward the idea of evolution is that the early embryos of most vertebrates closely resemble one another.’ ”
²⁸

Wells snapped the book shut. “As I said, it’s just false that embryos are most similar in their earliest development. Of course, some Darwinists try to get around Haeckel’s problems by changing their tune. They use evolutionary theory to try to explain why the differences in the embryos are there. They can get quite elaborate,” he said.

“But that’s doing the same thing that the theory-savers were doing with the Cambrian explosion. What was supposed to be primary evidence for Darwin’s theory—the fossil or embryo evidence—turns out to be false, so they immediately say, well, we know the theory’s true, so let’s use the theory to explain why the evidence doesn’t fit.

“But then,
where’s the evidence for the theory?
” he demanded, sounding both frustrated and perturbed. “That’s what I’d like to know. Why should I accept the theory as being true at all?”

THE TRUTH ABOUT GILLS

Wells’s explanation made me feel foolish for ever having believed the embryo drawings I had seen as a student, much less the previous two icons that Wells had already deconstructed. I felt a little like the victim of a con game, blaming myself for being so uncritical and naive in accepting what evolution textbooks and biology teachers had told me.

But Haekel’s drawings weren’t the only evidence I had been taught about universal ancestry. I also had been told a fascinating fact that helped convince me that our progenitors dwelled in the ocean: all human embryos, so my teachers said, go through a stage in which they actually develop gill-like structures on their necks.

The encyclopedia I consulted as a youngster declared unequivocally that “the fetuses of mammals at one stage have gill slits which resemble those of fish,” which to me was dramatic confirmation of our aquatic ancestry.
²⁹
In 1996,
Life
magazine described how human embryos grow “something very much like gills,” which is “some of the most compelling evidence of evolution.”
³⁰
Even some contemporary biology textbooks assert that human embryos have “gill pouches” or “gill slits.”
³¹

This colorful tidbit stayed with me from the first time I heard it. “Aren’t gills strong evidence that our ancestors lived in the ocean?” I asked Wells.

He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to raise this issue with him. “Yes, that’s the standard argument, but—here,” he said, gesturing toward me, “Look down toward your navel for a moment.” Feeling a little awkward, I bowed my head. “Now, feel your neck,” he said. “There are ridges in the skin, right?” I nodded.

“Well, if you look at an embryo, it’s doubled over. It has ridges in the neck. I’m not saying they’re only skin folds; they’re more complicated than that. But it’s just an anatomical feature that grows out of the fact that this is how vertebrate embryos develop.

“Let me be clear: they’re
not
gills!” he stressed. “Even fish don’t have gills at that stage. In humans, the ridges become one thing; in fish, they become gills. They’re not even gill slits. To call them gill-like structures is merely reading evolutionary theory back into the evidence. They’re never gill-like except in the superficial sense that they’re lines in the neck area. As British embryologist Lewis Wolpert said, the resemblance is only illusory.
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