The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel Read Free Book Online Page A

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