Darwinian Evolution Theory

Supported By A Hoax

By Junhui Bian

I am a Christian, and also a biologist. When I worked as a researcher to study the genetics of cancer at Park-Davis Pharmaceutical Research, Warner-Lambert Company, my colleague once asked out of curiosity, "how can you, a scientist, believe that God created man? How can you ignore the scientific evidence supporting evolution?" I replied, "although I did not see how God created man, I believe, through faith, God’s actions and promises to man recorded in the Bible. In the Bible, God dissects the nature of man as if He is talking to me about me. This let me know that I actually belong to God and need his grace. Every day, I can experience the love of God and the joy and hope this love brings. I can not deny the presence of God because God changed my family. Having been a scientific researcher for many years, I gradually realized how limited and incapable we humans are. Science, as a part of human activity, therefore is also limited. We were fed with atheism and the evolution theory in childhood and accepted them without questioning. This is time for us to examine these theories and the so-called supporting evidence."

Friend, do you know a man named Ernst Haeckel? He was born in 1834 and died in1919. This German physician gave up his medical practice and started to study the biological species, after reading The Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859. He became a world-known embryologist later and had named over 150 invertebrates. Haeckel was also an active atheist. He often cited the evolution theory in his verbal and literary attack on religion. More importantly, he published a research paper in 1874, providing the most convincing and the most cited piece of evidence in support of Darwinian Evolution Theory. His publication took the whole scientific community by storm. His findings have been permanently associated with Darwinian Evolution and cited by almost all biology textbooks in the world ever since.

In his paper, Haeckel drew by hands the morphological features of early embryos of several animal species. These early embryos of fish, salamander, chicken and human were almost identical in Haeckel’s drawings. Thus, he concluded, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history. Since the early human embryo looks like that of fish, salamander and chicken, humans must have evolved from these animals. This is one of the most important evidence which laid the scientific foundation for the evolution theory.

Few doubted and checked on Haeckel’s observation despite the development of photographic techniques. One hundred twenty three years after Haeckel’s publication, Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George Hospital Medical School in London, decided to photograph the morphological features of fish, salamander, chicken and human early embryos in 1997. These photos were published in the August issue of Anatomy & Embryology. In contrast to Haeckel’s drawings, these photos show remarkable differences between the early embryos of these species. In the words of Richardson, "it looks like this is the most notorious hoax in biology." Surprisingly, it was recorded in old archives that Haeckel had actually confessed when pressured by his colleagues that his drawings were the result of "his memory with artistic impressions".

Any hoax can not stand the pressure of detailed examination. The Bible says that Jesus is the Truth. This has been examined for over two thousand years. Would you be willing to examine it yourself? God invites you to read His word and even says, "come, let us reason together, …" Isaiah 1:18