 Was Darwin wrong? First piece of evidence they give is embryology. How many of you have ever seen images like this in the textbook? Why a few of you? These were actually drawn by a guy by the name of Ernst Heiko, done back in the 1800s. Now in order for you to kind of see what we got, take a look at this lower corner, you got a fish, a salamander, a turtle, a chicken, a pig, couple of mammals and a human at three different stages of embryological development. Now if you look across the top, they basically all look the same, right? They were drawn that way on purpose because Ernst Heiko believed in evolution. He believed we all came from a common ancestor. In fact, he said his turning point in his thinking was when he read Charles Darwin's book and those of you who know your history, you know he actually visited Charles Darwin at his home there on the mount. You say, okay Brad, so what was the big deal? The big deal is this guy was convicted of fraud. He faked his pictures. He was kicked out of the University of Jenna because he completely made them up. And you say, okay, yes, so what? Surely we're not still using them. Oh yeah, we've colorized them. We've made them a whole lot prettier. But folks, if you look, this is Ernst Heiko's images. That's the real McCoy. Keep in mind this guy was living in the 1800s. We've known for over 100 years that this is total fabrication and yet this is one of the pieces of evidence. They're marching out to say Darwin was right. Here's the funny thing. Even Stephen J. Gould, a staunch evolutionist, realized that this is nothing but mindless recycled garbage. He wrote an article in Natural History Magazine called Atrocious. And in that article, he's talking about these embryos, Ernst Heiko's. Look at what he says. We should therefore not be surprised that Heiko's drawings entered the 19th century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not majority, of modern textbooks. A century of mindless recycling. Yeah. Sure, Arthur King, people did this way, said he was expected the embryo would recapitulate the features of the ancestors from the lowest to the highest forms in the animal kingdom. Now that the appearance of the embryo at all stages is known, the general feeling is one of disappointment. The human embryo at no stage is able to pot an appearance. The embryo of the mammal never resembles the worm, the fish, or the reptile. Notice the last sentence. Embryology provides no support whatsoever for the evolutionary hypothesis. We've known that since 1932. And yet, National Geographics is marching this out as evidence that Darwin is right. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Heiko was one of those truly amazing people who makes me wonder what I've been wasting my time on every day, making YouTube videos apparently. Heiko was a scientist, a traveling naturalist, a practicing surgeon and physician. He also wrote major works on topics like language, classical art, human origins on pedagogy, or how to teach students. He documented his extensive travels in India and Malaysia and Salon now called Sri Lanka. In his life, he produced 42 works, many of them textbooks for a grand total of 13,000 pages. He was also an artist and illustrator. I've been showing pictures from his books, which he engraved from his own works in the field. He discovered and named over 4,000 distinctive species. He studied under Virchow, who today is considered the father of modern pathology. He was the first person to use the term First World War, as well as phylum, phylogeny, and ecology. He also made mistakes, many big mistakes. He was a proponent of scientific racism, believed the origins of humans lay in South Asia, Hindustan, to use his term, and argued that humans were closely related to the orangutan. Like many creationists of his time, he was a polygenist, believing in separate origins for the races of humanity. While he was inspired by Darwin's work, he rejected natural selection, instead accepting a form of evolutionary lemarchism. And that led him to formulate what was to be called the biogenic law, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which we know today to be false. More on that in a moment. It also led Hegel to form a new parareligious philosophy called monism, which mixed up biological science and spiritual belief. This monistic language and its eugenic implications would find a rebirth in the Nazi movement, where the mixture of racism and controlling the spiritual destiny of a people was mixed with the contemporary ideas of racial purity and xenophobia. Of course, creationists remember him for only one thing, forging evidence for evolution into the record of embryology, which is a shame. With all the effort they put into trying to link Darwin to Hitler, you think they would have come across a much more direct link between Hegel's spiritual monism and Hitler. Strictly speaking though, Hegel believed in a non-Darwinian form of evolution, so he'd make a pretty poor bridge between Darwin and Hitler. I have no interest in defending Hegel's illustrations of embryology. He was wrong on a lot of things, and I see him as a brilliant scientist with a sort of new age spiritual mania. He had an artist's eye, and his illustrations of embryos reflect both his artistic attention to symmetries, and his frankly quite false beliefs in his own biogenic law. I want to address two primary topics. One, what was Hegel trying to accomplish with his illustrations? And two, what was the damage of his illustrations to modern evolutionary theory? Hegel wasn't trying to prove evolution with his illustrations of embryos. As I previously mentioned, he only half believed the mechanisms that Darwin proposed, relying from most explanations on a Lamarckian view that characteristics acquired by the parents during their lifetime were passed on directly to the offspring. However, his own views inspired by Darwin, but rejecting the key thesis that of natural selection, was that the history of the evolution of each species was reflected in the stages of embryology for that species. The famous phrase ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny means that the ontogeny or the stages of development of an embryo would recapitulate or repeat in series the phylogeny, which means the evolutionary lineage. So he proposed that a dog embryo would pass through a single cell stage, then a fish stage, then a reptile stage, followed by a mammal stage that terminated in wolf than dog. I hope you can see that this is not a prediction of evolution, nor was it ever postulated by Darwin. In fact, Darwin's theory that embryology of different animals is similar up to a certain point was much closer to actual fact than Hegel's. Hegel believed in a creative supernatural force that pervaded living things, compelling them, driving them towards some goal. He rejected natural selection as too passive, too coincidental. He believed in a biological destiny, and you can see how that belief was so appealing to the Nazis, how it entered their philosophy as the destiny of the Aryan race. The goal of using illustrations of comparative embryology in modern textbooks, if figures similar to Hegel's are found there, is certainly not to teach students that the biogenic law is true. We've known it isn't for over a hundred years. I'll talk in the next section about why it is in the textbooks, albeit in a more accurate form. Hegel was trying to prove his own theory, now discredited, which competed indirectly with Darwin's. What led him to believe in recapitulation theory? Well, you may have heard that humans have tails and gills during their embryology. That's not quite true. The gills, for example, are pharyngeal pouches, though they can be called gillslits. They don't actually function as gills. The tail that forms in embryos, properly called the caudal eminence, has more to do with spinal cord development than a prehensile tail, though the base of the same structure is incorporated into the non-ape, simian tail. Hegel, in short, was observing something very important about comparative embryology, but misinterpreting the significance, the meaning of it. He thought he was seeing history being recapitulated, but in fact what he was seeing, we now know, was the shared mechanisms that produce similar structures. All vertebrates, for example, develop structures from three germ cell layers in the earliest embryo, the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm. Whether you are talking about a whale or a mouse, the process of forming a brain is very, very similar in terms of tissues and cell lineages. Herein lies the answer to our second question. Why is this still in textbooks? I have to first note that Hegel's drawings are not found in modern textbooks, but have been replaced in most cases with actual photographs or MRIs, so it's hard to claim their frauds. The problem lies in confusion over Hegel's claims, and the actual evidence for evolution to be found in comparative embryology. We've established that ontogeny does not, in fact, recapitulate phylogeny. The idea has been discarded comparisons of the stages of development to inform our knowledge of evolution, what is today called evo-divo, is separate from Hegel, and also cutting edge science. There are almost 40,000 publications on this topic, most of them from the last 10 years. Leaving out such a key evidence for evolution, because a German scientist and illustrator misunderstood the significance of it over 100 years ago, is the kind of bad decision that creationists would like us to make. I said early on that I have no interest in defending Hegel. That being said, I want to end on one final question. Was he convicted of fraud, and was his work fraudulent? The accusations of fraud began in 1870, two years after the publication of this book that I will not even attempt to pronounce properly. People suggested that he had been rather free with his details, emphasizing similarities too much. These few accusations had been levied by his colleagues. It was not until 1874, when the issue of evolution became a political battleground in Germany, pitting the nationalist supporters of Bismarck against the creationists of the Catholic Church that the non-scientists began piling scorn on top of the rather mild initial criticisms. Catholic writers, in particular the Swiss scientist Wilhelm Hiss, turned criticism against Hegel into a political tactic against the Bismarckian faction's ideology, which relied in part on Hegel's monism. Thus was born the legend of an active fraud. Recently, modern embryologists have reviewed the materials Hegel produced. There's little doubt that he did not produce photorealistic images, but the general consensus is that the popular criticism is overstated. Historically, there is also no evidence that, as Dr. Herob asserted, Hegel was convicted of fraud by any court, and most of his contemporary critics were on the other side of the political or religious aisle. In that sense, Dr. Herob is keeping alive an old tradition of attacking ad hominem, a person's character, rather than addressing the evidence of the natural world. Thanks for watching.