>The real experts, the developmental biologists who know that Haeckel is
>no fraud and that his biogenetic law is the basis of modern developmental
>biology, seldom write or edit textbooks, or serve as historical scholars, so
>their voices are seldom heard.
But the situation is quite the reverse. It is Haeckel's questionable
drawings which have survived in textbooks and popular publications,
whereas the evidence casting doubt on his "biogenetic law" lives in
the primary literature, largely neglected.
The biogenetic law is not the basis of modern developmental biology.
In fact, the biogenetic law was collapsing under (a) the weight of
contrary evidence and (b) its impracticality as a research tool, even
before the rise of the neo-Darwinian synthesis (Rasmussen 1991). In
1894, Edmund Wilson, in his lectures to the Marine Biological Laboratory
at Woods Hole, held the biogenetic law primarily responsible for "the vast
number of elaborate hypothetical phylogenies which confront the modern
student in such bewildering confusion" (1895, p. 103). As he continued:
It is...a just ground of reproach to morphologists that their
science should be burdened with such a mass of phylogenetic
speculations and hypotheses, many of them mutually exclusive,
in the absence of any well-defined standard of value by which
to estimate their relative probability. The truth is that the
search after suggestive working hypotheses in embryological
morphology has too often led to a wild speculation unworthy of
the name of science; and it would be small wonder if the modern
student, especially after a training in the methods of the more
exact sciences, should regard the whole phylogenetic aspect of
morphology as a kind of pedantry unworthy of serious attention.
(Wilson 1895, pp. 103-104)
Thus, by 1909, the Cambridge embryologist Adam Sedgwick, for instance,
was already looking for alternatives to the biogenetic law; as he wrote:
If after 50 years of research and close examination of the
facts of embryology the recapitulation theory is still without
satisfactory proof, it seems desirable to take a wider sweep
and to inquire whether the facts of embryology cannot be
included in a larger category. (Sedgwick 1909, p. 176)
In 1922, in his critical review of the concept, Walter Garstang argued that
the biogenetic law "has evoked little but controversy and confusion" (1922,
p. 81). As he continued:
As it is not to the credit of science that Zoology should harbor
a "law" which, like a creed, may be accepted or rejected at pleasure,
and as I believe the basis of this law is demonstrably unsound, I
venture to make a renewed attempt to define the points at issue.
(Garstang 1922, p. 81)
Many of the founders of neo-Darwinism (e.g., August Weismann) were
intellectual refugees from the magical land of recapitulationism. Others,
such as William Bateson (1894), abandoned the research program of "ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny," after their initial enthusiasm, because they
discovered that ontogeny did not recapitulate phylogeny in even an
approximate sense, and furthermore that the "law" suffered from grave
methodological defects (1894, p. 8).
In light of this, I would be interested in knowing from Kevin O'Brien about
"the developmental biologists who know that [Haeckel's] biogenetic law is
the basis of modern developmental biology." The biogenetic law is false,
and has been known to be so for well over a century.
Paul Nelson
Bateson, W. 1894. _Materials for the Study of Variation_. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press [1992 reprint].
Garstang, W. 1922. The Theory of Recapitulation: A Critical Re-Statement
of the Biogenetic Law. _Linnean Journal - Zoology_ 35: 81-101.
Rasmussen, N. 1991. The Decline of Recapitulationism in Early Twentieth-
Century Biology: Disciplinary Conflict and Consensus on the Battleground
of Theory. _Journal of the History of Biology_ 24:51-89.
Sedgwick, A. 1909. The Influence of Darwin on the Study of Animal
Embryology. In _Darwin and Modern Science_, ed. A.C. Seward.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 171-184.
Wilson, E. 1895. The Embryological Criterion of Homology. Sixth Lecture,
Summer Session 1894. _Biological Lectures Delivered at the Marine
Biological Laboratory of Wood's Holl_. Boston: Ginn & Co., pp. 101-124.