Joel Kontinen
A letter published in Nature sees Ernst Haeckel as a trailblazing scientist who built a more comprehensive tree of life than Darwin had done.
Darwin’s initial version that he sketched in 1837 was very simple. Haeckel “painstakingly drew up a much more comprehensive tree.”
The letter presents a biased view of the zoologist who invented non-existing species as evidence for evolution and is now mostly remembered for his fraudulent embryo drawings.
He also inspired some leading Nazis.
“This [i.e. Haeckel’s tree] represented Earth's wealth of species in the context of evolution — a concept he dubbed phylogeny (General Morphology of Organisms; 1866).
The root of the tree symbolizes a common primordial ancestor from which all other forms emerged. Haeckel developed his tree over almost 1,000 pages, basing it on palaeontological, embryological and systemic data — a precursor to modern biology's phylogenetic trees.”
We now know that Haeckel’s tree – just like Darwin’s – was simply wrong.
Secular researches have begun to understand that a bush or a net is a far more better description of the development and diversity of life.
Creationists have said so for decades.
Source:
Hossfeld, Uwe and Georgy S. Levit. 2016. Phylogeny: 'Tree of life' took root 150 years ago. Nature 540, 38.
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