Excepted from an Article by Michael Behe

Carl Sagan once wrote in Parade magazine (circulation in the tens of millions) that human embryos have "something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian." And eminent scientists declared that the great similarity only made sense in the light of evolution. But the embryos don't look like that. Recent research has shown that these century old drawings, by Ernst Haeckel, an admirer of Darwin, are quite misleading. In reality the embryos are significantly different from each other (although there are similarities). This turns out to be a real puzzle. If fish evolved into amphibians, then the program that turns a fertilized egg into a fish had to have changed into the program that makes an egg into an amphibian. Drawing on Haeckel's work, scientists thought they understood how that could happen. Crucial early development was conserved, while later, less important stages could vary. But now that scenario has been falsified. In trying to decide what we know about evolution and how we know it, the embryo fiasco is quite instructive. The scientists and textbook authors who touted the nineteenth century drawings with utter confidence are now exposed as clueless. (They include the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Bruce Alberts, whose textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell prominently cites Haeckel's work.) They assured the public that they had strong evidence for evolution, but they didn't even know what the embryos looked like. Their " facts" didn't come from nature, but from their Darwinian premises.

Michael Behe
Darwin's Hostages: A decision in Kansas to question evolution dogma has given rise to histeria and intolerance