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The Infamous 'Fish Stage' in
Human Embryos

Of all Haeckel's dubious activities, that for which he is most famous, or perhaps most infamous, is his promulgation of the totally erroneous theory that the human embryo is initially identical with that of other mammals and then goes through a series of stages where it has gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc. Sometimes called the law of recapitulation or Haeckel's term "the biogenetic law, this idea has been summarized in the mouthful, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history.

The first thing to say about this dictum, is that "law" it is not! The idea is now known to be completely false. It is therefore not surprising that Haeckel could not find sufficient anatomical evidence to make his theory convincing. Never one to let lack of evidence stand in his way, Haeckel manufactured the evidence by fraudulently changing the drawings of embryos by two other scientists.

In his book, The Natural History of Creation, published in
German in 1868 (and in English in 1876 with the title
The History of Creation), Haeckel used the drawing of a
25-day-old dog embryo which had been published
by T.L.W. Bischoff in 1845, and that of a 4-week-old human
embryo published by A. Ecker in 1851'59. Wilhelm His, Sr
(1831-1904), a famous comparative embryologist of the day and professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, uncovered the fraud.

Professor His showed in 1874 that Haeckel had added 3.5 mm to the head of Bischoff''s dog embryo, taken 2 mm off the head of Ecker's human embryo, doubled the length of the human posterior, and substantially altered the details of the human eye. He sarcastically pointed out that Haeckel taught in Jena, home of the then finest optical equipment available, and so had no excuse for inaccuracy. He concluded that anyone who engaged in such blatant fraud had forfeited all respect and that Haeckel had eliminated himself from the ranks of scientific research workers of any stature.

But most still believed, on the basis of the full range of Haeckel's diagrams, that embryos from widely differing creatures were
remarkably similar in their early development, and interpreted this
as evidence for a shared evolutionary ancestry. However, the
full extent of Haeckel's deception was made known to the scientific community in 1997, when it was shown that this alleged "similarity" of embryos was itself based on further fraud. Real embryos of the various creatures featured by Haeckel at that stage of development are not only quite different from one another, but remarkably different from his published drawings (see below).

Above, top row: Haeckel's drawings of several different embryos, showing incredible similarity, in their early 'tailbud' stage.
Bottom row: Richardson's photographs of how the embryos really
look at the same stage of development.

The Infamous 'Fish Stage' in Human Embryos

The Infamous 'Fish Stage' in
Human Embryos