re: #837 right_wing2

Since we’re teaching evolution, can we at least stop teaching the parts that have been proven to be hoaxes? Let’s just start with these 3:

- The classic pictures of Peppered moths on trees at the time of the Industrial Revolution
- The Miller-Urey experiments being based on premises about the make-up of the atmosphere which are no longer accepted
- The Haeckel embryo comparisons being fraudulent

As far as I know, the only one of these three that even comes close to being a deliberate “hoax” would be the Haeckel embryo comparisons — although it would perhaps be truer to say that Haeckel had “fudged” or “sexed up” his drawings in order to more dramatically support his favored (and wrong) notion that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” However, Haeckel quite obviously didn’t hoax the world by inventing a false claim that mammalian embyros (for example) have gill-like structures; rather, he exaggerated the similarities between the gill-like structures on a mammalian embryo and the actual gills on a fish embryo.

As to the peppered moths — they were once widely assumed to be a “smoking gun” of natural selection in action, and it’s true that many biology textbooks presented the peppered moth story in an over-simplified way because it provided such an easily-grasped model of natural selection. It’s also true that the famous experiments by Bernard Kettlewell in the 1950s suffered from some methodological limitations, and you can argue that Kettlewell unwittingly introduced these limitations because he had preconceived notions about why the ratios of light and dark moths were changing. But flawed experimental design does not make a scientific “hoax,” even if introduced by a researcher’s biases.

Finally, regarding the Miller-Urey experiments: you’re saying that because the experiments relied on mistaken assumptions about the chemistry of Earth’s early atmosphere, that makes the experiments themselves a “hoax”?

Sheesh, I’m going to make a guess of my own: you lazily cut-and-pasted these examples of “evolutionary hoaxes” from some Creationist website without having ANY FUCKING IDEA what you were reading.

To test this hypothesis, I did a Google search on the following string taken from your post: “Miller-Urey experiments being based on premises.”

Lo and behold, Google turned up this “Truth About Evolution” page, featuring a seven-item list of evolutionary “fairy tales.” And number 6 on the list is:

6. The truth about the Miller-Urey experiment being based on premises no longer accepted.

And surprise, surprise — here are items #4 and #5:

4. The truth about the peppered moth experiment.

5. The truth about Haeckel’s embryos being a fraud perpetrated by a leading German eugenicist.

(Note: It may not be the case that right_wing2 copied these items directly from the linked page, but rather that the page author and right_wing2 both cribbed from another source — possibly Ann Coulter’s Godless.)

In any case, right_wing2, U R A NIDIOT.