Doctor Courville, the contributor of this scholarly article, has assured us that he will furnish through the year several additional articles dealing with related subjects. We are confident that these scientific presentations will be read with interest and profit, and will provide a broader background for a strong, well-informed defense against the evolution theory. This necessarily brief survey of the problem touches on only a few main points. For a more detailed discussion, the reader is referred to the author's more comprehensive study. "The Recapitulation Theory," which appeared in the "Bulletin of Deluge Geology and Related Sciences," Vol. I, pp. 21-,59, August, 1941.—H. M. W.
The theory of organic evolution, like any scientific theory, must survive or perish as the accumulating evidence of the various biological sciences adds to or subtracts from its support. Viewed superficially, there are many features of biology which appear to indicate that evolution has taken place, "evidence" which seems strong to those who are content to ignore the lack of proof of the basic requisites of the theory (spontaneous generation, transmission of acquired characters, etc.), or who do not choose to consider any alternative hypothesis, or who do not critically apply all the available facts to the theory. Certain of these sciences in particular have offered hope of a solution to the basic problem of the method or the course of evolution, that is, geology and embryology. If, indeed, evolution has actually occurred, some confirmative remnants of this history should be found in the fossils which mark the earth's crust. But what the proponents of the theory hoped would be the "strongest evidence" in the support of evolution was the testimony of the growing embryo. "Since evolution did occur," they said, "residual evidences of its history should be manifested in the stages of the developing embryo." It was on this a priori deduction that the famous theory of recapitulation was based.
More than three hundred years ago, the renowned physician, William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, observed that the embryos of various animals resembled one another more or less closely, particularly in their early stages. This similarity had been observed by others before him, but the report of Harvey is the oldest and most definite one now available to us. It was about the turn of the nineteenth century, however, before scientists paid particular attention to this "parallelism" in the development of embryos. For reasons not now entirely clear, but certainly not because they were very critical observers, a number of biologists came to the conclusion that the embryo actually passed through a series of forms which were identical with adults of certain of the lower animals, such as the worm, the mollusk, the frog, etc., and so on up the ladder.
This theory met its zenith in the concepts of Meckel and Serres. While this error was not directly adopted by evolutionists, the seeds of recapitulation were thus sown. This absurdity was soon refuted by the careful studies of Karl von Baer, who is designated as the father of modern embryology. He restated the simple truth that embryos may resemble embryos of an equivalent stage, but not adult forms of lower animals.
Parallelism and Evolution
When he introduced the theory of evolution to the world, though not an embryologist, Charles Darwin called attention to this parallelism in embryos, and suggested that this similarity indicated an ancestral relationship of man to his predecessors in the presumed evolutionary scale. There can be no question that Darwin gave to parallelism its first definite evolutionary implications, substituting his idea of ancestral relationship for that of identity set forth by Meckel and Serres. It remained for the German biologist, Haeckel, to carry the notion that the developing embryo repeated its evolutionary history far beyond its scientific depths. He formulated what he chose to call "the fundamental law of biogeny" in his conclusion that "ontogeny" (the development of the embryo) was a recapitulation or a review of phylogeny (the history of evolution).
The implications of this law were so far reaching that, if they were true, the entire evolutionary history of man was open for study. Now, for the first time, with what aid the fossils might give him, man could explore his ancestry ! It is small wonder that biologists the world over began to study embryology with enthusiasm. In the development of every new creature, they expected to find the condensed story of the race.
Perhaps no other biological theory was born with greater promise than was the theory of recapitulation. According to Haecke1,1 evolution (or phylogeny, as he chose to call it) was not only recapitulated by the embryo, but was also the mechanical cause of the various phenomena of growth. There was no need to investigate further the causes of development ; evolution explained them all. Other great investigators, such as his, who sought for a physiological explanation of the growing embryo, were held up to ridicule and scorn.
But the whole story was not as simple as it seemed on the face of things. There were a number of important features about the embryo which everyone recognized could have nothing whatever to do with its presumed evoluitonary history. These structures—the embryonic membranes and the placenta for example—had to be otherwise accounted for. Haeckel called them ceno genetic, or newly added, features, in contrast to palm genetic ones, which were supposed to reflect more or less faithfully the story of evolution.
What made the problem even more difficult, though, was that some of the "stages" occurred in reverse order to what they should, some of the crucial ones were dropped out entirely, and still others came too soon or too late to fit well into the scheme. Because of these serious deviations from the straight story of evolution, it was charged that Dame Nature, perhaps with tongue in cheek, had mixed up, or "falsified," the record. By the time the theory was about three decades old, the unreliability of the embryonic record as an index of evolution was graphically described by Marshall, one of its supporters, who wrote:
"Although it is undoubtedly true that development (of the embryo) is to be regarded as a recapitulation of ancestral phases, and that the embryonic history of an animal presents to us a record of the race history, yet it is also an undoubted fact, recognized by all writers in embryology, that the record so obtained is neither a complete nor a straightforward one. It is indeed a history, but a history of which entire chapters are lost, while in those that remain many pages are misplaced and others so blurred as to be illegible; words, sentences, or entire paragraphs are omitted, and, worse still, alterations or spurious additions have been freely introduced by later hands, and at times so cunningly as to defy detection."'
The fundamental difficulty of the problem, which became more and more evident as the years passed, was the uncertainty of what constituted evolutionary sequence. It was obvious that the "stages" of the embryo could not be taken both as the essential basis of the theory and as proof of the argument. It was clear that what constituted the scale of life from an evolutionary standpoint would have to be established on the basis of information from some other source. Geology was appealed to, but here the record was too "incomplete." Comparative anatomy, some insisted, should be used as the basis of comparison. But, on the basis of living animals, there was some disagreement regarding their order in the evolutionary tree of life. Who was to be authority enough to decide on such points of difference?
This uncertainty in the use of fossil and living animals as a basis of comparison with the stages of the embryo further contributed to the confusion (if not to the "falsification") of the history of the race. This cycle of uncertainty led me to employ the figure of speech so dramatically used by Balfour and by Marshall, who compared the embryonic record with an abridged and altered manuscript, subsequently "interpolated by another hand," in the following language: "It now appears that this manuscript has been written in an unknown language, the only clue to which is another language, itself quite susceptible of various interpretations !"
The passing years have dealt unkindly with the theory. Exceptions proved to be so numerous and critical, that applications of the law to any specific problem in embryology have met only with failure and disappointment. Before the turn of the century, Hurst was bold enough to say : "Ontogeny is not an epitome, is not a record, either perfect or imperfect, of past history, is not a recapitulation of the course of evolution."
A few years later, Morgan was able to conclude: "That the embryo recapitulates in part these ancestral adult stages, is in principle false." ' Sedgwick, one of the outstanding embryologists of the period, also asserted that "the recapitulation theory originated as a deduction from the evolution theory, and as a deduction it still remains."'
Present Status of Recapitulation and Evolution
It is out of order in this short review to discuss the basic errors of the recapitulation theory, particularly since this has already been done in the longer article on the subject in the Bulletin of the Deluge Society. Suffice it to say that modern scientific advances in the field of embryology have been made without any help from this theory, and certainly have contributed nothing whatever to its support. A decade ago, De Beer, an English embryologist, tried to rechristen the theory and bring it up to date. In conclusion, he writes:
"It goes without saying that even if the views set forth here are correct, they do not provide an 'explanation' of evolution. . . . But what is claimed is that after dethroning the theory of recapitulation, we are able to make a better synthesis of our knowledge of embryology and evolution."
The "better synthesis" came ten years later when he wrote, in a revision of his book:
"But since phylogeny is but the result of modified ontogeny, there is the possibility of a causal analytic study of present evolution in an experimental study of the variability and genetics of onto-genetic processes."8
In short, then, since recapitulation and all of its aliases have failed, we are now in a position to make an analysis of evolution and experimentally study the details of embryological processes. We are, therefore, back exactly where we started before we had the recapitulation theory to interfere with the logical processes of the science of embryology.
But this is not all. Not only has the recapitulation theory failed to account for embryological processes, but so has evolution. Embryology, moreover, has no other explanation for the phenomena of growth and development. Needham, an outstanding contemporary embryologist, has this to say : "Embryology in particular has been theoretically threadbare since the decay of the evolution theory as a mode of explanation." One may therefore legitimately inquire, "How does science now account for the development of the embryo?"
Conclusion.—It has been known for centuries that early embryos of animals, even widely separated in the scale of life, may resemble one another somewhat closely in external form and structure. This "parallelism," once considered as evidence of identity of the various "stages" of the embryo with adult forms of lower animals, was discarded in favor of the evolutionary concept, which suggested that such resemblances indicated ancestral relationships. The passing years have proved that neither the theory of recapitulation, which stated that the growing embryo recapitulated its evolutionary ancestry, nor the larger theory of evolution itself, has been able to account for the phenomena of developing life.
References
1 Haeckel, E., "The Evolution of Man," pp. 2, 228, English ed., 1906.
2 Marshall, A. Milne, "The Recapitulation Theory," in "Biological Lectures and Addresses," London, 1894, p. 306.
3 Bulletin of Deluge Geology, I :43, 1941.
4 Hurst, C. H. (cited by Wilson in "Biological Lectures," 1896, p. 104).
5 Morgan, T. H. "Evolution and Adaptation," 1903, PP. 58-90.
6 Sedgwick, A., "Darwin and Modern Science," 1909, pp. 175, 176.
7 De Beer, G. R., "Embryology and Evolution," 1930, p. 100.
8 Id., "Embryos and Ancestors," 1940, PP. 97, 98. 'Needham, J., Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 8:1-18, 1935.
