Skimming through these threads I may have missed some important line of thought, so posting now I hope I am not repeating something already discussed.
I was in high school in the late fifties and was definitely taught the "biogenetic law" or that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." It was a sort of mantra. There were illustrations of embryos but I don't recall much about them, mostly took their word for the similarity and the claim that they proved that evolution really did occur, that even the way we develop from conception to birth recapitulates ancestral forms that evolutionism says we went through.
Although I continued to read popular discussions of evolutionism in various periodicals for the next few decades, many articles and columns by Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, and was quite addicted to
Skeptical Inquirer, which defended the ToE against creationism, I never once saw anything that retracted that formula. Until quite recently, maybe even this discussion at EvC, if someone had asked, I would have said, yes, isn't the "biogenetic law" still a standard tenet of the ToE?
I just did some googling on the subject and it appears that although the old formula is repudiated "in its literal form" it is still very much used in an only slightly modified form, in such a way that I'm not sure it looks sufficiently different from the old to be clearly differentiated from it by anyone not reading extremely carefully.
Various online encyclopedias give the following carefully worded definition:
Just a moment...
biogenetic law
in biology, a law stating that the earlier stages of embryos of species advanced in the evolutionary process, such as humans, resemble the embryos of ancestral species, such as fish. The law refers only to embryonic development and not to adult stages; as development proceeds, the embryos of different species become more and more dissimilar. An early form of the law was devised by the 19th-century Estonian zoologist K. E. von Baer, who observed that embryos resemble the embryos, but not the adults, of other species. A later, but incorrect, theory of the 19th-century German zoologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel states that the embryonic development (ontogeny) of an animal recapitulates the evolutionary development of the animal's ancestors (phylogeny).
Although they are officially repudiating the discredited formulation, it looks to me like they are still holding on to the main form of the same old claim. What does it mean that
the earlier stages of embryos of species advanced in the evolutionary process, such as humans, resemble the embryos of ancestral species, such as fish? "Ancestral species" is certainly making the same old assumption about how this demonstrates the evolutionary relatedness of the species, if in this case only their embryos, and doesn't the reference to a supposed resemblance to FISH embryos suggest the discredited "gill slits" notion, simply retained in less specific guise? In other words, although they acknowledge that Haeckel went too far, they haven't given up on the basic claim his exaggerated drawings were intended to support.
Another online encyclopedia that reproduces that identical definition is the one at Answers.com, and their page on the topic also gives the following dictionary definition of the "law" without the slightest hint that it is discredited.
That should certainly give someone the impression that the "law" is alive and well who doesn't read down to the later disclaimers.
Despite the disclaimers, they certainly do hold onto the idea in general however:
The fact that the literal form of recapitulation theory is rejected by modern biologists has sometimes been used as an argument against evolution by creationists. The argument is: "Haeckel's theory was presented as supporting evidence for evolution, Haeckel's theory is wrong, therefore evolution has less support". This argument is not only an oversimplification but misleading because modern biology does recognize numerous connections between ontogeny and phylogeny, explains them using evolutionary theory without recourse to Haeckel's specific views, and considers them as supporting evidence for that theory.
So it doesn't amount to a whole lot that Haeckel fudged his illustrations as what they were intended to affirm is affirmed by the ToE anyway in only barely modified form.
As for the topic of fraudulence, I would guess that perhaps "fraud" is too strong a word but that the certainty with which the ToE is believed in spite of the actual evidence might lead its aficionados to some fudging of facts in the clear conscience that they are only serving the truth in any case.
In any case the answer to all this is in the direction of emphasizing that there isn't a single claim evolutionistic biology makes about evidence for descent of species that isn't just as well explained by design. That is, of course embryos of many creatures show initial rough similarities. That's because they have rough design similarities. They have a head and limbs and in vertebrates a spinal column and similar internal organ arrangements. Similar design is all that evolutionists are using to prove descent but it only proves similar design. They have no real evidence except the extrapolation from similar design and the taxonomic hierarchy. Even the claim that the similarity of the genome between supposedly "related" species adds to the evidence for descent is easily answered by pointing out that if there is similarity of design in the phenotype why not also in the genotype? There is NO necessary reason to conclude that descent is the explanatory factor. Design is absolutely equal in explanatory power.
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