276 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



not agree with what was inferred from comparative anatomy 

 and the sequence of fossil forms. Besides, it was manifest 

 that certain organs in embryos were distinctively embryonic 

 and could never have functioned in adult forms, e.g. the yolk 

 sac and the amnion. "It was recognized," says T. H. Morgan, 

 "that many embryonic stages could not possibly represent 

 ancestral animals. A young fish with a huge yolk sac attached 

 could scarcely ever have led a happy, free life as an adult 

 individual. Such stages were interpreted, however, as embry- 

 onic additions to the original ancestral type. The embryo 

 had done something on its own account. In some animals 

 the young have structures that attach them to the mother, 

 as does the placenta of mammals. In other cases the young 

 develop membranes about themselves — like the amnion of the 

 chick and the mammal — that would have shut off an adult 

 animal from all intercourse with the outside world. Hundreds 

 of such embryonic structures are known to embryologists. 

 These were explained as adaptations and as falsifications of 

 the ancestral records." ("Critique of the Theory of Evolution," 

 pp. 16, 17.) 



The result has been that this so-called law has fallen into 

 general disrepute among scientists, especially as a means of 

 reconstructing the phylogeny of modem organisms. It is 

 recognized, of course, that comparative embryology can fur- 

 nish embryological homologies analogous to the homologies 

 of comparative anatomy, but it is now generally acknowledged 

 that the view, which regards the embryological process as an 

 abridged repetition of the various states through which the 

 species has passed in its evolutionary career must be definitively 

 abandoned, and that, as a general law of organic development, 

 the biogenetic principle has been thoroughly discredited. "This 

 law," says Karl Vogt of Geneva, "which I long held as well- 

 founded, is absolutely and radically false. Attentive study of 

 embryology shows us, in fact, that embryos have their own 

 conditions suitable to themselves, and very different from 

 those of adults." (Quoted by Quatrefages De Breau, in his 



