Secular biology textbooks have finally begun to remove a long-
time favorite of evolutionary teaching—the fraudulent drawings
of embryos produced by Ernst Haeckel in 1868. But another one of
Haeckel’s errors is still alive and well. Haeckel claimed that
“gill slits” (now called “throat pouches”), a backbone, and a
tail in vertebrate embryos are proof that humans and animals
descended from a common ancestor. This idea is still presented
in textbooks, despite the fact that the initial stages of
development follow very different patterns of cell division and
become very different structures in the mature organisms. The
differences are ignored, and the similarities, though fleeting
and only superficial, are emphasized to support the idea of a
common evolutionary history. The fact that the “throat pouches”
develop into jaw and gill structures in fish, and ear and throat
structures in humans shows that the apparent similarities in the
embryos are not indications of common ancestry. Rather, it is
clear that these ver