Paranoid blogger that I am, I did a search for my name on google and found out that I’m now an official part of Wikipedia! This is probably trivial, but it feels good to know people actually are reading what I have to say. Even so, I don’t have enough notoriety to have anyone case what my name is, haha, the article saying
One critic of Wells said “If one reads Wells’ criterion for his bogus A-F grading scale for the textbooks in Icons, it quickly becomes apparent that even publishing illustrations that resemble Haeckel’s to illustrate his folly will garner the book a D, the only difference between a D and an F in Wells’ mind being a ‘D’ grade book selecting a few embryos rather than publishing the full swath Haeckel originally doctored.” [emphasis mine]
This, of course, comes from my post about the “Hoax of Dodos” video the Disco Institute put up, inspiring me to have a look through some of the textbooks I own to see if I could spy Haeckel’s embryos anywhere. I also meant to mention, as a point of interest if nothing else, that Carl Sagan actually speaks of Haeckel’s embryos in a positive manner in the 1976 book The Dragons of Eden, using the defunct recapitulation hypothesis to help readers understand that our brains can tell us something of our evolutionary history. I’ll have to go back and reproduce the passages from the book, but it did get me wondering if the idea of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” not because it’s being taught or is in textbooks, but rather it is a popular misconception, being deemed scientifically accurate in some dated popular books (like Dragons and a TIME/LIFE science series I had as a child) and in films (like The Prophecy and Peter Benchley’s Creature). Regardless of all this, Randy Olson is right to point out that the Disco Institute fixating on this issue is trivial, the group doing little to nothing to refute the larger claims of Olson’s documentary Flock of Dodos.
Anyway, whomever listed me on Wikipedia, thank you for reading and quoting me. It feels good to be appreciated.














Congrats Brian. WordPress.. Stumbleupon.. Wikipedia… pretty soon I’ll be reading your stuff at scienceblogs!
I promise to send you a post for DarwinsBeagles sometime before 2008. Haha.
Thanks for your advice on this blog. One particular thing I want to say is that purchasing electronic products items through the Internet is not something new. In fact, in the past several years alone, the market for online gadgets has grown considerably. Today, you can find practically any type of electronic gadget and tools on the Internet, including cameras and camcorders to computer components and game playing consoles.