Recapitulation Theory

 

"Recapitulation" (also called the 'biogenetic law') is the evolutionary theory that, at different stages in your embryonic development in your mother's womb, you had the organs of your forebears. But this speculation has been repeatedly shown to be untrue by reputable scientists.The scientific evidence available does not agree with the theory. First, if the developing embryo is supposed to reenact the stages in the evolutionary history of the race, why are so few stages included? Why would we find some of them appearing in the wrong order? For example the human heart passed through a worm, fish, frog and reptile stage before reaching its final form. It is true that at one stage or another the heart in the human embryo has one chamber (as in the worm), two chambers (as in the fish), three chambers (as in the frog), and four chambers with the connection of the two sides (as in the reptile). But it should be noted that the heart in human beings starts out with two chambers, which fuse into one for a time. This sequence actually reverses the stages of supposed evolution. If 'biogenetic law' is true, why should we not find thousands of steps instead of only a few? Why does the embryo go through some stages that could not possibly have been included in the history of the animal? How can such stages as the egg, larva, pupa, and adult of a butterfly be explained? So the facts as we know them lend no support to the theory of recapitulation. "The shortcomings of this theory have been almost universally pointed out by modem authors, but the idea still has a prominent place in biological mythology", says Paul R Erlich in 'Process of Evolution'.