Common descent

Common descent is a scientific theory in Biology it can be applied on two levels, with a clad or group of species being said to share a recent common ancestor, or the broader theory which states that all organisms on earth originated from a single common ancestor. The theory is usually used in support of the Theory of Evolution.

Darwin wrote:

"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

Jonathan Wells in his book Icons of Evolution made the claim that many current biology textbooks use distorted pictures of vertebrate embryos to convince students that vertebrates share a common ancestor. (Wells) However, this statement has been heavily criticized by many scientists who have reviewed his book as being misleading in some cases and false in others. [1] [2]

However, Noted evolutionist Stephen Gould wrote the following regarding Ernst Haeckel's work in a March 2000 issue of Natural History:

"Haeckel’s forceful, eminently comprehensible, if not always accurate, books appeared in all major languages and surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin…in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution... Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities [between embryos of different species] by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases — in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent — simply copied the same figure over and over again.…Haeckel’s drawings never fooled expert embryologists, who recognized his fudgings right from the start. Haeckel’s drawings, despite their noted inaccuracies, entered into the most impenetrable and permanent of all quasi-scientific literatures: standard student textbooks of biology... Once ensconced in textbooks, misinformation becomes cocooned and effectively permanent, because…textbooks copy from previous texts.... [W]e do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!"