"Each vertebrate undergoes development in a series of stages, and the sequence of those stages happens to follow the evolutionary sequence of its ancestors. So, for example, a lizard begins development resembling an embryonic fish, then somewhat later an embryonic amhibian, and finally an embryonic reptile. Mammals go through the same sequence, but add on the final stage of an embryonic mammal."

The quote is from page 77 of Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.

Jerry Coyne asks why. Why does our sequence of development mimic the order of our ancestors (fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal)?

He answers his question. As one species evolves into another, the descendant inherits the development program of its ancestor: that is, all the genes that form ancestral structures.

Right here an evolution denier who wants to justify his childish magical creation fantasy would complain about Haeckel, as if an error made by a 19th century scientist is a good reason to throw out all of science.

Jerry Coyne explains what really happened. Creationists often cite Haeckel's "fudged" drawings as a tool for attacking evolution in general: evolutionists, they claim, will distort the facts to support a misguided Darwinism. But the Haeckel story is not so simple. Haeckel may not have been guilty of malfeasance, but only of sloppiness: his "fraud" consisted solely of illustrating three different embryos using the same woodcut. When called to account, he admitted the error and corrected it. There's simply no evidence that he consciously distorted the appearance of embryos to make them look more similar than they already were.

Even if the brilliant scientist Ernst Haeckel was an pathological liar and an axe murderer, even if he ate babies for breakfast, that would not change this incredibly powerful evidence for evolution. The idea that the world's biologists, thousands of them, distort facts to support the strongest fact of science, is even more ridiculous than the Jeebus-rose-from-the-dead bullshit.

Perhaps creationists, instead of repeatedly making fools out of themselves, should just once in their lives try to learn something. Face facts Christian cowards. You're an ape descended from ancient apes, your magic Jeebus man was an ape, and there's nothing you can to do to change this basic fact of science. The decision you must make is do you want to waste the rest of your life being a drooling moron, or do you want to grow up and educate yourself.

I highly recommend this one hour 52 minute YouTube video.

What Darwin Never Knew (NOVA Documentary)

Earth teems with a staggering variety of animals, including 9,000 kinds of birds, 28,000 types of fish and more than 350,000 species of beetles. What explains this explosion of living creatures, 1.4 million different species discovered so far, with perhaps another 50 million to go? The source of life's endless forms was a mystery until Charles Darwin's revolutionary idea of natural selection, which he showed could help explain the gradual development of life on Earth. But Darwin's radical insights raised as many questions as they answered. What actually drives evolution and turns one species into another? And how did we evolve?

On the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," NOVA reveals answers to the riddles that Darwin couldn't explain. Breakthroughs in a brand new science nicknamed "evo devo" are linking the enigma of origins to another of nature's great mysteries, the development of an embryo. NOVA takes viewers on a journey from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic and from the Cambrian explosion of animal forms half a billion years ago to the research labs of today. Here scientists are finally beginning to crack nature's biggest secrets at the genetic level. And, as "NOVA" shows, the results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin's insights while exposing clues to life's breathtaking diversity.