Lydia's IML 101 Blog: Cave Picturam! (Beware the image!)

In Biology, we often see carefully drawn images that are meant to be scientific: the view from a microscope, the details of a bird's wing, et cetera.

But wait. What?

Image as science falls prey to our previously discussed myth of "photographic truth" - even more dangerously so when we're talking about drawings, not photographs. Anyone who's done a Biology lab knows how hard it is to draw what you see in a microscope. The lines blur together and overlap and we don't always clearly see what we know we're supposed to, so we tweak our drawings a bit to get the lab done. It would take hours to draw it exactly how we see it. Even those who are actually visual enough to draw exactly what they see may be prone to a little idealization.

Such was the case with Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1800s published drawings of embryonic development to make a case for Biogenetic Law (which says that vertebrate embryos go through similar developmental stages due to shared ancestry).

Unfortunately, some of his drawings were tweaked. In fact, they were drawn based on his earlier observations and idealized to support his theory. Sounds kind of like a student who looks through a microscope, decides what the figure should look like, and then goes off in a corner and draws what it ought to be, mostly based off the image in the microscope, but fixed up a bit where needed (or forgotten).

Now, this isn't to say that Haeckel was a bad guy. In fact, he was quite the accomplished embryologist, and his drawings of nature are quite beautiful. Simply put, though, his embryo drawings remind us of the wisdom of the "perspective"-phobic Greeks. They understood that one should not trust art that claims to be anything other than art, or (as Sturken and Cartwright put it), "that one should not paint a painting that might "trick" a viewer into thinking it was real" (116).