DR Jonathan Wells
Jonathan Wells is a Senior Fellow at The Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture who holds two Ph.D's, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale.
Wells is perhaps best known to the antievolution Intelligent Design Creationist (IDC) movement for his book
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? published in 2000. The title is chosen for the format in which Wells attacks evolutionary biology, choosing what he claims are central pillars of the concepts underlying modern evolutionary biology and exposing them as fraudulent or highly suspect. The book is packed with rather amateur arguments and riddled with falsehoods from the introduction which states "
During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks. I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was being taught was substantially true", thus giving the uninformed reader the impression that Wells was a trained molecular biologist who started out accepting the conventional view of evolution and common descent, but came to question it as he learned more about the details.
Wells has been a disciple of Reverend Sun Myung Moon since the mid 1970's and his education at both Yale and Berkley was funded by Moon's Unification Church. He's been a devout 'Moonie' for decades and even freely admits, in his own words (affectionately referring to Rev. Moon as "Father") that "Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
(Moon's zany antics have been chronicled by many talented writers including friend of UTI, Ed Brayton here).
Icons only goes downhill from that first whopper as a number of reviewers have skillfully covered. I'll only add for the benefit of anyone who doesn't want to wade through it all that Well's primary shtick is to poorly present very old ideas, fringe ideas, and in some cases ideas that never even existed, about abiogenesis and evolution as the sole existing and critically essential underpinnings of the modern field of evolutionary biology, and then conclude that since it's all based on fraud, it all crumbles to dust. With the vague implication floating out there some where that somehow, some way, this would support IDC.
What's important to understand about this guy is that his books and articles aren't merely full of the clever misinformation and subtle mangling of logic found in the writing of Phillip Johnson or William Dembski. They're chock full of a dazzling array of more outright lies and the worst distortions I've seen west of Kent Hovind and Carl Baugh. The material is really, really, that bad. I'm talking gigantic stinking whoppers folks. Anyone with Internet access and a smattering of science 101 courses taken twenty years ago in the haze of a hangover could sign on, point and click, do some light reading, and see through them all in a few hours. Yet Icons is one of the primary 'textbooks' the Discovery's CSC touts as a legitimate science text and pushes on school districts they've infected with their antiscience religious agenda, as a prima-facie holotype for how to 'teach the evidence against evolution'. Apparently misleading children under the aegis of science does not rate high among the moral values of Wells, The Unification Church, or The Discovery Institute. But then of course we are talking about creationists here.
DR Stephen Meyer
Stephen Meyer (Not to be confused with UTI friend and science advisor PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame ) is a Senior Fellow at The Discovery Insititue's CSC who holds a Ph. D. in the History and Philosphy of Science from Cambridge Univeristy. He's written a couple of 'textbooks', one attacking evolutionary biology in the familar genre of IDC with sections lifted virtually verbatum from Wells' Icons and the other doing much the same with a little pseudo-astronomy thrown in. (I'd say more about both having skimmed them back when they first came out, but just glancing over the table of contents a few moments ago was enough to form a fine creationist induced glaze over my eyes)
Meyer's big claim to fame is that he, and he alone, is the only Creationist of all time to ever get a creationist paper attacking evolutionary biology into a peer reviewed scientific journal.
A few months ago The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories appeared in The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (PBSW). In that paper, Meyer dusted off an obsolete Young Earth Creationist argument centered around a fascinating period in geology known as the Cambrian and presented it as evidence for IDC.
Briefly, the oldest plants and animals on earth existed entirely in ancient oceans. Oceanic strata from that long ago is sparse due to the nature of plate tectonics. New sea floor is created at mid oceans ridges, spreads away from the ridge until it hits a continental basin, and then gets subducted beneath the continent on a literal geological conveyer belt over a few hundred million years. So it's rare that a few bits get preserved here and there near the present day surface and rarer still for them to bear signs of ancient life. For more than a century it appeared from the scraps of preserved Cambrian and Precambrian strata known that life was quite simple for several billion years. Then around 540 million years ago rich marine ecosystems with animals and plants start appearing with a high degree of diversity. The fossil ancestors of familiar modern day chordates, crabs, squid, clams, insects, etc., are clearly represented for the first time. This phenomena was dubbed "The Cambrian Explosion". But over the last few decades we've slowly accumulated fossil bearing sediments from the relevant periods showing a number of clear precursors to organisms which were once thought to originate in the Cambrian. And we've learned that the 'explosion' itself happened over tens of millions years (as opposed to a single day during the 'week of creation' as Young Earth Creationists liked to pretend).
True to creationist form, Meyer leapt on the rarity of ancient fossil beds, overstated the abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion, ignored more recently unearthed fossils which detract from his cause, throws around a few terms such as Specified Complexity and Information Theory, and claims there are no transitionals-another YEC oldie but goodie. He then claims that general lineage's of broad based classifications of organisms in taxonomy, called phyla, are too complex and show too much information to be explained by evolutionary biology, and triumphantly concludes using the good ole false dichotomy that the only possible solution to the Cambrian strawman argument he's brought back from the YEC grave is Intelligent Design.
What does he mean specifically by Intelligent Design? Meyer doesn't bother to tell us. How much 'information' or 'complexity' does an organism contain and how is it measured in the article? Meyer doesn't give the slightest hint. How could we test or falsify his hypothesis of IDC? Nope, he doesn't say that either.
Meyer's paper was promptly ripped to shreds by legitimate scientists ; after they recovered from the hysterical laughter the paper produced among any one of them who took the time to read it.
To add insult to injury, shortly after Meyer's paper was published, the PBSW issued a sharp retraction to it's readers explaining that a single editor (and personal friend of Meyer) had snuck the paper past the routine editorial process without consulting or notifying the rest of staff in direct violation of stated policy.
It's also worth noting that the editor in question is also an editor at another organization: the Baraminology Study Group (BSG). Baramin means 'kind' ... Yes the BSG is a group of fundamentalist Christians dedicated to pushing the idea of 'created kinds' as mentioned in the first book of the Old Testemant; Genesis 1.