DR.
Jonathan Wells is a Senior Fellow at The Discovery Institute's Center for 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 refers to the format in which Wells attacks biology, choosing what he claims are central pillars of the concepts underlying modern evolutionary biology and exposing them as fraudulent or highly suspect. For a break from current politics and a little disturbing insight into one the forces behind the neo-religious right, follow me below.
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" -- Icons of Evolution; Introduction
Doesn't that sound like Wells is saying in the introduction of Icons that he was a trained molecular biologist and even as a graduate student he mostly accepted the conventional view of evolution and common descent, but came to question it as he learned more about the details?
[Link] 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.
The "Father" Wells is referring to is none other than Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Well's education at both Yale and Berkley was funded by Moon's Unification Church. He's been a devout 'Moonie' for decades.
Wells has appeared on CNN on the Lou Dobbs Show and in plenty of other traditional media outlets where he is presented as credible authority on biology, his Ph D. in molecular bio usually pimped for all it's worth. What I'd really like to see is someone pipe up in the middle of his speil and say something like "I'm not sure which Jonathon Wells we're seeing here. Is this DR Wells the objective molecular biologist, or Disciple Jonathon Wells whose education was paid for by Rev. Moon's Unification Church so that he could in his own words, 'destroy Darwinism'?
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 in so many self described Intelligent Design philosophers of science. In my opinion and the consensus opinion of every objective bio scienist I know, they're full of a dazzling array of more outright disinformation and the worst distortions I've seen west of Young Earth Evangelists Kent Hovind and Carl Baugh.
For example, a scientist named Ernst Haeckel fudged some data to make it appear that human embryos went through a phase where they were fish and then rats and so forth, moving up the old fashioned evolutionary ladder as they developed. The sketches were either bogus or at the very least 'enhanced'.
Wells' implies in Icons that this is a major example of a failure or screw up or cover up or some crazed tin foil hatter stuff in evolutionary biology, because Haeckel got away with his fraud for years. And all that's true. There's just one problem with that: Haeckel's claims were exposed as phony by 1890 and he had withdrawn them and provided more accurate depictions well over one hundred years ago!
Update: See PZ Myers review of this issue here.
Icons then goes further with a discussion of the photographs and illustrations of modern fetal development shown in science textbooks and conflating them with Haeckel's long ago discarded version, cleverly giving most readers who are unaware of the difference the idea that they're one and the same. The author then vaguely concludes that schools are teaching as fact known, fraudulent data as (I guess anyway) part of some athiest/zionist/evil secular conspiracy to promote evolutionary biology for reasons unknown. Then, since evolutionary biology is all built on a House of Lies, somehow the unstated-and never-qualified super-natural alternative called Intelligent Design or Creationism 'wins'.
Icons only goes downhill from there 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 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.
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 and/or grass roots organizations tout 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'.
Many of the people involved in the Intelligent Design movement would be selling bibles or insurance if they hadn't taken up the call to attack science. But Wells by all accounts is not only a nice guy (And I don't mean that in a smarmy used car salesman kind of way; he's said to be a truly warm person always willing to lend a hand to a neighbor or friend), he's gifted with a classic brilliant, eccentric intellect of the absent minded professor. The loss is not just his, the loss is all of ours. For you and I and everyone we know have been deprived of what all the Joanthan Wells' of the world might have contributed to science, had they not been coopted by fringe, neo-fundamentalist bullshit during their formative years.