Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today we're bringing you excerpts from a recent gathering to celebrate the life of Dr. Jonathan Wells, who passed away in September 2024 at the age of 82. Dr. Wells was one of the first fellows of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. As a biologist, he worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and as the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California. He also taught biology at California State University in Hayward. In 2000, Wells took the science world by storm with Icons of Evolution, a book showing how biology textbooks routinely promote Darwinism using bogus evidence. Icons of evolution like Ernst Haeckel's faked embryo drawings and peppered moths glued to tree trunks, Wells achievements in the field of biology are notable. Today you'll get a glimpse into Dr. Wells life and character as well as his relentless search for for scientific truth.
In a few moments you'll hear comments. First from Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute's center for science and culture. Dr. West explains how Wells managed to be both brilliant and understandable. No easy task. Following that, you'll hear from philosopher of biology Dr. Paul Nelson, who reminds us of the importance of wisdom and how Dr. Wells espoused it.
Second only to God himself is wisdom, notes Nelson. She is the queen of the physical world and therefore the queen of science itself.
After that, Dr. Richard Sternberg takes the stage to share details of how his friendship with Wells impacted him personally and professionally. And then Dr. Casey Luskin wraps up these eulogies by giving the perspective of a humble student. One student among the many, both current and former, who have learned the truth about evolution because of Jonathan's work.
As he concludes, Dr. Luskin reminds all of us that it's our task now to continue Jonathan's quest to use grace, humor and evidence backed science to speak the truth into people's lives.
Here now is Dr. John West.
[00:02:35] Speaker C: Dr. Wells had two PhDs, one in religious studies from Yale, the other in molecular and cell biolog from UCAL Berkeley. He was a husband, father, scholar, teacher, writer and he was a founding senior fellow of our center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. Actually still remember the time that I first met him when he flew up to because they were considering a move to coming up to Seattle area and he stayed at our home and it was really that. Still I have an impression of that, a very positive impression.
Jonathan devoted his life to the integrity of science. He often liked to Cite Nobel laureate Linus Pauling's injunction that science is the search for truth. And that was Jonathan's view.
You could see it in his openness to following the scientific evidence wherever it led, and also to his passion for exposing shoddy science.
Jonathan's book Icons of Evolution single handedly exposed how biology textbooks were misinforming students by recycling endlessly inaccurate and outdated information when teaching about Darwinian evolution. Jonathan's book was so meticulous in its accuracy that it was impossible to ignore, although the establishment certainly tried. But thanks to Jonathan's book, the New York Times felt obliged to run a story about how biology textbooks were still reusing fake embryo diagrams originating with 19th century German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. But the Times reporter studiously avoided mentioning Jonathan by name, even though the article is actually based on Jonathan's book. Fortunately, people found out anyway. Jonathan was not only brilliant, he was understandable. And that is no small feat. No disrespect intended, because I know we have a number of scientists in this room, but many scientists can't write. At least they can't write in a way those of us who are non scientists can understand.
Jonathan could write. He could make extremely complicated ideas appear deceptively simple and easy to understand, but that was really because of his own brilliance.
CS Lewis famously commented that any fool can write. Learned language. The vernacular is the real test. Jonathan mastered the vernacular. In fact, that site from Louis, I had to look it up because it just kept going through my mind this past week when I was reflecting on Jonathan. Jonathan was not only brilliant, he was also humble and kind and one of the nicest people you could ever get to know. And I think you'll probably be hearing about some of that today. He cared for others, and as a colleague, he would step up time and again to fill the gap when something needed to be done.
[00:05:34] Speaker D: Jonathan Wells was one of the wisest people I have ever known.
It is interesting to observe how human languages have different words for wise versus intelligent. A German speaker, for instance, will use the good Saxon word wise, which shares its etymology with our wise, whereas Klug in German describes someone who is intelligent or shrewd. And this distinction in language has an ancient lineage. Greek mythology, for instance, is marked by many characters who were powerful, intelligent or clever, but sadly unwise. Think, for instance, of King Midas.
However, I want to consider the biblical personification of wisdom as we find her in Proverbs chapter eight, because that beautiful passage represents to me many of the most admirable and memorable aspects of Jonathan's personality I met Jonathan in the early 1990s. We were introduced on the UC Berkeley campus by another wise person, Phil Johnson.
When I met Jonathan, he had already experienced the equivalent of two or three or four human lifetimes as a Princeton dropout, as army serviceman, army rebel, federal prisoner, California mountain hippie, religious believer and advocate, Yale doctoral student and now Berkeley PhD candidate in cell and molecular biology.
Do you know what happens to a person who has that many different experiences and adventures, often as different as night and day, if those experiences don't break you, as happened, unfortunately, to many young people in the late 1960s and early 70s? They teach you wisdom.
Jonathan's wisdom, however, was not motivated only by his rich life.
Excuse me, I have what my family calls weepy Norwegian genes, so I'm blaming it on DNA. All right?
Jonathan had a heart wide open to the voice of nature, to Wisdom herself, as we see her depicted in Proverbs. The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old.
I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning when the world came to be. This, in modern terms, is a scientific setting, a causal account of origins. Of course, it is much more than that. Proverbs 8 is first a philosophical and theological account of origins. It is noteworthy that Jonathan arrived at Berkeley having already completed a theology dissertation at Yale on the Reformed thinker Charles Hodge. Consequently, Jonathan's perception of science was already embedded in the larger and deeper understanding of how the scientific enterprise depended on assumptions which were not themselves scientific.
Thus Jonathan could never give to science the cultural dominance and authority which so many of his intellectual contemporaries granted it.
In Proverbs 8, wisdom is described by the writer as a powerful woman, God's first creation.
She is then his helper in bringing the rest of the world into existence. She points clearly and unmistakably to her Maker.
The true ordering of the universe, therefore, is not mass energy first with mind, showing up only many billions of years later as the product of a long and undirected evolutionary process fueled by randomness and chance.
Rather, God is first, the grounding of all reality, seen and unseen, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Second only to God himself is Wisdom.
She is the queen of the physical world, and therefore the queen of science itself.
So much of what Jonathan did with his life is explained by this deep understanding which once Jonathan seized it, or perhaps better once it seized hold of him, he never relinquished.
I want to end with something about Jonathan that very few people know. One of his professors and mentors At Berkeley was the influential evolutionary biologist David Wake. Jonathan and Wake would often discuss issues in evolutionary theory during the mid and late 1990s.
Here is how Wake described their interactions and I quote.
From time to time, I have engaged in discussions with individuals who question aspects of evolutionary theory.
These are usually professionals in other disciplines, but occasionally they are biologists who are not convinced that the modern synthetic theory of evolution is well established. It is interesting to determine what these often intelligent and even well informed individuals see as the weak points in evolutionary theory.
In this case, the issue at hand between Wake and Jonathan was the topic of homology in evolution, to which Jonathan gave much careful thought.
I know because he and I collaborated on articles about homology.
Jonathan's arguments left an impact in Wake's thinking. In the same article I just quoted, Wake said, and again I quote, homology is not evidence of evolution, nor is it necessary to understand homology in order to accept or understand evolution. You should realize just how radical a claim that is. And it came about in large measure because of those conversations between the two of them.
Of course, Wake did not surrender his conviction that evolution was true, but he acknowledged that Jonathan's critique of standard theory had great merit. And it's dangerous to play this game.
It's not really a game, it's just a risky thing to do.
I expect in the next two decades that much of what Jonathan said about the nature of organisms will be vindicated by scientific discovery. And it's often the case in science that people like Jonathan pay a heavy personal cost for being well ahead of the curve.
But he will have his vindication, I'm sure.
You know who else referred to Wisdom as a woman? Jesus. In Luke 7:35, Wisdom, Jesus said, is vindicated by all her children.
We, in this room, in a real sense, are all Jonathan's intellectual offspring.
[00:12:34] Speaker E: Thank you very much.
Good evening. Good afternoon. Lucy, Josie, family, Peter, everyone.
It's an honor, not a pleasure to be here.
And whatever I have to say is going to overlap largely with what's already been said.
To be very brief, I met Jonathan in 2001. Prior to that, two years earlier, after a failed stint in Venezuela, I had returned stateside with my family. I had ceased, for scientific reasons to believe in the big picture scheme of evolution. I reached out to a gentleman, Paul Nelson, who led me on the path to ruin, so to speak.
He suggested I contact Jonathan. And so I started an email correspondence with Jonathan and which I've kept all my correspondence and I. By 2001, 2002, I, I was convinced Utterly convinced that he was an intellectual giant. Of course, Discovery Institute, yes, handful of people, but a lot of intellectual giants. And he was definitely on top.
2007 or so had an opportunity to move out here northwest.
And full heartedly, one might say, I decided that we. We'd move over not too far from Bremerton. But one of the reasons really was to be close to Jonathan, to be within 15, 20 minutes driving time and from 2007 to 2019, during that time, the fondest experiences, which is speaking with him for hours about science, lingering over gin and tonics and discussing just a plethora of issues and always walking away feeling fulfilled. Now I just wanted to bring up some words that have come to mind and I want to. Just a little caveat there.
The philosopher Plato said, words are. They're very poor containers for what one actually has to say. And as I was going through kind of a mental list of adjectives, I realized that I could keep pouring and pouring my memories into those adjectives. All positive, but they simply did not have the capacity to hold. But I have a few of them and some you've heard. I'll be brief. One was that he had a commitment to the truth. Capital T.
There was no dogmatism about him. There was no room for, you know, this is the, this is the truth and I have a corner on that market. No, it was not that way. He had, he was searching for, Had a commitment to the truth.
He was undaunted, meaning that once he had set his mind to something, as far as I could see, once he had an idea, once he saw the fruitfulness, once he saw what positive could come out of it, again in the greater cause of search for truth, he was headed in that direction.
Humility.
He was a profoundly humble man.
And it's because I believe he had an awareness. And here I'm going to be distorting Donald Rumsfeld a bit. But Jonathan was aware of what I would call the unknown unknowns, that there was always something else out there waiting to surprise one.
He had the ability, and this was something that John west had pointed to, an ability of which I am incredibly envious of because I completely lack it. But he could distill very complex information down to its essentials. And in that distillation process, he did not betray anything.
It was always solid as a rock. He was brave. All you have to do is look at the work that he published. But he was, he was a brave man.
Composure. I only saw Jonathan once lose his composure. And by the way, it wasn't that much of a. Of a loss. And that was where we were trying to make our way to. The ferry was late at night.
It was like one way, one way, one way. And it was not where we're doing. And so I decided, I'll watch my language here. But I just decided, well, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. And I crossed a barrier and I had broken, I think, one of those laws that he would never have broken up. But I really didn't care. I wanted to get one, to get home.
He was, as I alluded to, he was widely and intelligently conversant. Meaning there was probably, I. I can't think of a topic that would ever come up that he did not have something intelligent to say about it.
One of his favorite statements, one thing he would say, and I'm sure Paul would remember this, and it may not be appropriate to say here, but he would always say, all is well that ends.
And that usually would be after some arduous conference or something like that. It was like, you know, all's well to end.
I'll close with saying this, and it's, it's not at all an apt analogy. Similarly, whatever, however you want to call it, but as a, as a man, he was a bit of a human iceberg, meaning that no matter how long one could interact with him, spend time, you realize you are really only getting a few percent of the actual depth of the person.
So these words do not do him any justice. I think they're very poor containers for everything in my heart that I would have to say.
But I would say one of the best things in my life was having met and then having become friends with Jonathan Wells. Thank you.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: I really appreciate what's already been said about Jonathan's brilliance, humility, wisdom, giftings as a scientist and a communicator. And I really can't add anything to that. In fact, I frankly don't feel worthy to be speaking here today. But thank you, Lucy and the family for letting me be here. But maybe what I can add is perspective of a student, someone who first met Jonathan as a student and who I'd like to think represents untold students who were similarly encouraged and impacted and blessed by his work. I met Jonathan in the early 2000s. In the late 90s and the early 2000s, I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, when some fellow science majors and I, who are ID fans, got fed up with the pro Darwin only indoctrination in our classes and we started a student group called the Intelligent Design And Evolution awareness or Idea Club for short, where students could get together and have discussions that our classes wouldn't allow. We were just a bunch of kids who had no idea what we were doing. But there was one scientist who always had our back and that was Jonathan Wells. Jonathan didn't just have a big brain, he had a big heart. And his heart went out to our little student club. He sent us books and bookmarks. You guys remember these 10 questions you can ask your biology teacher bookmarks. He sent these to our club. I think these are actually ones that he sent to our club. I dug these out of the archives this morning. And T shirts and other propaganda that we could give away at club activities. Jonathan even once flew down to UC San Diego and spent a day taking abuse. I mean speaking on our campus. And he did a great job. He was his normal self. He responded to questioners and critics with grace and hard hitting fact based science like he always did. Jonathan had a huge heart for students and he did a lot to help our little club succeed.
Now one thing I learned about Jonathan in just the last couple years we would come to visit him and Lucy here in Poolsbow every so often is that he is full of stories. And every time I would hang out with him, I would learn about some new era of his life that I didn't even know existed. Many of us, we heard him tell stories about his radical days at UC Berkeley. And no, I'm not talking about when he got his PhD in biology there in the 90s. I'm talking about when he was an undergraduate there in the 60s and he was an agitator and a protester. As we saw, he did jail time. But somewhere between his two Berkeley degrees, Jonathan found God. And that changed everything. He was still the Jonathan Wells that God had made him to be, wanting to change the world for the better. But when Jonathan came back to berkeley for his PhD in the 90s, instead of trying to burn the system down, he wanted to now reform it with the truth. And this too, I think was motivated by his love for students that they hear the truth and not be misled like he once was. This love became manifest in his life's greatest academic works. The whole point of Icons of Evolution and Zombie Science was to help free, dare I say, liberate students from the false information that their textbooks were using to promote evolution. We're talking about things like the Miller Urey Experiment where Jonathan showed all of us how textbooks had falsely claimed the origin of life had been solved, or Darwin's finches And peppered moths, where Jonathan helped us see that textbooks had failed to demonstrate the grand creative power of natural selection because scientists had only observed minute, small scale changes. And don't forget junk DNA, where Jonathan broke the story about how evolutionists had comically claimed that most of our genome was good for nothing when literally there were thousands of scientific papers that said otherwise. Then there's my own personal favorite, the ape to man icon, where that famous drawing of progressively more and more upright walking hominid creatures turned out to be a fiction based not upon fossils, but a paradigm that always prioritized human evolution over the hard evidence. But the one icon that I think Jonathan will be most remembered for is taking down Haeckel's embryo drawings. These were the drawings that literally had been called fakes and frauds by leading scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Richardson. But it took Jonathan to show everybody that these embryo drawings had overstated the degree of similarity in their earliest stages to finally make a difference in what was being taught in the textbooks. Jonathan wrote in the American biology teacher that, quote, if evolution is central to our understanding of biology, then it is important that we give our students reliable information about it. Clearly, Haeckel's embryo drawings are not reliable. Students who are taught that teachers constitute evidence for evolution and later learned that teachers misrepresent the facts may feel betrayed by their former biology teachers and develop a distrust of science in general. Yet Haeckel's drawings are still featured prominently in some biology textbooks. He wrote those words in 1999, and guess what? Today you can't find Heckel's drawings in textbooks. And I think the credit goes 100% to Jonathan Wells. So, Jonathan, you won in the end. You've already been vindicated.
Students aren't learning these false icons anymore, or at least they're hearing them in such small, smaller numbers. And it's because of Jonathan Wells and his work. But of course, when you go after the main lines of evidence that are used to support evolution, some people aren't going to like that. Jonathan once noted that, quote, if Darwinists could show that my criticisms of the icons were unwarranted, or if they could stop lamely trying to defend the icons and simply replace them with better evidence, I would drop my case. And I think he would have. He didn't do this out of anger. But he went on to say, but Darwinists cannot defend the icons and they cannot afford to abandon them, so they resort to insults and smears. This is why in the year 2000, when I was a graduate Student at Scripps Institution for Oceanography. Leading evolution activist Eugenie Scott came into our class and held up the book Icons of Evolution. You know what she said? She said this book was going to be a royal pain in the fanny of evolutionary scientists. You know what? She was exactly right. Because Jonathan had boxed them in with evidence and grace and they had nothing left but smears. And when Jonathan took the abuse, he responded with facts, perseverance, a cheerful spirit, and was always ready with a laugh and a joke.
I didn't know Jonathan before the 2000s, but I wonder if his care and concern for students came from maybe his own experience as a student. I wish I could ask Jonathan this question today and perhaps Lucy, you or others closer to him could help shed some light on this. But was Jonathan's second Berkeley education inspired by the feeling that his first Berkeley education had misled him and taken him down a path that he felt was highly misguided? Whatever the answer, this much I know. Countless students, both current and former, learn the truth about evolution because of Jonathan's work. I was one of them. And so, on behalf of those students today, I want to say to Jonathan, thank you. But the task isn't over. Our world is still saturated with misinformation and now it's our task to continue Jonathan's quest to use grace, humor and evidence backed science to bring the truth into people's lives. Thank you, Jonathan, for living such a beautiful and compelling life that showed us precisely what this is supposed to look like.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: That was Dr. John West, Dr. Paul Nelson, Dr. Richard Sternberg and Dr. Casey Luskin sharing some of their memories of Dr. Jonathan Wells at a gathering of friends and family in March 2025.
I also recorded longer conversations about Dr. Wells with Dr. Nelson, Dr. Sternberg and Dr. Luskin. So if you haven't heard those yet, look for them in the archive. And of course, the central place to turn online to learn more about Dr. Wells books, articles, videos and his full length online course is Jonathan Wells.org that's Jonathan Wells.org for I Do the Future. I'm editing Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Org.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
