[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. A quick heads up before we get to today's episode. This fall, Discovery Institute Academy will be offering both high school biology and high school chemistry for the coming school year.
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ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today it's my pleasure to welcome medical illustrator and artist Jodi Sjogren to share some of her remembrances of our longtime colleague, Dr. Jonathan Wells, who passed away in 2024 at 82 years old.
Dr. Wells was one of the first fellows at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, and he made significant contributions to the intelligent design debate and the science behind it. Jodi will also discuss her work illustrating Dr. Wells classic book, Icons of Evolution.
She graduated from Colorado State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology and then from the Medical College of Georgia with a Master of Science degree in medical illustration.
For 43 years, she ran her own business, Metamorphosis Studios, doing medical illustration, graphic design, aviation art, calligraphy, and floral oil painting. Though much of her artwork has been produced for the medical field, she also enjoys connecting biological avian flight with human designed flight machines. Jody, welcome to ID the Future.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Hello, Andrew, and thank you for this opportunity.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, in a separate episode, we're going to chat about your career as an illustrator and how your work can give us a glimpse into the mind of an intelligent designer. That's a fascinating aspect of this, this whole idea. But today I wanted to give you a chance to share some memories of our colleague, Dr. Jonathan Wells and discuss your experience of illustrating his 2000 book, Icons of Evolution.
So first you describe illustrating Jonathan's book as one of the greatest honors of your life. And there's an interesting story behind how you connected with Jonathan to do that. As Jonathan was busy writing Icons of Evolution in the late 1990s and you were moving to and settling in Kansas City, you had just unpacked your bags when the news media started talking about an evolution controversy that was going on with the Kansas State Board of Education.
So tell us how you got involved with that and how you first met Jonathan.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Well, my husband Jack and I had moved to Kansas City in 1998 for his engineering job.
And when I read about this controversy in the news, I became quite interested because I had been reading and studying a lot about the scientific problems with Darwinian evolution for probably a decade or so prior to our move.
So I attended one of the Kansas State school board's meetings back in May of 1999, and there I met John Calvert, who was an attorney, and Bill Harris, who was a biochemist.
And the three of us started Intelligent Design Network shortly thereafter. And we were in the midst of trying to influence the policy that was being crafted for the science standards that summer.
And Discovery heard about what we were doing, and they got involved. And that's how I learned that Jonathan was writing this book called Icons of Evolution, and he was looking for an illustrator. And since I had the training and the experience in biological illustration and a very keen interest and some knowledge about the evolution controversy, this job just had my name written all over it. So I stepped up and offered to help.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Yeah, sounds like you were exactly what he needed to complete the book.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Well, sometimes you're in the right place at the right time.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: And that's what it was.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Now, you were involved in interacting with school boards and giving presentations on intelligent design. You've noted that there was a lot of energy swirling around the topic of evolution and ID between 1999 and 2002.
Journalists were even flying in to interview advocates of ID. You were living through a bit of ID history in a real sense.
Now, you joined forces with attorney John Calvert and biochemist Bill Harris to create the ID Network, as you've mentioned. Tell us briefly about those men and what sort of things the ID Network did to promote academic freedom and awareness of intelligent design.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yes. Well, John Calvert, who really did the administrative work of chartering Intelligent Design network into a 501c3 organization.
He had been working for 33 years as an attorney in corporate finance, mergers acquisition, business litigation. He had a degree in geology, and he had an enormous interest in seeing that the issue of the origin of life was treated with academic and religious neutrality in public science education policy. And his energy for this controversy was limitless.
Unfortunately, he's no longer with us, but he continued working tirelessly at it right up until his passing last year in 2024.
Bill Harris was at the time a professor of medicine at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He has a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, and his scientific research is very widely published in, in the area of lipoproteins. So he was our expert biochemist.
And both of them, like myself, were strongly convinced that the structure and function of DNA, RNA, and all these cellular information processing systems were evidence for design in the origin of life instead of naturalistic Darwinian processes. And we were all concerned that this evolution only policy in the science standards was purposely suppressing evidence for design in nature and as well, the origin of life.
So we went to work, along with many other enthusiastic design advocates from different academic and business disciplines to try to change the way this issue was being handled in the media and to actually influence the crafting of the Kansas State science education standards.
So we were publishing position papers and communicating with the school board and with the local media outlets. We were traveling around the state to speak at public forums and school school board meetings. We participated in some very lively debates with evolutionists.
And one of our biggest efforts was that we organized a national symposium that featured scientists and fellows from Discovery Institute.
Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Walter Bradley, Dave DeWolf, John Wiester.
They all came and spoke at this symposium, which we called Darwin Design and democracy.
And about 500 people attended that symposium. That was in July of 2000.
So we were busy, but that was really just the visible and public work that my colleagues and I were involved with behind the scenes. I was very focused on the research and illustration work for Jonathan's book, Icons of Evolution.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Right. Well, it sounds like you were doing a lot of work to raise awareness about intelligent design and get the word out about the work of Discovery Institute and its different fellows.
And then the book came along. Now, you began working on Illustrating Icons of Evolution in February of 2000. You spent five months creating 26 pen and ink illustrations and two full color illustrations for the COVID Can you describe the experience of working with Jonathan on the project?
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Yes, it was really an experience.
When we started working on the project, I made a trip from Kansas City out to Seattle, Washington, where he and his family were living.
And Jonathan and I spent a couple days going over each chapter in detail, discussing what illustrations he needed. For each chapter.
He handed me one of those plastic accordion type file folders, which I still have, by the way, with documents for each of the 10 chapters in each of the file sections. Over the course of the project, the documents in that file folder grew to fill an entire file box.
There was a lot of research that was needed for each of the icons along the way.
Jonathan's approach, as you know, to his writing, was very thorough and very well documented from the scientific literature.
And my approach to the illustrations had to be equally disciplined in the sense of making sure that I had accurate visual reference.
As a scientific and medical illustrator, I knew that an illustration essentially tells the viewer what the illustrator knows.
The information that you put into the illustration that comes from your mind tells your viewer what you know.
And you can't draw what you don't know, unless of course, you're doing some form of abstract art.
If you're just tossing paint on the canvas, that's fine, but there's no information content in that kind of a painting.
So this was representational art that I needed to do for the book. So it had to be accurate. And that meant that I had to know everything necessary about comparative anatomy, embryology, ornithology, vertebrate skeletal structures, et cetera, in order to accurately depict the information.
And we were on a fairly tight deadline with Regnery, the publisher, they wanted to publish the book mid year in the year of 2000.
So I went to work back at my Kansas studio pretty quickly and spent those five months creating the pen and ink illustrations and the two different full color illustrations for the COVID Regnery did not use my first attempt at the COVID illustration. It featured kind of a stained glass church window concept with the various icons in the windows, but I guess that was a little bit too suggestive of religion for them, so that got scrapped.
The second and the final cover that I did used the ape to human metamorphosis. And I think I talked about this in my tribute to Jonathan on evolutionnews.org Jonathan gave me plenty of freedom to use my research skills and scientific knowledge along the way.
But he was always available by phone and email to answer questions and provide guidance.
I would come up with my sketches and then I would send him the pencil sketches by fax or FedEx, and he would make comments and corrections and then I would make the changes and resend the sketches to him. And when all was approved, I would complete the final pen and ink illustration.
So in this way we kind of proceeded through each of the chapters and we had the project ready to send to Regnery in mid July. Jonathan even helped me put the labels on the final art when he was in Kansas City for that Symposium that year.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Okay, so you worked a little bit directly with him as well as over the phone and remotely to get the job done. But it sounds like it came together pretty quickly.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah, we were short on time and it was a real collaborative effort. And thankfully, he was just fantastic to work with because of course, this was his project. And I knew how important it was to him and I knew how important it was to the whole effort of the controversy.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: And you mentioned the COVID The final cover is the Ape Human metamorphosis, arguably the most famous icon of evolution.
And you tell a funny story. You write that it was giving you fits because you weren't sure how to be right and accurate in the various figures that make up the metamorphosis because it itself is an icon and hotly debated and.
And you weren't quite sure how to communicate this accurately.
You called Jonathan up and explained your dilemma. What was his response?
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Boy, he just laughed and he said, it doesn't really matter. Just make something up. It's just a figment of their imagination anyway.
And that was great. It took the pressure off because I had been sweating. Well, okay, what ape turns into what other ape? And which one came first and which kind? You know, as an artist, it was just. It was so different from all the other pieces of art that I was doing from the book because so much of the other stuff was just straight anatomical and biological information that I had to represent accurately. But this one, you know, you go and look at the literature and you can't tell what proto human turns into what. And I was just at my wits end. So when he said that, I just took the pressure off and I said, well, really, they just wanted a pretty picture that captured the concept. So that's what I gave them. A series of apes morphing into a golden boy.
And, you know, it's just a shame that so many people think that it has any scientific validity. Every one of those kinds of icons that you see out there, just some artist has sat down and just, you know, created what he wanted to create.
It's amazing how they believe it.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Well, and that's a very important point, I think, one that needs borne out a little bit, that proponents of evolution have been using art and illustration to promote the theory since Darwin published it in the mid 19th century.
Creative figments of an artist's imagination have popped up in science textbooks and journals doing that heavy lifting of supporting a theory that was light on evidence and weighty on assumption. A great example of that artistic license would be Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, which you also covered in your illustrations. You were tasked with creating an illustration of what the embryos actually look like at that stage in their development. And the difference between your work and Haeckel's work is stark. Tell us how you navigated that particular illustration.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Well, Jonathan was very focused on this chapter of the book, the Haeckel's embryo chapter, because Darwin believed that the similarities in early embryos strongly supported the idea that they're descended from a common ancestor, which is one of the major tenants of evolutionary biology. And Darwin considered this to be by far the strongest class of facts in favor of his theory.
So just a little bit of background on Ernst Haeckel. He was a German biologist, a contemporary of Darwin, and Haeckel was an extremely prolific scientific illustrator. He did some amazing work in the area of marine protozoa.
Highly detailed, absolutely exquisite illustrations of various species of Radiolaria, sea urchins, bivalves, octopuses, et cetera. And when you look at his work, you clearly see that he had an extensive knowledge of these creatures, and he had seen them firsthand because of the improved scientific apparatus that was coming out during the 19th century.
And in the case of his illustrations of deep sea and marine microscopic life, he was drawing what he knew.
But Haeckel also created this famous chart of early vertebrate embryos, which has come to be known as Haeckel's embryos. And the chart, of course, depicts these embryos like a fish, a salamander, a turtle, a chicken, a pig, a calf, a rabbit and a human, showing that they are virtually identical in their earliest stages, and they become noticeably different only in later stage of development.
And you can find some version of Haeckel's embryos in almost every modern textbook about evolution. Sometimes now they're just photographs of the embryos.
And at least prior to Jonathan's book being published, you would find these embryos drawings.
And the problem is the drawings are faked.
In real life, the embryos don't look like Haeckel represented them at all.
So my task was to correct the information and depict the embryos at those early stages accurately.
Good embryology textbooks will actually show the correct features of some of those embryos at their early stages. And I had some books like that from my biology training earlier.
But fortunately for our timing, a scientific paper had just been published a couple years prior to our working on the book.
A team of British embryologists led by Dr. Michael Richardson were the authors of this paper. And in this paper, Richardson published photos of the actual embryos at this so called phylotypic stage, this tail bud stage, that was illustrated as Haeckel's first stage in his drawings.
And the actual embryos look very different from the way Haeckel drew them.
So I was able to create illustrations based on the actual appearance of these embryos in order to correct the information and to contrast them with the way that Haeckel drew them.
I might just comment from the artistic standpoint on Haeckel's embryos and in Jonathan's book, he reproduces the actual Haeckel's embryo chart that appeared in those early books on evolution and as compared with his other illustrations of like, marine life forms.
Going back to my comment that an artist can only draw when he knows if you look at Haeckel's embryos, there's a certain kind of stylized treatment of the various embryos, especially the ones at the phylotypic stage, that suggests that he was actually trying to make them look similar.
These illustrations are so similar and so lacking in, you know, convincing anatomical details that they almost seem to be copied from a template and just tweaked a bit to make them look somewhat different.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: That's very interesting. Yeah. I'm looking at your illustration right now in the book and how you pull out just really what they do look like. And I'm glad that that paper had come out so that you had something, you know, to refer to and you just do a great job rectifying that, pulling Heckle out of history and, you know, making things right, you know.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Dr. Richardson was quoted, and I think Jonathan has it in his book as saying something like, it's looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.
Heckel's embryos. That is so.
Yeah.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: And what a great privilege and a great service to be able to rectify that. That's awesome.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Yeah, somebody needed to do it.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Well, there was another illustration in that chapter that Jonathan considered to be very important too. Tell us about the chart of the earliest stages in vertebrate embryos.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Well, this chart, which was probably one of the most time consuming pieces to come up with, it shows the significant stages of development in those very same vertebrate embryos from the time of fertilization and the very first cell divisions. And it demonstrates how differently every class of vertebrates develops right from the get go.
When we were working on this illustration, Jonathan loaned me this videotape. It was called A Dozen Eggs and it showed video footage of 12 different vertebrate embryos from the moment of fertilization, and how the initial cell divisions were completely different from one class of vertebrates to another.
And I show this in my illustration from the start of what we call cleavage, where the first cells begin to divide all the way through the end of that process of cleavage, where you have a very different looking.
The scientific term would be a blastula or a little ball of cells for each of these embryos.
But then the really interesting thing is how the cells move in the process. That's called gastrulation.
And this is the embryological stage that determines your head end from the other end.
So it's a very important stage in development.
And in each vertebrate class, this process happens in a very different and unique pattern.
And I illustrate this in that chart as well as you can in a static drawing, and to try to show how very differently even vertebrate classes develop in their early embryonic stages.
This was completely overlooked by Haeckel, of course, because that phyllotypic stage, which was the first row of embryos in his chart, is actually further on down the embryological development from those earlier stages that I just talked about, and that that chart shows.
There was a great deal of research that went into this illustration.
Finding accurate information on turtle embryology turned out to be particularly challenging. And it actually took us to some scientific articles that we had to translate from French.
But the information was very detailed and specific with good visual reference. So I was able to use that as well as a lot of other embryology textbooks and material that gave us the accurate portrayals of all of this. Jonathan was particularly proud of this drawing. It was his brainstorm in the first place to have a chart like this because it demonstrates that vertebrate embryos develop very differently right from the earliest stages, which is in direct contradiction to what Darwin believed.
And it further weakened Darwin's claim that embryology would provide this convincing evidence for his theory of common ancestry.
You know, when I was back in biology classes in college, you know, we used to come home proudly touting this little mantra, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And we sounded so erudite, but it was a concept that it was just a short phrase that encapsulated this idea that embryos from different groups of animals look similar when they're going through their early stages of development because they had a common ancestor. And ontogeny simply means the embryological development of the individual animal, and phylogeny means the evolutionary history of the species.
So These individual animals pass through or recapitulate the forms of their ancestors as they develop, and then they become more like their own species in the later stages.
Well, that's what the Darwinian approach would suggest, but that's not how it actually is.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah, you and Jonathan put paid to that part of the icon with your excellent work. Well, were there other icons that were particularly challenging or interesting to illustrate?
[00:24:35] Speaker B: They were all interesting in one way or another. But I think that the homology invertebrate limbs was a particularly important one because this concept is so pervasive in evolutionary biology. And the idea that similarity of structure presupposes common ancestry is central to evolution.
And Jonathan showed how circular reasoning is used by Darwinists to claim common ancestry and descent with modification without any really objective evidence. I mean, you can't prove an ancestor descendant relationship by mere anatomical similarities or imagined development of features such as the bones and a forelimb without something objective like a pedigree or direct observation, which we don't have in the case of fossil animals.
So when, when I was illustrating the homology and vertebrate limbs diagram, I was able to travel over to the University of Kansas, probably much to their chagrin, but I was able to view a bat's wing and a porpoises flipper in their museum of biology so that I could draw those structures correctly.
And I had plenty of reference material from veterinary texts for the horse limb. And of course I knew the anatomy of the human arm from my medical illustrating. So it was important to get all of the structures in that particular illustration correct.
But the other two illustrations in that chapter were lots of fun.
There was an Ohio State University professor named Tim Berra who wrote a book, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. And in it he made this terrible mistake of comparing fossil evolution to the so called evolution of the Corvette.
And the Corvette happens to be my favorite muscle car. So I had a great time doing this little Corvette. The Corvette illustration, which kind of depicts Barra's blunder, I mean, we know that the cars were designed by human intelligent designers. And you know, to say that the corollary that animal life just came about by random material processes, when you're making a comparison to something that's obviously designed, was kind of a fun blunder.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Not the best comparison.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Right. That was a mistake I'm sure he's regretted. But then there was another illustration in that chapter called a similar gene in non homologous limbs. And it was about this gene called the distal less gene, because when that Gene is missing.
The distal end of the forelimbs of a creature don't develop correctly.
And this gene actually is active in a lot of different animals that are not related phylogenetically.
And so this particular illustration kind of worked out as a lovely little piece of art that illustrates an important challenge to homology from the genetic standpoint.
So that was a fun chapter and a meaningful one.
The Archaeopteryx chapter was also fun. It was notable for the convenient timing of a symposium on dinosaur bird evolution that Jonathan and I both attended during the writing of the book.
A new fossil discovery out west was exhibit A at this symposium. They were calling it Bambi Raptor feinbergi. It was this little kind of chicken sized fossil, sort of reptile, sort of bird like creature.
And they were hailing this as the most recent and compelling link between reptiles and birds.
They had the complete fossil on display in a Plexiglas case and I have an illustration of it in the book.
They also had an artist's reconstruction of a feathered Bambi Raptor on display.
This is another example of letting artists bring their imagination to evolutionary science, adding feathers and other structures which were not found with the fossil in order to create an image or a reconstruction that advances the theory.
The artist himself was there at the symposium and he gave a presentation in which he explained, maybe confessed is a better word, that he set out to make Bambi Raptor look something like something in between dinosaurs and birds.
So he added these sort of feathers and integumentary structures that would suggest the early development of feathers. He used an eye that they often use in taxidermy for making eagle. You know, putting eagles back together again. It's imagination in the service of the theory.
So with great amusement, I illustrated this cute little imaginary creature with as much accuracy as I could for the book.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Wow, the artistic license that has been used in Darwin's name, huh?
Quite something.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Oh, yes. Oh, it's really something.
Years back, I made a trip to the Museum of Natural history in Washington D.C.
and I just looked at all of the amazing artwork. I mean, they have, they've employed some top notch illustrators and artists in creating, you know, these charts of geologic time with all these fabulous creatures from prehistory. And artistically it's just handled brilliantly and it's so convincing because the art makes you think it's real.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: It may be the most successful aspect of evolutionary science, Right?
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And it plays right into these icons that Jonathan identified as things that were misleading to students and those in the field. And that's kind of why he wanted to put this book together.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Yes. And he was brilliant in making that connection between the power of the art and the icons and how easily the human mind just goes, oh, yeah, that must be it, and believes it just because it's there in a picture.
[00:31:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you guys got to work together. And he had someone of your caliber who could, you know, create these illustrations that would go with the book.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: Well, it was a great privilege to do it because, you know, there are other illustrators out there who certainly have the capability and the talent to do what I did.
I think it was partly being in the right place at the right time, but it was also that I shared Jonathan's concern about Darwinism, and I was totally on board with the mission. I always used to say, it's the default setting on my computer.
I'm amazed at how much time I find myself thinking about the problems with Darwinian evolution and how we can overcome this problem, this scientific myth, and replace it with the truth and show people the evidence for design in nature and the origin of life.
So it was a great privilege for me to be able to work with Jonathan Wells. I mean, he's a legend in his own time.
I'm just so privileged to have been able to do that.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: Well, and as you know, icons is 25 years old this year. How would you describe the book's impact, both personally and at the larger cultural level in the debate over evolution? Do you think it's living up to its promises and still delivering?
[00:33:11] Speaker B: Oh, I think so.
Your colleague Casey Luskin, when he was at the Scripps Institute, he heard Eugenie Scott from the national center of science Education say about Icons of Evolution, this book is going to be a real pain in the fanny, and I think it is proving to be so.
Just from my own personal experience over the past 25 years, many authors from an intelligent design perspective have contacted me for permission to use various illustrations from Icons in their books, and I have copies of all these in my collection.
Icons of Evolution has been a catalyst for a lot of new publication, in addition to being translated into at least three languages itself.
There have been so many books written in the last 25 years since icons was published, and many of them have quoted Jonathan, included my illustrations. Clearly, Jonathan's message has resonated and kind of gone viral. You know, my husband and I moved back to Ohio in late 2001, early 2002, just as the Ohio science standards were being debated with the school board, the state school Board here in Ohio.
And when they were considering the treatment of evolution in the Ohio science standards, one of the board members commented to me that he wished that every school kid was carrying a copy of Icons of Evolution in their backpack.
And I thought, well, if that ever happens, the battle is over and won. And I hope it happens.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: I think you'd be right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If only. Well, that is the hope. And that's why we have these conversations and you know, why we're still putting out books and videos and articles. Because we want to keep getting the message out to young and old, you know, that the battle is over once you can take a look at the cumulative case. You know, we have the evidence on our side, but we do have to push through the associations and the institutions and the media that that can sort of cloud that, you know, message.
So it's great that we're able to talk about this.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: It's an uphill battle. I recall early on when we were establishing Intelligence Design Network back there in Kansas, John Calvert made a very astute comment. He said, It's a 30 years war.
He was in it for the long run. And he knew that in order to overcome and defeat and replace something like a cultural entity, you know, that everyone believes everybody's just assumed evolution now for 150 years, it's so entrenched in all the science establishments and the educational institutions, colleges, universities, cease. It's taught everywhere. There's textbooks galore that have been teaching this message for so long.
I mean, it's a fortress.
And you don't just overturn that with one book or in a short period of time. John Calvert understood that it was going to be a long term battle. And now here we are, 25 years later after the first shot was fired across the bow by that Kansas State school board back in 1999.
And you know, a lot has changed and Discovery Institute has been so pivotal and so important in this work and you've stayed at it all this time. And I do believe the tide is changing and eventually school kids will be able to learn about intelligent design as a very plausible and evidence based explanation for the origin of life.
And we'll look back on those early years and go, wow, it really was an important battle.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But one that needed thought.
And yes, Jonathan was a warrior in that regard and ready to fight. Now you've written that Jonathan's great genius was in recognizing the power of these icons of evolution. We've talked about that. And he called her bluff with, with his work. What do you think Jonathan's legacy will be to Intelligent design and science at large as we move forward here?
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Well, I think that Jonathan really struck a fatal blow to Darwinism.
He understood the power of a picture.
He went right to the basic tenets of evolution, you know, descent from common ancestors by means of natural selection and gene mutation.
And he analyzed the icons, these pictures that are used to support and visualize those tenets. And he exposed the myth of evolution for what it is, basically a theory in search of evidence, using pictures to promote it.
And when looked at carefully, this so called evidence turns out to be either inconsistent with reality, for example, the miliary experiment, or ultimately meaningless like Darwin's finches and the four winged fruit fly, or outright fraudulent like Haeckel's embryos.
So I think that Jonathan really did strike this fatal blow to Darwinism, and in so doing, he helped to open the way for intelligent design as a more logical and evidence based explanation for the origin and diversity of life.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: It was just a huge service that somebody had to do and he had to the insight and the knowledge and the courage and the ability to do it. And we'll thank him forever.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: And that's why we describe Jonathan's work as foundational.
I was just talking with Jay Richards as he was sharing some of his memories of Dr. Wells, and he put it as a ground clearing operation that Jonathan was part of. You know, before we could put out the evidence for intelligent design and have that really evaluated and accepted, we had to first show how the Darwinian mechanism was incapable. And Jonathan was such a big part of that ground clearing operation.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Yes, that's a good way to describe it.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: Well, you call Jonathan a prince among men, an unsung hero and a warrior of unusual courage and humility.
What aspects of Jonathan's character and personality endeared you the most?
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Well, I always found him to be calm and considerate of everyone around him, totally prepared for his duty and keeping good humor no matter what.
At least in working with him, I found that he was just reliably helpful anytime I called or emailed with a question about some aspect of the evolution debate.
And I leaned on his wisdom often during the years when I was interacting with school boards and giving presentations on intelligent design and also on the icons of evolution.
He was a wealth of scientific knowledge, but he was also politically shrewd and savvy. You know, he'd been through enough battles to know the strategies of the other side. And he was very generous in sharing advice.
For all those years after that, Jack And I corresponded with him and his family every year via Christmas cards and letters. And occasionally Lucy, his wife, would include photos. And the last one I have of their family was taken in 2023.
I've kept all the cards that they sent over the years.
Jonathan Wells was one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met.
He autographed a hard copy of the book for me. After it came out, he wrote to Jody, friend and fellow warrior, Jonathan.
That's the highest praise I've ever received.
I'm just so grateful for the opportunity to work with Jonathan Wells.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: And readers of Icons of Evolution are the benefactors of that and your contributions.
So I'm grateful that you two found each other. And it came along at just the right time to.
To really become a force in the debate over evolution.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: Some things you can't design yourself.
That one just came about, and I'm very grateful that it did.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Well, in a separate episode, we're going to. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: I wasn't planning on moving to Kansas at the time, you know, and I had. At the time we moved to Kansas, I had no idea why we were moving to Kansas, but this turned out to be a big part of it.
So you don't have to include that in Pause. You don't have to include that in your.
In the interview. But anyway, sure, sure.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Okay. Well, in a separate episode, we're going to continue this discussion. I want to talk about your career as an illustrator, including some of the insights you've gained about the similarities between organisms and machines.
And we'll discuss what art can teach us about the mind of an intelligent designer. So that's all coming up in our next segment together. Jody, thanks so much for your time today.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. It's been a privilege.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: Its center for Science and Culture.
