[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I welcome back philosopher of biology Paul Nelson to share some more stories of his experiences with our longtime colleague, Dr. Jonathan Wells, who recently passed away at 82 years old. Dr. Wells was one of the first fellows at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, and his contributions to the Intelligent Design movement over the last 25 years have been instrumental. In case you don't know him, Dr. Nelson is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and an adjunct professor in the Master of Arts program in Science and Religion at Biola University.
He is a philosopher of biology who has been involved in the Intelligent Design debate internationally for three decades. After Paul received his BA in philosophy with a minor in evolutionary biology from the University of Pittsburgh, he entered the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1998 in the Philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory.
In the first half of our conversation together, Paul talked about how he first met Jonathan back in 1991. He took us back to a famous early meeting in ID history, brought together many of the ID theorists you likely know and love today. Mike Behe, Steve Meyer, Bill Dembsky, Doug Axe, and of course, Jonathan Wells himself. Paul also related some of his adventures with Jonathan, including a conference on the origin of animal body plans at Indiana University in 1994 and a memorable trip to southern China in 1999.
So let's jump back into the conversation now. Paul has just finished relating their adventures in China, and I ask him next if he could tell back in 1999 that Jonathan's famous book Icons of Evolution was just on the horizon.
And it was the following year that Icons of Evolution was published, which put him on the map. Could you get a sense that that was coming? Was he telling you that he was working on that?
[00:02:15] Speaker B: He was. And what he had noticed because he had to. He taught as a graduate student. He taught at, I think at Berkeley, and then he actually won an award for teaching. I think it may have been at Berkeley. I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly. But he was already teaching and having to use books, textbooks that, you know, dealt with evolution. And he would look at them and realize what they're saying here about Haeckel's embryos, what they're saying here about the early atmosphere, the Miller Urey experiment, these classic textbook stories, they're just wrong. Why are they in the textbook?
And what struck him was the fact that many biologists get a Certain amount of evolutionary theory early in their training, often just in their college years.
And then they go off and specialize and they don't really use evolutionary theory in any practical way after that. It's something they have to learn, so they do.
But the textbooks have a life of their own and they perpetuate these, these myths basically.
Because, you know, if you've ever done any textbook writing, I have, it's laborious. You've got to make figures, you know, you've got to tell the story in a way that makes sense to a general reader. And if you can just borrow a figure that somebody else made 20 years earlier and put that in your chapter, saves labor.
So these, these stories about the peppered moth or about Haeckel's embryos, or about the Miller Urey experiment, they take on a life of their own and they become kind of urban legends of evolutionary theory or as Jonathan called them, and icons, you know, they're icons. And you get this then this mass of very ill supported or, you know, flat out wrong stuff that's preserved by textbooks perpetuated to students.
The image you should have is of a big, I guess a big heavy cart rolling downhill. It's got so much inertia that it's impossible to stop. And Jonathan says, I got to do something about this.
And he writes, icons and icons made a difference.
Because you can see in textbook publishing, high school and college biology, textbook publishing, Haeckel's embryos come out. And there were other things at the time that had an influence on this. There was series of papers by a guy named, a developmental biologist named Richardson that got a lot of press because Richardson saw the same thing. These drawings of embryos that come from Ernst Haeckel are flat out wrong.
Jonathan helped greatly in that process of cleaning up evolutionary theory. And that book caught a lot of attention. I think a lot of people had learned these icons and they were unhappy. No one likes to find out they've been taught something that's not true. Right.
And Jonathan was a wonderful writer, very clear and, and found good illustrations to show the problems. And the book, the book was one of the things that really brought intelligent design to cultural prominence in those early 2000, let's say roughly 2000 to 2005. It was one of the things that really made intelligent design a talking point.
Yeah, it was, it was already in China. It was already beginning.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And you can almost guarantee that a book like Icons of Evolution would, would require a sequel, you know, 10, 20 years later, because, you know, it doesn't fix everything in one fell swoop. You know, it would take a while and. And you'd need another reminder of the. The lingering zombies.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: You're right. The. His later. His later. I've forgotten the title. Exact title now, but yeah, Zombie Science. Yeah. There is a lag that I think is in a certain sense unavoidable between the. The leading edge of scientific research and what ends up in textbooks. Again, for reasons that have to do with what it costs to put a textbook together, the requirements of making something that's readable almost by definition, I think of a textbook as probably equal parts valid information and that really shouldn't be there.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Yeah. All for the sake of telling a cohesive story. Yeah, that's a great point about textbooks having to tell a story. And not to experts either, but to young students and laypeople having to tell.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: A story that's consistent. It's a great book to read for fun. If the author says the people in this field don't really agree, Joe says X, Bob says Y, Laura says Z, here's why they disagree. That's a terrible textbook for a student who just wants to get a grasp of the field. Right. Tell me something where they do agree, where they're consistently on the same page.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: So, you know, what makes for a good trade book does not necessarily make for a good textbook.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, let's have another recounting of an adventure. Another adventure you had with Jonathan, 2003. Right. So three years after icons drops, University of Chicago, there's a poster presentation on evolution and development. Tell me about that experience.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: So it was in that early 2000s. Right. Jonathan and I, I think we at the time, we were both members of the Society for Developmental Biology, and I would do presentations, poster presentations at their annual meetings. Well, this was a meeting organized by University of Chicago on the question of large scale evolution. Not just the origin of animal body plans, but lots of questions having to do with macroevolutionary change.
So Jonathan and I collaborated on a poster where we pointed out that there were severe problems with evolutionary mechanisms for changing body plan features.
So if you look at a developing embryo in any major animal group after the initial period of the formation of what's known as the gastrula, It's a stage found pretty much in any developing animal. It's been named the gastrula. Then you begin to see the features of what will make a chordate. A chordate. What will make an arthropod. An arthropod. Right. And the embryo is headed towards A particular adult form, the adult phenotype, what do you. What's the last thing you want to happen? If you're that embryo at that stage, that early stage, the last thing you want to happen is a mutation that affects the global form because the rest of the organism doesn't really know where to go at that. If you're, if you're supposed to be a fruit fly, right, that's where. That's your sort of the last stage on the road, the last station on the bus line, you know, that's going to be three major body segments, six legs, two eyes, two wings and so forth, a gut, functional brain, all of that. If you have a mutation that occurs early in development that says, guess what? No thorax, we're leaving the thorax out this time.
And the embryo somehow manages to make it all the way through, it's not going anywhere. It's over. Because the normal state for a fruit fly is you got to have a thorax, right? So our poster was addressing this question of evolutionary mechanisms, because by their very nature are undirected, they tend to damage, irreversibly damage embryos rather than make them better. Okay, so we put up our poster, and it's in the hallway right outside the main lecture hall in this beautiful biomedical research building there on the Chicago campus.
So at this point, Jonathan had begun to get burned out on big meetings. He felt like it's always the same rich organic matter that issues from the nether end of a large male bovine, okay, Suitable. Suitable for fertilizer. Okay? It's. He says, always the same. And I said, well, you know, we gotta, we gotta show up Jonathan. We gotta come and, and do our, do our bit and, and show the colors of design and at least interact with people, right? Well, he was running out of patience. And I said, you know what, let's just do it anyway. Let's do our poster and talk with people and see what we can find out. And so anyway, we come out of a lecture and all the posters have been put up, and we're walking back to stand by our poster, because that's what you do at a poster session. You stand by your poster and you talk to whoever comes by as we come around the corner here with his face, this is not an exaggeration. About 5 inches from our poster is Sean Carroll.
Now, Sean Carroll is one of the world's best known evolution and development biologists.
He did pathbreaking work in a whole bunch of different areas of this field. It's known as evo devo, now, at the time, he was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I think he's probably still there. Anyway, we come around the corner. Here is Sean Carroll, right up, about 5 inches away from our poster, reading it with a look of dismay. Okay, so Jonathan starts to walk towards him to introduce himself, like, oh, Shawn, hi. You know, let's talk about my poster. Shawn looks up, he sees Jonathan, and he takes off down the hallway in the opposite direction, like, I am not going to talk to you.
And the moment was so comic, we just burst out laughing.
We just burst out laughing like, sean, we're harmless.
We're harmless.
If there's a mistake in the poster, tell us, right?
You have nothing to fear. We're so much in the minority. We're like two little fleas. Don't worry.
Instead, zoom down the hallway, off he ran.
And I think at that point, Jonathan thought, well, you know what? Just for that one moment, seen Sean Carroll run, literally run down the hallway. That was worth it.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Another great story. Well, you've talked a little bit about his sense of humor, his courage, obviously his bravado.
But what quality did you most admire about Jonathan? I know it might be hard to pick, or maybe something we haven't talked about yet.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: You know, I was thinking about this when you asked me to do this podcast, because next month I'm going to be speaking at a memorial event for Jonathan in Poulsbo, Washington, where he lived. Some colleagues are also speaking, and we're trying to coordinate our remembrances so we don't all say the same thing.
But I was saying to one of my Discovery colleagues just yesterday, an email. The thing that I most valued in Jonathan can be understood via a military metaphor. I generally don't like military metaphors because I'm a pretty easygoing person, and I would rather be friends with someone than fight them. It's just how I was built. But I can imagine being in an infantry platoon, right? A small infantry platoon, and we're under heavy fire, right? You can hear the bullets cracking overhead. The mortar shells are coming down. We're in our. We're in our foxhole. We're in our trench.
And it looks pretty grim, right? Opposing forces are very significant. They're bringing down heavy fire. They have our artillery coordinates.
You know, they've bracketed us so they could just drop the mortar shells right on top of our position.
Jonathan was the kind of squad leader or fellow soldier who always would have your back.
No excuses, no running away, no burying himself in the corner of the dugout. And pulling a blanket over or whatever. Right. He had that kind of courage of I, you know, I've seen the worst and I can handle it, and I've got your back, and I'll be there through thick and thin. And in this area, this intelligent design bait debate, you take a lot of hits.
Right.
If this were strictly a scientific question, that wouldn't happen. But it's never been strictly a scientific question. It wasn't for Darwin. It's not for us today. It connects to a lot of areas of human existence and feelings run hot and people can say very, very nasty things about you.
And I think Jonathan had the kind of just gutsiness and courage and ability to stand up under fire that you would want in your squad. Right. You pick your squad. You say each person has a role. But what do I want all of them to have? I want all of them to have that baseline courage that under fire. I know I can count on them.
And Jonathan, never in our 30 years.
Well, actually, do the math. It's more like 33, 34 years of friendship. That's a long time, Right. It's almost a biblical generation.
In our long friendship and collaboration, I always felt that I could count on him, which is a rare. It's a rare quality in any part of human life. And he had it.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, a favorite Jonathan Wells book, icons.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Hands down, I think it did a great service not only to motivate the intelligent design community to find each other and think about these things, but it performed a real service for the science of biology, which is textbook writers have a responsibility to convey the best information to students, not to recycle stories, because it's easy not to recycle stories because they tell. They got the punchline that you want. Right. Miller Urey. What's the punchline?
Biologically relevant molecules can form in an atmosphere like the early Earth. Okay. Was that the right atmosphere? No.
What was the actual yield? Minimal. The longer the Miller Urey experiment runs, the more the products get caught up in insoluble tar.
They're as far away from a living thing as the asphalt on the road outside. Right. You need to tell students accurate information. You. That is your responsibility. And I think that book really helped in the. In those two areas.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: So, yeah, Icons, hands down, if you.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Were to look at your life and your career without Jonathan, and then your life and career with Jonathan in your life, in what way do you think he has impacted your own productivity, your own work, your own pursuit of scientific truth?
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Well, first off, he really helped Me think about the nature of development and that there is a, an interplay, a subtle, beautiful interplay between the organism and the genes. You know, when you, when you get a biological education post, post Darwin, which is all of us nowadays, right, 1859 to the present, it's, it's very alien to that understanding of the living world to say that organisms are irreducible.
Because if you, if you listen to Dawkins, what he'll say is the original replicators were not whole cells. The original replicators were ribozymes, they were RNA world hypothesis. They were little RNAs that could make high fidelity copies of themselves.
And gradually more and more complexity accreted around these original replicators. But to say that the unit of biology is the cell or an organism and that is irreducible, that leads you almost immediately to design what kind of an entity can cause an entire organism. Well, the job description sounds a lot like a transcendent creator, right?
To be able to bring together everything for a functioning cell is not the kind of thing that we understand. So one of the things that Jonathan helped me to see was not to be afraid of saying to biologists, if you try to make an organism, what organism, what it's not, if you try to pick out some part of its ontology, some part of its being, like its genes, it's DNA. And you put everything else to the side and say the only thing that matters is the DNA, you're not going to have a living thing and you're going to distort the science of biology.
So his willingness to say that clearly and beautifully helped my own thinking.
And then to play that out in terms of his own research and his own writing, and again, to do it with humor and clarity, you know, just wonderful, wonderful qualities. And so I would say probably above everything else, it's that understanding of the nature of what living things are and how to explain that to people in a way that A makes sense and B, helps them to do productive research down the road.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, as we move into a world without Jonathan Wells present with us, what do you think his legacy is going to be going forward?
[00:21:27] Speaker B: I think his books will live on.
They will become classics, especially icons. I think his willingness to challenge orthodoxy where it needs to be challenged provided a great example his colorful life. We've only just scratched the surface.
He was living in a mountain cabin somewhere in California dropping acid.
He was on an acid trip when he was reading the Bible and heard God's voice. This is one of the things I learned on this drive from Chicago to Bloomington in 1994. Right. He didn't hold back anything. He said, I'll tell you where I met God. I met God on an acid trip, and I was reading the Bible. I think it was the Psalms. This is long before he went to Yale for his theology degree. Long before Berkeley. Right. And that, that life of driving a taxi in New York City and arguing about Marxism on the, you know, he would set up a. A tripod on street corners in New York City with a placard or like a little blackboard and try to engage people to argue about communism. I mean, this guy had a rich and varied life, which made him a wonderful companion because he had so much experience that he had accumulated. But it made him very wise about what worked and what didn't and where we needed to change the culture and what we needed to preserve for future generations.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Paul, you're a wonderful storyteller, and I could sit with you all day and listen to stories about you and Jonathan, but I'm grateful for the ones you've shared in this session, and I really appreciate your time.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Thank you. And. And when my book is done, I hope you'll have me back for a whole series.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Looking forward to. For sure. Well, folks, if you don't have any books by Dr. Jonathan Wells on your shelf yet, it's time to remedy that. Learn more about his work and order copies of his books@Jonathan Wells.org that's Jonathan Wells.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
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