Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, joining me today is Dr. Casey Luskin to share some of his remembrances of 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 have been vastly and massively influential. Few who listen to ID the future will not know about his 2000 book, Icons of Evolution, wherein he exposed a range of falsehoods in popular biology textbooks, including the fraudulent Haeckel embryo drawings, Darwin's famous finches, the fabled peppered moths, and more. In the words of Eugenie Scott, Darwin champion and a former director of the national center for Science Education, Icons of Evolution became a royal pain in the fanny for the evolution establishment. Well, if you don't know Dr. Luskin, he's associate Director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He's a scientist and attorney with graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg, where he specialized in paleomagnetism and the early plate tectonic history of South Africa. He earned a law degree from the University of San Diego, where he focused on First Amendment law, education law, and environmental law. His BS And Ms. Degrees in Earth Sciences are from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at the graduate and undergraduate levels and conducted geologic research at Scripps institution for oceanography. Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools and defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for intelligent design. Hey, Casey, welcome back.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: It's great to be with you, Andrew. I wish it was a different occasion, but it's great to be with you.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I know. So, Casey, you were introduced to Jonathan's book Icons of Evolution as a student at UC San Diego. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and how it impacted your life and work at the time?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So, Andrew, we're recording this interview right now in January of 2025. And of course, Jonathan passed away in the end of September 2024. So it's been just a few months and we certainly miss him. He was a friend to many of us and a colleague for many years, and really a wonderful person, really a lot of fun to be around. Always had a Smile and a joke to tell. And really loved Jonathan a lot as a human being, more than just a colleague. But for me, when I was an Undergraduate student at UC San Diego, this was in the late 90s and early 2000s. I was basically an ID junkie. For me it started reading Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behef. I read books by Philip Johnson Dembsky. And then Jonathan Wells book Icons of Evolution came out in the year 2000. That was my senior year of undergraduate at UC San Diego and I was just starting my master's degree at that time. And this book basically looked at standard lines of evidence that were used to support evolution. In textbooks. We're talking about things like the vertebrate limb, homology as evidence for common ancestry. Darwin's finches as evidence for natural selection. The Haeckel's embryo drawings as evidence for common ancestry of the vertebrates. Peppered moth, again as evidence for natural selection. The ape to human icon, the famous drawings we see of these primitive hominids that are starting to stand upright and eventually evolving into modern humans as evidence for human evolution. And so when I read the book Icons of Evolution, Jonathan talked about how so much of this, the supposed lines of evidence that are supposed to support evolution, when you actually dig into the evidence and you dig into the technical peer reviewed literature, you find out that actually those lines of evidence are flawed. In many cases the evidence is not as we've been taught. Oh, here's another one. The Miller Urey experiment. At UC San Diego where I went to school, Stanley Miller was actually a professor. I took an undergraduate seminar once on him telling us about his Miller Urey experiment. And he actually brought in a flask that I don't think it was the original one, I think it was a replica, but it was like the flask he used to produce amino acids using supposed earth like atmosphere. Well, one of the things that I learned from reading Jonathan Wells book is that actually geochemists no longer believe that the atmosphere was like the one that Stanley Miller used in his experiments. So, and this is courses in many textbooks, textbooks that I had used. I took many courses in evolution at UC San Diego. Even though I was an earth sciences major, almost every elective course that I had the opportunity to take, I would take a course in evolution. And so I was familiar with these icons. We learned about the homology, invertebrate limbs as evidence for common ancestry. We learned about Stanley Miller's experiments. We learned about the peppered moth, Darwin's finches, Haeckel's embryos. All these things had come up in my classes. And so when I read icons, I realized, oh my goodness, these lines of evidence are not really what I had been taught. That actually Haeckel's embryos drawings were basically fudged to overstate the degree of similarities between vertebrate embryos in the earliest stages. Darwin's finches actually show small scale change. Actually, that was one I had already knew about because I'd already read Darwin on trial by that time. And Philip Johnson talked about how Darwin's finches really showed, you know, very minor small scale changes. But what I learned from Jonathan Wells book is that these supposed species of finches can actually interbreed, which means they're not separate species, they're actually one big species with small scale changes between these subpopulations. So basically what I learned was that so much of what I'd been taught in my classes that supposedly supported evolution was simply factually wrong. And we can talk about this more later. But the first thing I did after I read the book was I went to the references at the back to see if what he was saying was actually true. We can talk about whether those references held up or not. But yeah. So it's really impacted me a lot as a student to help me realize that a lot of what I had been learning about evolution in my courses at UC San Diego really was not factually true.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Wow. So you actually got some of these icons in your classes firsthand and then you picked up Jonathan's book. It must have been quite a surprise. Well, you talk about actually meeting Jonathan virtually at first. Tell us how you met him.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so first I met Jonathan online. When I was an undergraduate student. I started a student club called the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club, or the Idea Club for short. It was basically a forum where students with different views, whether they were Intelligent Design supporter or an atheist, evolutionist or a creationist or a Hindu or a Muslim or whatever they were, everybody was welcome at the club and we would invite folks to come have really just warm, cordial, friendly discussions about the evidence regarding evolution and intelligent design. And Jonathan was a very early friend to the club. In late year 2000, I actually got to meet Philip Johnson for the first time. And Philip Johnson got me on a listserv with a bunch of intelligent design supporters. And Jonathan Wells was on that listserv. And so through that I was able to meet Jonathan and he immediately became a friend to our little idea club at UC San Diego. He would send us bookmarks and t Shirts and literature we could give away, you know, promoting intelligent design, promoting, you know, this idea that he was talking about, and also, you know, problems with evolution. And so we were able to use these materials as sort of promotional propaganda that our club could give out at booths and tables and so forth. And Jonathan was very much a supporter of our fledging Idea club at that time. And I really appreciate that because, like I said, it was really Jonathan who sort of deprogrammed me from a lot of these lines of evidence supposedly supporting evolution that I had learned about during my undergraduate studies. But I first met Jonathan in person in 2002. We actually brought him to speak at UC San Diego for a lecture. I think this was in January of 2002, and it was a lot of fun. We can talk about that more. But that was the first time I met him in person.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So a couple years after his book came out, Icons of Evolution, you did host him at UC San Diego, and that was a free public lecture. What do you recall about that event?
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah, so this was just our little student Idea club. We brought in a number of different speakers. I think we'd already brought in William Dembsky to speak. And when Jonathan Wells came, it certainly caused quite a stir. I think we had about 250 people attend. It was very mixed audience with folks, you know, both supporting and disagreeing with Jonathan. And that's exactly what we wanted. We wanted folks to come together, be able to have these conversations. In fact, the whole reason that I started the Idea Club was that most of my courses did not give the opportunity to really discuss and debate whether the evidence really supported evolution or maybe it supported intelligent design. We never got the opportunity to do that in my classes. And so we wanted to provide a forum for students to have these conversations that really their courses were not providing for them. And so I think the club really succeeded because we were meeting an unmet need on the campus. People wanted to discuss and debate evolution and intelligent design, and we were trying to provide opportunities for people to do that. So when we passed out opinion and response cards during the talk, Jonathan's talk, we got quite a few responses back. We got 72 responses, and 57% said, I'm convinced. 26% said they had missed mixed feelings, and 17% said they disagreed with Dr. Wells. So, you know, that was good. We wanted people to come in with different views, and it's okay if people weren't convinced just the fact that they were able to have the conversation, have the dialogue. For us, that was a Win. Because that was such a rare thing on our campus at that time.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Your idea club sound awesome. And it sounds like they, they give students academic freedom. You know, we know teachers and professors need that as well, but students need the freedom to be able to explore these deeper issues with what they're learning. So those sound pretty awesome. Well, you also had an experience where Eugenie Scott lectured at a graduate course you were taking and mentioned Jonathan Wells book. Tell us about that.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so one of the few times that I was in a class that actually did give you the opportunity to discuss these topics and debate them was a graduate seminar I took at Scripps Institution for Oceanography that was actually on intelligent design. And it was taught very, very much for a negative viewpoint. I mean, the professors in that course, I give them credit for opening up a forum to have the conversation, but really it was universally negative. The lecturers who were brought in, it was basically the purpose of the class was really to sort of make sure that nobody left the evolutionary fold and we all stayed in the evolutionary viewpoint. Maybe some people did. I think I had already left the fold by that time. I was already very much interested in intelligent design. However, one of the lecturers that was brought in was actually Eugenie Scott, who she had, you know, obviously was a well known supporter of evolution. She was the executive director of the national center for Science Education, as you said, Andrew. And she was brought in and she came in one morning and held up Jonathan Wells book Icons of Evolution. And this is actually where that quote you mentioned earlier came from. She said that this book is going to be a royal pain in the fanny for folks out there who are defending evolution. And you know what I mean? She was right. She wasn't wrong about that. She was absolutely right. It did become, I think, a real, a difficult thing for them. Because what Jonathan had done is he had raised the consciousness of people to the fact that many standard lines of evidence used to support evolution were wrong. So this would have been in probably the fall of the year 2000. The Eugene Scott was brought in to teach this lecture, teach this course that I was taking. And yeah, it was really interesting for me to see. You know, okay, people are really concerned about Jonathan Wells book and they're really kind of nervous about what the impact is going to be. And rightly so. You know, as I said earlier, when I read Jonathan Wells book Icons of Evolution, the first thing I did was I went to the references at the back and I went and I looked them up in the libraries and I Still have scans of photocopies rather of papers that I went and dug up after reading Jonathan Wells book to see if the technical literature that he was citing actually supported what he was saying. And to my great, you know, I guess, happiness, they did support what he was saying. I would go to the library, I would photocopy the papers and I would read them and it turned out that exactly what Jonathan Wells was saying, it was supported. So what I realized when I read that book that actually was that actually, you know, the public sort of front that is put on for evolution is that there's no weaknesses in the theory. Eugenie Scott actually said that once. There's no weaknesses in the theory of evolution. That's sort of the public Persona that they want you to accept about evolution. But when you actually dig into the technical literature, you can find that there's a lot of disputing some of these core evolutionary claims. There's a lot of questions about the main lines of evidence used to support evolution. And for me, reading Jonathan Wells book and, and then doing this exercise of digging up the references and looking at what, you know, whether is really true really brought me confidence that, yeah, in the scientific community they actually are debating these things. They were just not very commonly allowing the public to see these debates.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, Jonathan had a reputation for backing up his claims, as you say, with solid scientific citations. He didn't bluff. He wasn't that kind of guy. Why is that important to science? Well, you know, not to bluff and to really be honest with what you.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Cite, it's, it's absolutely crucial. Andrew, I once, I guess I'm gonna give away my poker strategy here and maybe that's a foolish thing to do, but I actually once won a thousand dollar poker tournament and I think I actually just got really lucky because when I play poker I do it the same way that I do my science. And that is I don't bluff. I don't say something unless I know I've got the goods to back it up. I won that tournament because I got a lot of really good hands of cards and there were a lot of good poker players that night. But I didn't bluff, okay? And I went all in because I knew that I had the goods to back it up. And you know what, Andrew? I really think I learned that strategy, that technique, that approach to doing science from Jonathan Wells. Because I realized that anything that I was finding in his, in his books and his writings, I could go. He was going to, first of all, he's going to provide a scientific paper to back it up. And I could go and look up that paper and it was going to say what he said it said. And so I realized that, you know, those are two, two really good lessons I learned from Jonathan was number one, always back up what you're saying with evidence and citations to the literature to back it up. And number two, when you are being attacked and you're having people who are being really sort of nasty towards you or critical, always respond. When you do respond, always respond in a kind and civil and well informed manner. And if you do those two steps, you're going to be okay in this debate. Okay. Certainly you're going to get attacked unfairly sometimes. You're going to have people call you names, they're not going to like what you're saying, but you're not going to have to worry about, you know, are you going to be caught flat footed if you bet, if you know, you've got the goods to back up what you're saying and you respond in a nice, kind, civil and well informed way to people when they, you know, ask you hard questions, whether in a nice way or not so nice way, you're going to be okay, you're going to sleep well at night, you're going, you're going to be able to know that you've done the best you could do to stand for the truth. And so absolutely what you said, you know, backing up your claims with scientific citations is crucial because science, at the end of the day, what is it? It's the empirically based search for truth. And if you're not basing your claims upon evidence, then you're not doing science. So I give Jonathan Wells a lot of credit for being a model of how to do good science.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, can you describe the impact that Icons of Evolution had on science education and the culture at large?
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that Jonathan was really primarily responsible for raising the public's consciousness to the fact that there were scientific problems with many of the standard lines of evidence used to support evolution. And as I said earlier, you know, everything that Jonathan talked about in Icons was in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Okay. What he did is he brought it out so the public could see it, so the public could realize, oh my goodness, you know, even though Eugenie Scott, the National center for Science Education, many other folks, and you know, who we affectionately call the Darwin lobby, you know, even though those folks will tell you that there's no weakness in evolution, when you dig into the scientific peer reviewed literature, you find that Actually, there are big questions about the sufficiency of natural selection. Whether or not Haeckel's embryo drawings are accurate, whether whether or not vertebrate limbs really are, you know, provide a compelling argument for homology, for common ancestry. These are all things that are being debated in the technical literature. But Jonathan, what he did is he made people aware of that fact in a way that the scientific community was really not disclosing to the public. So let's talk about some of the successes that he had in science education. I think that he was primarily responsible for getting Haeckel's embryo drawings out of the textbooks. Okay. And also similarly inaccurate drawings out of. Out of the textbooks. You can still find them occasionally, but compared to the state of things when Jonathan came around, there's been a lot of improvement. They're very, very difficult to find. One of the only sort of recent memory examples of a science educator using Haeckel's embryo drawings to promote evolution is actually Khan Academy. I know many folks love to use Khan Academy to learn good science on YouTube. They have a lot of great resources. But their video, which is still on YouTube, as far as I'm aware, for as the. Their video on the evidence for evolution uses Haeckel's embryos drawings. But that's one of the only examples of recent memory that is still using Helckel's embryos drawings. And I think that it is because of Jonathan Wells's work that brought to light the fact that these embryo drawings are inaccurate. Stephen Jay Gould called them fraudulent. You know, Jonathan talked about this, that it was highly criticized in the scientific community, these. These drawings. And because of that, people were willing to finally take them out. I think textbooks also made improvements in how they treated the Miller Urey experiments and the peppered moth. As I said earlier, you know, the Miller Urie experiments, what they would say in the textbooks is that, okay, Stanley Miller did these experiments. He zapped a bunch of gases with electricity that was supposed to simulate lightning zapping Earth's early atmosphere on. On the early Earth. And then they produced amino acids. And they said, okay, this is evidence that you could actually generate amino acids in primitive Earth conditions. Well, what I learned from Icons of Evolution, many other people learned, is that actually geochemists don't believe that the early Earth's atmosphere was the gas mixture that Stanley Miller used in his experiments. And so they're interesting experiments, but they're not really relevant to what happened in the early Earth. And so I think as a result, we've seen a lot of Improvements. A lot of textbooks now will disclose and acknowledge that Stanley Miller's experiments, yes, they produced amino acids, but they probably did not accurately simulate the early Earth environment.
Peppered moth. Also, you know, the whole question about whether or not peppered moths rest on tree trunks, this is still being debated today, but I think that a lot of the rhetoric around that has been tempered as well. So we've seen improvements in the textbooks. Are they perfect? No, certainly not. Far from it. But at least we've seen some improvements. And I think that Jonathan Wells gets the credit for a lot of that.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Well, Jonathan sometimes went to great lengths to protect friends and colleagues from the harm that may come to them as a result of standing up against the Darwinian paradigm. Tell us about the time he disguised himself to get ready for a research stint.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is a story that I've heard secondhand. I didn't hear this story firsthand, but basically Jonathan Wells was doing research on a scientific research project related to the evidence for intelligent design and molecular machines in the cell. And while he was traveling to another university to use some of their instruments to do this research, and he basically dyed his hair bleach blonde. Now you would think, okay, he was doing this so that he wouldn't be caught, he wouldn't be identified or recognized, but actually it turns out that the reason that he dyed his hair was to protect the colleagues that he was collaborating with at this university. He did not want to get them in trouble by people recognizing, oh, you're a friend and a collaborator with Jonathan Wells, and then they would get in trouble. No, he was trying to protect them, not himself. But that's really classic Jonathan. You know, this makeover was not for the purpose of protecting himself. He was trying to look out for other people. And that's also, I think, Jonathan Wells always putting his friends first, even at the cost of himself. Yeah, making himself look kind of silly with his bleach blonde hair.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Do we have a picture of that?
[00:21:12] Speaker A: I've seen a picture of it. I don't know where it is, but I have seen a picture of it. Yeah, there probably is one somewhere.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Classic. Well, I know Dr. Wells was also one of the early proponents of the radical idea that so called junk DNA was not just evolutionary detritus, but actually held important function. I know this is a topic dear to your heart recently too. His 2011 book the Myth of Junk DNA helped move that idea forward. Tell us why that book was important.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah, Jonathan Wells, he was, he was a literature hound. Okay. He was so good at compiling evidence from the literature. And in the mid to late 2000s, peer reviewed papers that were finding function for, you know, the junk DNA essentially started to pour in by first by the dozen, then by the hundred, and probably eventually, you know, by the thousand. And we were seeing so many papers being published. So in the early 2010s, Jonathan decided to write a book called the Myth of Junk DNA to show people all this evidence that was finding function for junk DNA. And what I liked about Jonathan is he always framed things very well. So at the beginning of the book he talked about and he cited again, he always backed up what he was saying with citations. He cited all these evolutionary scientists who were saying, oh, junk DNA is, you know, most of the non coding DNA in the cell is functionless junk. It's evidence against intelligence, it's evidence for evolution. And there's no way that you can argue against that. And then what did Jonathan do? He then brought forth hundreds of peer reviewed papers showing that in fact there was function, important function for this quote unquote junk DNA in the cell. And so Andrew, you made an interesting comment. You said that this was a 2011 book. This book came out in 2011. That was before the famous ENCODE project published its major findings in 2012, where they found that over 80% of our the human genome shows evidence of biochemical function. And so this actually what Jonathan Wells cited in 2011 when he published the Myth of Junk DNA was pre encode. There was a little bit of encode of research that had come out at that time, but most of it came out after the book came out. So this was really pre encode. So even pre encode there were still hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers finding function for junk DNA. And again, because Jonathan was just such a great literature hound, he backed it up. Now the Darwin lobby hated this book. I think Pandas, Thumb and some other ID critics, you know, they just went off, you know, chapter by chapter trying to rip it down. But you know what the evidence was there. He cited it, he backed it up. He showed that the evidence did not support this idea of junk DNA even before encode, after encode. You know, this is why post encode we've seen papers saying things like in the sand, peer reviewed mainstream literature saying things like the days of junk DNA are over, okay? Or the journal Science said that ENCODE wrote the eulogy for junk DNA. So certainly there was a major paradigm shift after 2012, after Encode published its papers. But Jonathan was on the cutting edge of this paradigm Shift, calling it the myth of Junk DNA at a time when it was still controversial. I think today, if you wrote a book called the Myth of Junk DNA, it would not get the kind of pushback that Jonathan received. But he was always on the cutting edge. He saw where the evidence was going, he was willing to follow it, where it lead, where it was leading, even if it, you know, made people call him some names sometimes.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I'm glad that he lived to see sort of the death of the junk DNA claim. You know, he, he, he was able to see that his prescient claims were borne out, you know, with years and years of, of the data coming out. And I know you've been following it very closely as well. And that idea is on its last legs, right?
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Well, absolutely. I mean, if you read Jonathan Wells sequel to Icons of Evolution, Zombie Science, which maybe we can get into that more. He has a chapter on junk DNA in that book, and he didn't talk about it in Icons, but he did talk about it in zombie science because, you know, basically by 2017, when zombie science came out, that paradigm shift was really, really far along. I think it's still on a little ways to go, and we're still seeing the tail end of it. But he knew by that point that, yeah, the paradigm shift had happened and this icon of evolution, it was dead.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he released his highly anticipated sequel in 2017 to Icons of Evolution. It was called Zombie Science. I had an awesome cover of Zombies. And it's just that idea, you know, of these icons continuing to rise from the dead like zombies in a terrible b horror movie, you know, with equally bogus icons joining their ranks, other ones. And he assembled all this and brought it all together. What was his prescription for rescuing empirical signs from the madness of these zombies of evolution?
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah. First off, Andrew, I want to say, you know, when he wrote Zombie Science, I was really excited about that. I was actually doing my PhD in South Africa at that time, so I was not at Discovery Institute, you know, really closely involved with it. But, but I was so glad he wrote the book because there were additional icons that I always thought needed to be tackled, like the whale evolutionary transition. Fossil supposedly showing how whales were once walking on land. Junk DNA, as we mentioned, the human eye, antibiotic resistance. These are all other very common lines of evidence that are used to support evolution. And I was so grateful when he wrote this book because he tackled, I think, some additional icons that really needed to be hit. But you asked, you know, what, how did he say we could rescue empirical science from, you know, basically going down this road of just recapitulating junk science, bad lines of evidence. And I went back to zombie science and also icons of evolution to kind of look at what Jonathan's recommendations were for science. So let me give you a couple quotes from the book. He said, quote, there was never a war between religion and empirical science, but there is a war between religion and materialistic science, and the battleground is evolution. He went on to say, quote, for empirical science, the highest value is truthfulness, but for materialistic science, the highest value is survival of the fittest. And he explained in zombie Science how this works. Here's what he wrote. He said, quote, Kansas State University biologist Scott Todd wrote, quote, even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. The distinction between empirical science and materialistic science could not be more obvious. Jonathan wrote. So let's appreciate that quote. And this is actually a quote, I believe, from a letter to Nature from this biologist who is an evolutionist. He said, quote, even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because. Because it is not naturalistic. Right there you have sort of materialistic science at its epitome, okay? It is not sort of the blind, dispassionate search for truth. It is the search for materialistic answers. And if the answers lie outside of materialism, then materialistic science is not interested in finding those answers. And again, listen to that quote. It's really an amazing quote. I've known about this quote for many years, but I want our listeners to really appreciate it. It says, even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. In other words, science is not really the search for truth. It's the search for naturalistic answers. And so Jonathan Wells's prescription for sort of, you know, fixing science was you've got to take these naturalistic blinders off. You got to be willing to follow the evidence where it leads and search for truth, regardless of whether it points in a naturalistic direction or in the direction of intelligent design. Whatever the evidence shows you, that's where you need to follow it. And I think Jonathan was a really good example of a scientist who tried to do that.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: What's your favorite Jonathan Wells book?
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Well, for me, it's definitely icons. And again, for me, it really opened my eyes to the fact that so much what I've been taught about evolution was wrong. And in many of My, you know, undergraduate, you know, upper division, lower division, even graduate level courses in evolution that I've been taking at UC San Diego. So that was, for me, it was icons. It had such a big impact on me. You know, at the end of that book he also had some similar words about pursuing truth in science. He talked about the famous quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky, that evolutionary biologist who said that quote, nothing in biology makes sense in light except in the light of evolution. And what I loved about that book is Jonathan really tackled that sort of creed. He talked about how in science, you know, you should never have a creed. Science commits suicide when you have a creed. And he said, this is what he said at the very end of that book. He said, science at its best pursues the truth. Dobzhansky was dead wrong. And so are those who continue to chant his anti scientific mantra. To a true scientist, nothing in biology makes sense except in light of the evidence. And I think that was very well said on Jonathan's part. It's the evidence, not, you know, evolution, quote unquote. It's the evidence that determines what's right and wrong, not some paradigm.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Yeah, he was the epitome of following the evidence where it led. Okay, so Casey, in what ways will the legacy of Jonathan Wells continue to live on in the Intelligent Design movement?
[00:30:29] Speaker A: I think Jonathan Wells legacy is going to live on by the example that he set for so many of us to follow. And I see three parts of that example that I think have influenced certainly me, but also a lot of other folks as well. Number one, Jonathan Wells showed a lot of courage. He was always willing to stand for the truth and follow the evidence where it was leading, even if that came at personal cost. Sometimes that might have meant that he was going to get called some nasty names by, you know, angry folks on the Internet. Sometimes it meant he was going to lose stature or favor in the scientific community. And sometimes it might even mean that he's going to lose friends, you know, folks that he was collaborating with who didn't like what he was saying. Not that he was attacking them, it just meant that, you know, they did not like what he was arguing for. And so it was going to cost him. On a personal level, Jonathan was always willing to follow the evidence where it was leading. And I. And he was very courageous in being willing to do that. Number two, Jonathan, as we've talked about, you know, he always backed up what he said with good science, with citations to the peer reviewed scientific evidence in the literature and really just was always careful to make sure that he had the cards in his hand to back up what he was saying. He didn't bluff. And I think that that's a model that a lot of us follow in the ID community. Finally, Jonathan also was very civil, and he was always very kind towards his critics. Okay. Even when he was being called nasty names where folks were disagreeing with him. Maybe, maybe not always in a nasty way, but he was always civil and kind towards his critics. And I think that that really is, again, a model to follow. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it, but it's certainly a model that I have striven to follow. And I think that many of us in the ID community would love to have the courage, the civility, and also the, you know, just basically the ability to always back up what you're saying with citations and evidence. So, yeah, Jonathan left a legacy of doing good science and conducting himself well in scientific debate. And I think that he inspired a lot of people to pursue the truth in the process, and I'm definitely one of them. I'm very thankful to have known him.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I didn't know Jonathan incredibly deeply, but I had met him on many occasions as we did events locally, and. And the word that sticks out to me when I think of Jonathan is just fighter. You know, he. He was willing to go down to the mat and really fight hard for what he believed in. And we see that before he even got into the intelligent design debate. And we, of course, see it throughout his scientific career, just, you know, his determination, his tenacity, and his courage, as you say, to. To fight the good fight and follow that evidence where it leads. Well, Casey, thanks for catching up with me today and remembering Jonathan. I really appreciate your time today.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Thanks, Andrew. I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to remember him. He was a great man, and I think that his legacy is going to live on far after he departs this earth. There's going to still impact a lot of people. So it's worth having this conversation. Thank you.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Yeah. 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 I Do the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
