Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. My guest today is Dr. Richard Sternberg to share some of his memories 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 his contributions over the last quarter century to the Intelligent Design movement have been significant.
Dr. Sternberg is an evolutionary biologist with interests in the relation between genes and morphological homologies and the nature of genomic information.
He holds two PhDs, one in biology, molecular evolution from Florida International University and another in systems science, theoretical biology from Binghamton University.
From 2001 to 2007, he served as a staff scientist at the national center for Biotechnology information, and from 2001 to 2007, also was a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of natural history.
Dr. Sternberg is presently a Senior fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Rick, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Well, there's a lot to talk about that I could talk about with you. I know you're busy working on an intriguing book project at the moment, and we could also discuss a host of other topics from your previous research. But today I wanted to ask you to share some of your memories of Dr. Wells. Now, first, you've known Jonathan for decades. Tell us when and how the two of you first met.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Well, I first heard of Jonathan in 1999. I contacted Dr. Paul Nelson out of the blue and began discussing some issues not really related to intelligent design, but to some other issues in biology. He brought up Jonathan's name, and I began an email correspondence with Jonathan, but did not meet him in person until 2001 at a conference.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: From I'd say from 2001 to about 2002, 2003, I maintained either phone correspondence with him or email correspondence.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: And where were you in your career at the time that you began to have correspondence with him?
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Well, I had just returned from a gig in Venezuela, so I was interested in some outstanding, outstanding problems. There are still outstanding problems in theoretical biology. And I was, at that time, in between serving as a visiting associate professor at a university and on my way to the National Museum of Natural History. It was in that period, moving around and then getting established in Washington, D.C. okay.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: So a few years before things would sort of blow up with. With regard to intelligent design and. Yeah, things like that. I know you've had quite a few memorable experiences with Jonathan over the Years. Do any stand out to you to help our audience sort of connect with the type of man he was?
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, a number of things. One is that some of the most enjoyable instances, intervals of my life was simply traveling with him. We would travel to the library at the University of Washington. We'd make a day of it. We'd usually carve out. We'd do it once every two weeks or so. Jonathan was a remarkable person in that you could discuss a plethora of topics and not only did he show interest, but he would have something intriguing to contribute. So in terms of conversation, he was a never ending fount. So that was one thing. He had a very good sense of humor. So what would stand out is that over our lunches, which I cannot count the number of times, or over dinners, we would discuss very serious topics, but then it would always end up on a. On a light note where we would be laughing and joking about things either that had happened to us in the past or things that were happening or just things that we found humorous. So that was one thing he changed. In the course of my many interactions with him, he changed my way of thinking profoundly. I was very DNA centered and Jonathan was very cell and embryo centered and did not take a shine to trying to reduce everything to the DNA level. It was by virtue of my conversations with him that in rather short order I shifted my focus.
I'm immensely grateful for that. And another thing I should add is that when I had the opportunity to move to Washington state from Washington D.C. no less, I deliberately chose a place that was about, I would say, 15 to 20 minutes driving time from his home, simply so that I could be near him and enjoy his company. So my memories of him are not just passing one or two encounters.
I met him on a regular basis from about 2007 until 2019.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Yeah, and it sounds like he had quite an influence on your thinking. He did, and I've heard that from others too, about his skill as a conversationalist. Whether it was just casually riding in a vehicle on the way to a conference or, you know, some other. Some other interaction, he did have a gift for warm conversation and indeed bringing in a sense of humor.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Yes, he was not at all a pretentious man. He was not at all an unapproachable person, someone who had put up barriers to try to use status or something like that. He was open to almost everyone and he had the remarkable ability to take a complex issue and he could boil it down to a few salient points, and that's Reflected in his writing, of course.
So he had one leg on the horse of complexity, and he had another leg on the ability to simplify it without watering it down, without losing the substance of the topic. And that is something that I find very hard to do. But that was a skill I think was innate, reflective of his intellect.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely a gift. And what did you glean from his background that would have given him experience in being humble and down to earth and approachable? I know he had a stint in prison, which is.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: Which I'm sure will do that for you.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And later he would say that he was glad he got that out of his system, you know.
What else about his background do you think lent itself to this humble character he had?
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Well, one character that he occasionally brought up, the character was Faust. Goethe. Faust.
He mentioned to me once. I remember we were on a bus headed somewhere, and he thought that the one thing that had saved the character after he had made his bargain with Mephistopheles was the fact that he realized he didn't know everything and that perhaps there was too high of a price to be paid, not only for the hubris of thinking one could know everything, but for the flip side of that, that one could assume that they did not need to know anything else. So he impressed that upon me, not because I think I was saying anything that was, you know, arrogant or out of bounds, but we'd had an encounter with someone who gave the impression that. That they had everything figured out. And that was kind of the backdrop to the conversation was sort of like, well, the more, you know, the less, you know, actually. Or to expand on that, the more you know, the more you realize that you know too little and there's always some other horizon to go. And so he, by bringing that up, emphasized the need for a humble perspective. But I also think it was just the vicissitudes of life he had. Certainly, he held himself wrong about political views he entertained during the 1960s. He held himself wrong about his. Not necessarily a stint in the military, but what led to his tenure in prison and how that does something to one's soul. In his case, yes, it led him to be a very humble man. He did not have an ounce of vainglory in him, I don't think.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that honesty and humility really served him well in his career as a biologist and in the intelligent design debate in general.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Yes, yes. One thing I recall is, I believe it was 2003. Around that time, he spoke before the American Enterprise Institute.
And so I ventured to listen. He was debating, I think, Michael Shermer and someone else. I took this without knowing him that well at the time. Actually, I didn't know him very well at all.
But what I noticed was that various ad hominems were hurled at him about his past. And it was just an attempt to not get at the issues that were on the table and that were supposed to be debated. And he was staying on. On. On message, by the way. He had his. His points and they were on topic, but the other side, the opposition, they were just going after his character. And what I noticed about him was he was unruffled, and it was not the type of composure that came from, you know, an attempt to. I'm just not going to listen to that, and I'm just going to march forward. Is that he was. He was resolute in that he was going to make his points. He was simply not going to listen to the disparagement. And he soldiered on. And I was very impressed by that also.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I've heard other stories that sort of relate that same idea. Paul Nelson shared a funny story of being in Southern China at a conference, and Jonathan, you know, walking up to deliver his speech to a rather hostile crowd of colleagues, and he drops all of his papers and transparencies. And it was. It was that type of comic moment that releases all the tension and ushers in some real confidence about the talk he was about to give. Well, there's lots of stories like that now. Dr. Wells was the author of several books, including Icons of evolution in 2000, the politically incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that came out in 2006, and the myth of junk DNA in 2011. And that's just a few of them.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Do you have a favorite Jonathan Wells book and why?
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah, my favorite is Icons of Evolution. I'll tell you why. In 2000, I spent a wonderful afternoon with a philosopher of biology by the name of Ronald Brady. And after lunch and visiting a museum, he went his way and I had to go mine. And I was going to take the Dupont Circle Metro station to make my way back home. I walked by a bookstore, and there in the window was the newly published Icons of Evolution, which I have. I can. I can look at it. And so I. I purchased it and eagerly started reading through it.
And I found the book astounding, not only because he had assembled these various. Yes, he found these various icons, and he was being iconoclastic. He was smashing each one of them verbally, of course, but There was just a lot to be gleaned. And I was also. Another reason I liked it is because when I would visit a few people there in the National Museum of Natural History in their offices, I would see it on their shelves too. So clearly it was something that people were paying attention. There have been a few books like that that I rec. It would be Michael Denton's Evolutionary Theory in Crisis that was somewhat, you know. Yes, he was attacked for it, but on the other hand, you would see it in various people's shelves, of course, Phil Johnson's book and Icons of Evolution. So that's one of my favorite books and of his, definitely my favorite book.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, really made an impact and had reverberations and. And led to reform. That was much needed, for sure. Well, I recently had a conversation with Tom Woodward on the podcast where he's sharing some of his memories and he. He called Jonathan Wells a Galileo figure in ID's connection with epigenetics. Now, you've done pioneering work on the nature of the epigenome, the information beyond DNA that plays a crucial role in body plans and other features of life. Can you remind us why epigenetics is such an important frontier in biology and how Dr. Wells contributed to it?
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Yes. So Jonathan, because of his background in embryology, was able to see things, biological things, from an angle that, say, someone who's focused on DNA sequences cannot. He was able to put it into a broader context. I recall listening to a. In fact, it was first time I met him, he was speaking about early frog embryogenesis and the remarkable and very rapid transformations that occur during that time.
And he was interpreting it from this, I would say a non DNA centered and you could call it an epigenetic framework. It was a holistic framework, which I found exciting. If you want to make an analogy between, say, geocentrism versus heliocentrism and the transition that that took, and then the role, of course, that Galileo played in opening minds perhaps to there being another perspective, and then of course, having those that were not necessarily philosophically on the same page, pushing back. If you want to make an analogy with Jonathan, it was similar to that.
Id, when I first encountered it, had very much a DNA centered orientation.
I had grown past that, but in a sense I was still. I had some attachments to it. Jonathan was able to take the same stance, that is vis a vis intelligent design, but he was able to cast it in a way which did not require one to buy into, say, the central dogma. One could have a broader horizon from which to interpret the data.
So I had the privilege spending a lot of time with him and discussing this. And I realized from his insights into he was thinking about cell membranes, the kind of information that they can carry. He was thinking also about centrioles and centrosomes and the kind of roles that they were playing.
And it was something that from my perspective, was a desperately needed orientation, but it was also one that I thought could build a bridge to other schools of thought that we would not necessarily characterize as Darwinian, but nevertheless have also some useful insights, like those, for example, who study quote, unquote, self organization or who study quote, unquote emergent properties. So Jonathan was not only to take, able to take a large body of evidence and to say this is not contrary to a design perspective, but actually augments design perspective. He was not only able to do that, but he was also able to see how roads could be built, to bring other perspectives into harmony with design, and also hopefully to have a design perspective influence some of the other schools of thought.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: So in that sense, he was a bit of a visionary and liked to think outside the box, the DNA box, as it were.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Oh yes, definitely.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: A lot of folks have mentioned in this series that I've been doing that Jonathan really cared about the integrity of science and just why intellectual and academic freedom was so important. He himself was very thorough and very careful in his research and the way he presented his research. Why do you think he cared so much about those things?
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Part of it had to do with his worldview.
So he had developed, I believe during the 70s on into the 80s, he had developed a deep concern for the truth.
And that is not to say that he ever thought he had, quote, unquote, the truth. It was the search for truth that was important to him and because of his radical tendencies of the 60s. And he saw how ideology could be used to not only bend the truth, but also to just subvert it. He did a 180 or at least a 90 degree shift and decided that he was going to commit himself to the evidence. And you'll have to keep in mind that he had a very deep theological background. So he was able to write on the topic of the church fathers or patristics. He had a very large library volumes, medieval philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas, et cetera. So he had a wealth of knowledge to, to draw on. But he was aware that if one is not at least searching for the truth, that it's not, if one is not doing that, if their, if their motives are, say, Utilitarian. And that could be power seeking or just merely to. To make a name for oneself however you want to want to cast it.
He saw that as a very deep perversion of the human mission. And he had become convinced also that a lot of what passes for science when you dig into it is not really so. And of course he could provide many examples of that. But I think the most striking and painful example of it is what we've been through in the not too recent past.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that is definitely a quality that I most admired about him was that deep seated desire to follow the evidence where it led and to seek truth in science. And it shows in his writing, it shows in his research, and it shows in the response he had to his critics just all around.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: It also showed could judge a man by his enemies.
And for me, Jonathan had the right enemies. I remember being at a conference, this would have been perhaps 2008, maybe around that time there were, I would say half or more of the attendees were those that would. Would be on the anti design side of the fence. And I remember, so it was around breakfast time and it was like one or two of the men, he said good morning and they ganged up on him intellectually, so to speak. They were trying to get the. Get the better of him. I knew one of them. I kind of inquired what was going on. And it occurred to me that because he was able to do something revolutionary in the Orwellian sense of just speaking the truth, you know, and he was, he was, he had given a talk and part of the talk was about, yeah, there's certain things that we assume to be true or that are said to be true in biology that we know and we have known for quite some time are simply not true. And this has gotten under their skin. And so their reaction to that was not a reasoned series of statements. Their reaction was just an emotional, how dare you, how dare you say our emperor has no clothes. How dare you say this? And so he had that skill, it was surgical, where he could really cut to the core of an issue and he could lay it bare. There were some that simply could not abide that. And of course today they cannot abide it.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Just one reason why Eugenie Scott would refer to icons of evolution as a royal pain in the fanny for Darwinists in general. It certainly fits the description.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so with icons, I mean, it presents the science, it presents the assumptions, it presents the simply, here's what we knew. Remember it came out in 2000. The response, it was a bit like a.
I was going to say like a Rorschach test, but the response was telling. It's a bit like the divide we have in our country today. You can have just one simple thing put out there. And he was just simply saying, well, okay, let's look at the dinosaur bird issue. Let's look at what one guy says about it, let's look at the fossil evidence, et cetera, without going into just nasty polemics. The reaction was either you would say, well, that's very interesting and I want to know more, or else your reaction would be one of just outright hostility, like you're not allowed to say that, you're not allowed. You know, it's fringe.
This is politically incorrect. Even if it's true, it should not be said.
So he was able to walk into a room and with all modesty, nothing grandiose, just simply present the arguments in a factual way. He could part the human sea, the waves would part and one side would go to the left and the other side would go to the right. That's what I noticed about his skill.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: And you know, having just bravery is one thing, you know, bravado if you will, but having that modesty and that humility is another thing. And when you combine those, you really get the sense of the gentle, quiet power that Dr. Wells espoused as he shared his arguments. Yes, well, as we wrap up, I just want to put an eye on the future for a second here. The modern intelligent design movement has gone from strength to strength in the last few decades. How will Dr. Wells legacy help to fuel the future of the intelligent design movement, do you think?
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Well, I think he's anyone who will either investigate the history of the movement, just as a, you know, looking at it, as a historian, someone who wants to understand alternatively, philosophical underpinnings or the vantage points, someone who, again, alternatively, who just wants to follow the science.
In my opinion, they're going to have to refer back to Jonathan not as being the sole source, but as someone who laid the foundation. It's, in my opinion, for the modern ID position. Just as one cannot speak about, say, geometry or some aspect of it without referring to certain key figures in geometry and some of the basic theorems that they established. So too, in the case of modern design theory, Jonathan will be one of those that will have to be named as having laid out some important insights.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. The historian will not be able to avoid Dr. Wells influence. But at the same time, the proponents of intelligent design, those fellow founders of the modern movement, I think have been so, so moved and influenced by, by Jonathan that they have no choice but to carry Jonathan with them as they continue their work and their research.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Well, Rick, you know, the beauty of this is we could be sitting here all afternoon talking about Dr. Wells, but we do have to wrap up this podcast episode. Perhaps we'll come back and do another. And I'm also excited to discuss with you the things that you're writing about. We will get to that in due course. But I appreciate you taking your time today to remember and pay tribute to our friend and colleague.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: It was my honor. My pleasure.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Well, if you listener have not read a Jonathan Wells book, or absorbed his articles or taken his online video based course, what are you waiting for? Right, let's add it to the to do list. You'll find all those resources at his website, Jonathan Wells.org that's Jonathan Wells.org. thank you Dr. Sternberg. Once again for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit us@idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
