Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone.
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[00:01:08] Speaker C: Idaho. The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: In 2024, we lost a giant in the intelligent design research community.
With PhDs in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley and religious studies from Yale, Dr. Jonathan Wells was a scientist, a scholar, and an iconoclast who demonstrated unusual courage and not only in the science world. And he wrote some of the most important literature on the controversy pitting evolution against intelligent design.
My guest today is Dr. Jay Richards, a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Wells, to share some of his memories of a great scientist, a great man.
Dr. Richards is director of the DeVos center and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's also a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and editor at large of the Stream. He's the author or editor of more than a dozen books including Money, Greed and God and the Human Advantage. Welcome, Jay. Great to have you back.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Thanks, Andrew. Good to be with you.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Well, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. I wish today were under happier circumstances, but though we're grieving Jonathan's loss, there's a joy in remembering and sharing stories that illuminate his life and work. So really appreciate you taking time out to do that.
[00:02:30] Speaker C: My pleasure.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Before we. Yeah. Before we get into how you and Jonathan met, can you give us just a little background on your association with Intelligent Design and this. This institute called Discovery Institute that you've been part of?
[00:02:44] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's actually more or less the same story. Bill Demski and I were at Princeton Seminary together and I started 94 to 96.
I was working on my PhD who was working on an MDIV to sort of add to his two PhDs. And I remember that we invited Philip Johnson to come speak when his book Reason the Balance came out.
And then in 1996, there was a big conference, maybe the first really big conference on Intelligent Design, or what came to call Intelligent Design, called Mirror Creation at Biola University. And that's where I actually met a lot of the people that really now, you know, are sort of household names in the intelligent design community. By Steve Meyer for the first time, I think in person. It's the first time I'd met Mike Behe, even though we had talked on the phone and emailed Jonathan Wells and just sort of a lot of those folks, other than Bill, I mean Bill in some ways, and our friendship, he was my conduit into getting involved in intelligent design research. Time I was interested in the, the fine tuning argument. That's sort of the closest thing to this. And he thought, oh, actually, you know, that that's relevant. And so in 96. And then there was another ID conference, I remember a smaller private one, I think, in Dallas in 1997.
And then by that point, the center for Science and Culture, or what at the time was called the center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, had started at Discovery. Jonathan Wells was one of the first fellows, as was I. And so I actually started at Discovery full time, moved from New Jersey to Seattle and started on June 1st of 1998 in Seattle. And at the time, I mean, it was a real. It was a really small operation. It's nothing like it is now.
But Jonathan had moved his family actually to the northwest from, from Berkeley, California, and he settled out just on the other side of Puget Sound. And so we quickly became very close friends and colleagues.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Okay, and so you met Jonathan and others at this conference. Now, you mentioned, you know, one of the first serious conversations you had with Jonathan, really grappling with the, you know, the problems with Darwinian evolution occurring in what, the late 1990s. You both talked about a very cutting edge view of biology at the time, which is the very view that Dr. Richard Sternberg would later go on and work on for, for the next few decades.
What was that like to, to sort of grapple with those things with Jonathan Beckman.
[00:05:11] Speaker C: Yeah, and I, I remember the exact location in terms of, like, where we were. I know we were sitting at a sort of bar at a hotel restaurant at one of these conferences. So sometime between, let's say, 1997 and 2000. All right, so it's somewhere in there. But, you know, and obviously I knew Jonathan, but we never really had, you know, say an hour or just sitting there talking.
And he was telling me about his research at Berkeley, which, as you mentioned earlier, really focused on, on cell and organismal biology rather than, say, molecular biology, which focuses more on the, on the molecules and especially on DNA.
And I remember it so well, in part because at the time it was mind blowing. But he said, you know, yeah, the information in DA DNA is really important and of course the cell needs, uses the DNA for information, for coding for proteins, but there is a lot more going on in cells and in organisms than can be specified in DNA. And he said there's orders of information that you just really can't possibly locate anywhere kind of physically in the organism. And if we're going to understand what's happening in biology, we're ultimately going to have to be willing to consider these sort of, you know, what he described as these kind of higher planes of explanation or these, these extra sources of information, which at the time I only half grasped, though I certainly understood that organisms vastly surpass our under, you know, say, our grasp of something like a machine that we ourselves could make. I mean, there's a kind of integrated coordination in organisms in which they develop from the inside out. And I know Jonathan talked a lot about, say, look, you know, just look at what's happened, happens with a frog embryo or human embryo in which you start out with this single cell, right, with DNA in its nucleus. And then something gives that information about spatial coordinates, right? The head's going to go here, the gut's going to go here, the tail's going to go there. It's, it's timed and coordinated by time in terms of its sequence. So there's a clock somewhere apparently writing this stuff out. Well, where is that? Is that in a sequence in the DNA somewhere? I mean, that doesn't really make any sense, especially when you start getting different kinds of cells for different organs in the body of a, of a multicellular organism. They've all got the same DNA in them. So it's something beyond the DNA that's, that's coordinating this whole thing. And I remember it well enough that, you know, even though I can't remember the exact data or even the city we were in, I remember the content of the, of the conversation. And Jonathan very often would talk about this, even though he'd very often be working on something, you know, something accessible like his book Icons of Evolution or something like that, which was so important. Nevertheless, he always had in view this, the sort of higher reality that we're dealing with when it comes to organisms. And then of course later Rick Sternberg got involved and has been working on this for years. So folks that are in the ID movement now are sort of used to hearing these things. But telling you, Jonathan Wells, he was on it in the late 1990s.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So he had a sense of the immateriality of the genome even then and was able to apply it to, to what he was working on. I wish you were with us as we, as we move forward into that potentially revolutionary, you know, new frontier in science. It's really exciting stuff.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: It is.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Now you mentioned you were intimately involved in the publication of Jonathan's landmark book book, Icons of Evolution, which was published in 2000. Tell us about the experience of working on that with them.
[00:08:49] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And so as I said, I started full time at Discovery June 1st of 1998. And then already in 2000 we had this terrific book published by Regner, Icons of Evolution.
And I got to be intimately involved, quite honestly, because we had such a small operation. We didn't have. People like Jonathan Witten, David Klinghoffer sort of dedicated full time to helping internally with editing and sort of watching book projects come to fruition. And so I got to be really close with Jonathan in him writing the chapters. I can remember going to the University of Washington with him or on his behalf to try to find resources and illustrations, reading chapters of the book. In fact, strangely, I remember when my sister and brother in law got married in Seattle, there was a break between the wedding and the wedding reception and I sat on a porch of a church and was editing chapters of Icons of Evolution during that break. And it was just, it was just so much fun because the book, I mean, honestly, it is so accessible. I mean, a reasonably literate sixth or seventh grader can probably read it and benefit from the book. But of course it was grounded in some cutting edge stuff that, that shouldn't have been cutting edge. A lot of the stuff that he talked about in the book is sort of outrageous. I mean, the Heckles embryos, for instance, the infamous embryos that we've known weren't an accurate sort of portrayal of, of these different classes of organisms. For a hundred years at least some people have known, okay, this, this isn't accurate. And yet they were such a good explanatory tool for the pedagogy of Darwinism that they just stay in textbooks decade after decade.
And so Jonathan was able to bring all that together it wasn't, you know, it wasn't an argument for intelligent design per se. What it was is, I'd say, look, let's look at the sort of reigning theory of claiming to explain, you know, the, the emergence and development of adaptive complexity in biology, namely Darwinism or neo Darwinism. And let's just look at what it's done. Is it making valuable predictions? Has it created sort of great fruitfulness in research, or is it stultifying? Is it a sort of Procrustian bed that makes predictions that are actually contrary to the evidence and it will keep doing it over and over again? Well, that's the sign of a, a paradigm that's either spent or really never fit the facts of the, the reality that it, it was supposed to. And so I think that's what made the book so powerful because for a lot of people, as long as they thought that the Darwinian explanation of organisms was, was adequate, they weren't willing to consider, well, maybe there's positive evidence for intelligent design. So I think it was important to they kind of have a ground clearing operation first. And that's what Jonathan did with that, that really, that early book, Icons of evolution in 2000.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. It had to be done first before you started making the positive case.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: And Icons definitely did that. Has it gotten better with age, that book? What are some ways that you think it's fueling the debate even now over winning evolution?
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Absolutely. In fact, I looked at it fairly recently and incidentally, I remember Jody Shogren was the, actually the illustrator of that, which who was also a friend that did all the illustrations. But again, Jonathan was already ahead of the curve. You might guess this because he's already in the late 90s, acutely aware that the information in organisms, it certainly includes the sequential information in DNA, but goes way beyond it. He's probably going to be aware of the problems with claims about junk DNA. Of course, this sort of, again, sort of a prediction of Darwinism that if, if everything really, this sort of adaptive complexity you see in organisms is ultimately the result of what they view as a blind process of natural selection and random genetic mutations. And presumably this is the Darwinist prediction. You're gonna end up with a lot of sort of useless junk and detritus. And so that was the idea. You have a little bit of the DNA sequence that codes for proteins, and so it has a selective advantage. In other words, it does stuff. And then there's all this kind of leftover stuff that for some Reason cells and organisms have continued dragging on and on and on.
And so from a design perspective you tend to say, well I mean, I don't know, yeah, we might end up with some leftover stuff, just some historical change, but it would be surprising if all that stuff actually didn't do anything. And so ID theorists Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, Bill Demski and others were predicting for years that when we finally looked carefully at the so called non coding regions in DNA, what we would find is that they would have absolutely crucial function for the organisms. And it was so bad that, you know, I think Francis Collins in, in his book the Language of God, a Christian trying to sell Darwinism to Christians effectively was still using the junk DNA argument years later.
Jonathan was already on that the precursors were there. And it's honestly, it's been fun over the last 20 some odd years now just watching the fate of the junk DNA story go from a presumed prediction. It was a prediction of Darwinism as long as we didn't know anything about it. And as soon as we actually looked, it turns out it wasn't true. And then of course Darwinist, because the great thing about Darwinism is that it manages to explain everything in its opposite. Immediately turned and said, well yeah, this if you're Darwin is exactly what you would expect because there'd have to be a selective value to this part of the cell or it would have gotten weeded out. But of course they didn't say that before. Right. And so you see how this kind of dys. Teleological sort of thread in Darwinism can some ways, in some ways it has more power in the theorist's mind than even the kind of reasonable stuff that you would expect. Certainly natural selection explains some things. The problem all along has just been then it explains fairly minor things. Natural selection, it's like the, you know, it's like the pruner, it's not the gardener and is absolutely not the landscape architect.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. And Jonathan covered the, the myth of junk DNA. He wrote a whole book about it long before it became, you know, the success story we see it as today. I can't think of a better, a better example in the last, you know, couple of decades of, of a way to show that Darwinian evolution is a science stopper. You know, by believing in this particular mechanism you're actually slowing down, know the progress there.
So yeah, you could call that another icon of evolution for sure.
Now Jonathan published a long awaited follow up to his book in 2017. Zombie science. And he asked that important question, if these icons of evolution were innocent textbook errors, why have so many of them persisted? And even now we're seeing lots of evidence that these icons are still shambling along, perhaps in a different guise, you know, called by different name, but still the same faulty reasoning or assumptions behind them. Do you think we'll ever fully eradicate the popular consciousness of these icons or do they serve as. As useful evidence of the lasting faults of Neo Darwin's?
[00:16:00] Speaker C: I do think that there's sort of useful evidence of the lasting faults. I mean, the truth of the matter is there's sort of a theoretical pressure within the Darwinian scheme, right, to just reduce everything to function and to try to insist that anything we find in the biological realm, it must be accessible to the Darwinian mechanism understood as Darwinists understand it. So in other words, you can't just say, okay, maybe at one level it looks like it's, it's random and undirected, but at another level, you know, God is behind the scenes sort of directing it. Yeah, you can do that in your head. That's not what the Darwinists mean. They mean that this is a blind process. And so they're always going to be expecting and assuming that everything we find in the biological realm is going to be accessible to that mechanism.
And so it's, it's quite a jealous God. It doesn't sort of admit of alternatives, especially teleological or design alternatives, because anyone that reads the Origin of Species understands that unlike a lot of other scientific theories, like Newton didn't write the Principia because he wanted to get God out of a job or something like that. Copernicus didn't write on the revolution of the heavenly spheres because he had a theological ax to grind. Yes, those theories have theological implications.
Darwinism itself, from its origin text in the Origin of Species was both a scientific and a kind of theological project in which he was at a particular view of divine action in mind of special creation of all the species. Right. And he thought, actually, I have an another explanation that works better and that makes God, you know, either obsolete or at least it sort of pushes his work way out of the picture so that he's just kind of way back behind the scenes. That makes the Darwinian project different from almost every other scientific project because it's deeply theological and metaphysical in its intention and its origins. And I think the committed Darwinists mostly retain that. You know, this is why Richard Dawkins, you know, he has a very hard time separating his atheism from his scientific work. I think that that's not a coincidence.
You know, it's why you see Darwin fish on the bumpers of cars. I have never seen an Einstein or a Newton fish. I've never even seen a Descartes fish. But you know. Yeah, Darwin fish in abundance. I think it tells us something about the program and why in some ways it's so resistant because it's not just, okay, here's our favorite scientific theory to explain certain aspects of biology. It's. Here's a massive metaphysical program that prevents us from considering things that might point in a direction, say toward God that, that we wouldn't like, don't want to consider.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's very difficult to let go of when you're so committed to that on numerous fronts. Not, not, not just the religious front, but the, you know, the, just the, the passion that scientists have. They need an explanation and they can't let go of that bottom up reductionist view of life.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. And Jonathan especially, I mean you mentioned at the beginning, has had this PhD from Yale in religious studies and worked on actually a topic, I think, Charles Hodge and the design argument. And so that he would. I mean, there are not a lot of people that have PhDs in one of the hard sciences and also have PhDs in religious studies and theology. I mean, more people should have that. But Jonathan was only one of the few people that both took the time to do that. But then I think was able to, to interact and to integrate these, these ways of seeing the world in a way that was, was very, very fruitful. It kept him from being, it kept him from being a reductionist in almost every other area.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And gave him a particular sensitivity to the religious fervor that surrounded Darwinism. Great point. Well, you and Jonathan also worked closely on our response to the 2001 PBS series Evolution.
And despite coming from a publicly funded broadcast network, the documentary series failed to accurately and fairly represent the major shortcomings of Darwinian evolutionary theory. And it almost completely ignored the growing body of scientists who were saying, wait a minute, I have some questions about this, you know, and it dismissed them basically as biblical literalists.
So what was it like to work on that?
And how did you see Jonathan's passion coming through as he wrote that? Awesome response.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: I mean, Jonathan wrote this. It was a period of weeks and I think most of this is probably publicly known. If not, we'll reveal it here. But you know, before this PBS evolution series came out, of course, a year more when the Production started.
It was actually, I think the production team at nova, which is a very high quality, a PBS production, of course, the NOVA series. And so they had been funded to do a multi part, multi hour series on evolution. And they wanted the final episode to be on the topic what about God? And so the producers contacted Discovery and said, hey, we'd like to interview some of your scholars and scientists for the what about God? Section. Then we thought about it and said, okay, why that section? I mean, why don't we talk? Can't we also. That's fine, but can't we also talk about, you know, maybe the problems with, with random genetic mutations or something like that? Now they didn't really want to do that. And so, you know, we eventually decided, okay, let's just not participate in this. You kind of, you kind of had to bite the bullet. But we thought we're almost certainly going to get represented or we're going to get sort of isolated so that all of our arguments are treated as if they're theological. And then for an argument to be theological on pbs, that's, that's not a compliment, right? So he said, okay, it's not worth it. Well, I mean, honestly, providentially, I can't even remember the details. We ended up with a pre release screener of the series. It was actually on VHS tape, sort of press packet. And so we thought, well, let's write a review and wait a sec. I mean, so this is, what is it, 2000, 2001? So at the time there were still lots of URLs available for purchase. It turns out PBS evolution.org was available. So I think we bought that for 20, $10 or whatever and we posted it online. And so Jonathan, I mean, literally for weeks he would watch the video and sit, I mean, it's just kind of in a little closet in his house and work on this. And we had a small team of other folks at Discovery that sort of helped him along. But he was the primary author of that PBS Evolution critique. And then when it came out, we had either the fortune or the misfortune that I guess the PBS lawyers didn't really like the fact that we had PBS Evolution as a URL and they complained about it. So we said, okay, we'll change the URL.
But it was a extraordinary thing to be able to publish a critique of the thing simultaneously with, you know, with the release of, of the series. And so I don't think it probably did as well. And maybe as the producers and the funders imagined it at the time. The reason is because it just, it relied on all the standard tropes. I mean we could have guessed what the arguments were going to be without, without even seeing them rather than doing something genuinely interesting and cutting edge and heterodox. You know, there were things they could have done instead. It was just a kind of standard Darwinian pedagogy that, that all of us had gotten used to.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah, but they were careful to draw the, the typical Darwinist crowd, you know, the Richard Dawkins and the Daniel Dennett and, and you know, just lots of folks who were spokespersons for Darwinian evolution at the time and, and I think maybe in the background they were realizing that this wasn't getting taught well in schools and oh my gosh, we better put something out on, on PBS that really lays, lays down the gauntlet for people, you know, for sure.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: That was honestly they also, and we'd known this from the beginning, had planned to curricularize the content so that, yeah, it's gonna, it have a, you know, it had a life on pbs, but they have a much longer lifespan chopped up into curricula that schools could use. And that was a major part of the campaign, which is honestly why we decided to devote so much energy to. It wasn't just because, okay, it's just another kind of, you know, Darwinian story being spun on pbs, but this is going to find its way into, into children's school. So we wanted there to be a critique out there, at least for the kids and the parents that might be paying attention.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just going through the pages of the full response. It's called Getting the Facts Straight. A Viewer's Guide to PBS Evolution. Full book length treatment. And here's Jonathan, you know, scene by scene explaining what they're, what you're seeing on camera and why it doesn't make sense. You know, when you, when you compare it to the evidence, I mean just a real blow by blow and very, very detailed, very structured response to this.
But if, if listeners and viewers want to check that out, it's still online. It's not at that domain that God is in trouble, but it's at review evolution.com you can go there, download the whole book that Jonathan studiously put together and, and that you helped edit and you know, really get a feel for, you know, what has been. I know it's like 25 years old now but, but still the same kind of tired things are still being hashed out as we're talking about here with all the icons so anyway, if you, if you do want to check that out, that's review evolution.com now, just switching gears as we wrap up today. Jay, what qualities would you say come to mind when you most admired about John?
[00:25:50] Speaker C: What I. So many qualities. I mean, anyone that knows him and got to spend time with him knows what a kind of teddy bear of a man he was. Honestly just a delightful, merry person, but also wicked smart and utterly committed to the truth and to the facts. I mean, he just had this, you know, whether this is a natural or a supernatural virtue, but just a desire to, to find out what the world is like and to conform your mind and your understanding to it. And he, that's why he was always quite confident. He said, look, in the end, if a theory is not in keeping with the facts, if it doesn't conform to reality, reality is going to win. And I think that that conviction is what kept him working and toiling on this project, on these works for all those years. And so it was just a blessing to get to be with him and to know him and to work with them for, gosh, a couple of decades.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Yeah, a dedicated soldier and seeker of the truth for sure. And you know, you and I were just talking before we recorded this that the evidence and the reach of intelligent design is growing every year. I mean, this is so exciting to see so many things confirmed in the latest discoveries in science that we've been talking about for decades in the intelligent design research community.
You know, how will Jonathan's foundational work fuel the future of this project?
[00:27:15] Speaker C: I mean, I, I think, you know, we talked about icons, of course, but Jonathan did a lot of really important ground clearing work in showing the shallowness of, of Darwinian theory, at least as applied, used as a totalizing theory. I mean, look, we all recognize natural selection explains some things. We know there's variations and things have a selective value. They're going to get preserved in a population. Nobody denies that. It's just that that's sort of what it explains. Antibiotic resistance and the thickness of some fitch beaks, you maybe, and things like this. Right. Very low level stuff. But it just does not come anywhere close to explaining what needs to be explained in biology. And so that's, that's the sort of crucial part I think that Jonathan played, but also in being aware of and in some ways being a kind of prophet about where this was going. Look, it wasn't just that this reductionist paradigm of Darwinism doesn't do the subject the justice that needs to be done, but that even sometimes our own non Darwinian perspective can be too small, it can be too reductionist, that we might be looking for the answers someplace where it's only a partial answer. And so I think, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, the beginning, that initial conversation I remember having with him in which he said, look, the stuff that's going on in development and organisms is so far beyond us that we're going to need new categories and new theories to be able to account for it. And so both of those things, both the sort of ground clearing operation of the reigning paradigm and that hint of where things are going and where we're really, honestly just now getting in the Intelligent design movement in 2025, Jonathan was there and he saw where it was going to go.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Well, that's really awesome. And I really appreciate your time to, you know, discuss Dr. Wells and his contributions.
Let's do this again, perhaps in happier circumstances, and talk about some of your, your current work.
[00:29:20] Speaker C: Absolutely. Great to be with you, Andrew.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Well, if you don't have any books by Dr. Jonathan Wells on your shelf yet, it's time to remedy that. You can learn more about his work and order copies of his books@Jonathan Wells.org Jonathan Wells.org that's the place to go to learn more about this great man, great scientist and great friend for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us, ID the Future.
[00:29:47] Speaker C: A podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
