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, everyone. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, my guest today is philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, 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 monumental, to say the least. 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. Paul, there's so much more I could say about you, but let's get on with it. Welcome back.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Oh, it's great to be back.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Has it really been four years since our last conversation on the podcast? I mean, I think I remember we talked about your trip to the Galapagos.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's hard to believe. I think lying between that last visit and today was Covid that pesky little pandemic, pesky little pandemic which I fear has wiped out my short term memory. But the memories that are relevant to Jonathan Wells are all still there.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Oh, good, good. Well, we'll be relying on those today and sharing. Well, you and the modern Intelligent Design movement go way back. You were an organizer of the Mir creation conference in 1996, where the modern intelligent design research community first, you know, sort of gathered and formed officially. But your history with the ID movement's pioneers goes even further back than that. Now, when did you and Jonathan first meet?
[00:02:08] Speaker A: It was Phil Johnson who introduced us. So the, the year is 1991, and Phil has met Jonathan through mutual friends at Berkeley. At the time, Jonathan was a PhD student in cell and molecular biology at Berkeley, where Phil was on the law faculty. They met, they hit it off instantly. And at the time I was in a kind of informal email group, I guess you could call it a mailing list with Phil. And Phil said to me, hey, I'm, I met this guy. He said, he's got quite a backstory, which I came to learn myself, as I'll explain later on. He said, you know, if you're going to be out here for any reason, why don't you and Jonathan come with me and we'll, you know, we'll introduce you and you can get to know each other. So I forgot why I was there in Berkeley. But 1991, I met Jonathan on the Berkeley campus and Phil took us to the faculty club for lunch.
And it was one of those meetings where I'm sure this has happened to some of the listeners. It may have happened to you, Andrew. You feel like I've known this person my whole life.
I've just never met them face to face. But where there's a kind of an instant camaraderie, an instant understanding. Our friendship in that sense started out very strong because I think, you know, he's gone now. But I think I can speak for Jonathan in saying that he had. He felt the same way about me. Like, I've known you, you know, for years. We've just never been together from that point. We were regular correspondents because we thought about a lot of the same questions. What is the role of DNA? What is the role of the organism in development? So he was studying frog development at the time, and I was working on what are known as evo devo questions at Chicago, where one looks at the relationship between how animals develop and what their history might be, their evolutionary history or their design history. So we were already working in the same areas and we had a lot of the same sort of heretical thoughts, such as, DNA is a wonderful molecule, but it's highly overrated, and we can talk about that later. So that was the occasion I asked Phil Johnson to thank for the introduction. But, you know, in a sense, Jonathan and I never looked back. We knew right away we were going to be collaborators.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I've heard similar things from other of his friends and colleagues. You know, Bill Demski said they took a walk on the beach and by the end of it, it was like they had known each other for. For decades. It is. It is strange when you, when you find that sympathetico with, with someone, sort of a mixture of seeing that you have the same passions and, and, and goals and then maybe this universal friendliness that, that you pick up on with somebody, but it is pretty special. Well, tell me about the Pajaro Dunes meeting. This is, this is a famous meeting in ID history, and it occurred in June 1993. What was going on there to bring that about and what was the result?
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Phil Johnson had realized that he was in regular communication with a circle of advisors, friends, call them what you want, who all needed to get together and meet each other. So he was the hub. And we're the spokes radiating from the hub. And he had some funding to do this. And for years, Phil and his family had vacationed at Pajaro Dunes, which is a resort community on Monterey Bay just outside Watsonville, where the strawberries come from, right? So you, you drive through Watsonville, you keep driving west towards the ocean, you come to Pajaro Dunes.
He already loved this little resort town there on the waterfront. So he reserved three houses to house us. And one of the houses, the biggest one I think, was where we would have our discussions.
And it was quite a list. Mike Behe, Steve Meyer, Bill Dembsky, Doug Axe, some people from Europe, like Siegfried Scher from Germany, Kurt Wise, who had been a doctoral student with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard in paleontology, and remarkably, David Raup, who was Kurt's undergraduate mentor at University of Chicago and one of the best known evolutionary paleontologists in the world at that time. Member of the National Academy of Sciences faculty, senior professor at Chicago. But Phil and, and David Raup had struck up a friendship over golf, of all things. Phil was an excellent golfer. Started as a teenager, I believe, in Illinois.
So David Raup came, and over the course of two and a half days, with no preparation, no one was required to, to bring a talk or to bring a position paper, just with whiteboards and coffee and some very good California wine, We kicked around these questions and we realized we're not crazy. You know, there is a social cost to be paid by being a dissenter in science, in politics, in any part of human endeavor. If you dissent and you don't have anyone who is dissenting with you, in other words, you feel like I'm a lone wolf on this topic, you can begin to question your sanity.
People tell me I'm crazy. Maybe I am crazy because I can't find anybody else who thinks the way that I do. So Pajaro was a chance for us to meet and talk and realize, yeah, we may be in the minority, but we are definitely not crazy because we are all focused on these same questions and their relevance.
So I flew into San Jose, or it might have been San Francisco airport, I can't remember. But it's a fairly long drive from the South Bay down to Pajaro. Pajaro Dunes, you have to go, you know, you go down towards Monterey Bay. So I don't know, maybe 90 minute drive, maybe two hours. I don't remember exactly. Jonathan was in the car with me.
And what happened was just on the drive to the venue, right? We begin to brainstorm about things. And it made that whole weekend incredibly rich. And I think everyone came away from that realizing there's something here.
It may be nascent, it may be not entirely worked out, but there's something here that we can collaborate on and make a difference.
So, 93, the real storm of controversy surrounding intelligent design was still a decade down the road. It's in 2004, 2005, 2006, when it makes the front page of the New York Times. It's on the COVID of Time magazine. If you do a Google words search, put in the phrase intelligent design, you will see an enormous spike in the early 2000s, and then it tails off after the Dover trial. So, 93, nobody knew what was going on. Phil Johnson had made a stir with his book Darwin on Trial, which was a bestseller. But intelligent design was just a phrase. It didn't have any cultural association. So Jonathan and I at that meeting, again, we were realizing we should work together, and we did. We ended up writing papers together, ended up in some book chapters together, and we began to collaborate. And then that's after Pahara was when our real adventures began.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Wow. Well, I wish I had been a podcaster back then to. To sit with you guys and drink the coffee and interview you about your thoughts as. As all this came together. I was actually finishing off my seventh grade year, so I was busy, but. But what an awesome gathering, and the fruits of that. That came out of it pretty amazing. Well, after that meeting, that was 93, you know, was there a sense that there needed to be an organization with a headquarters, or was everybody satisfied in working where they were sort of under wraps? Let's not say anything about this quite yet. What was the mood going forward from that meeting?
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Oh, I think there was definitely a sense that we needed something formal. We needed a structure, some kind of a headquarters, some kind of a place where funding could flow, let's say, to graduate students or funding for conferences. But there was definitely a sense that if there is something here around this idea of design, then, you know, let's. Let's build the community, let's build the structures, whether it's an organization, whatever, maybe just an email listserv where we can begin to collaborate. I'll tell you, on that drive down from the Bay Area to Monterey and Pajaro, Phil Johnson was very clear. He said, I don't really care what the alternative is to Darwinism. Give it a name, evolutionary theory. I don't really care. I just want to get a bad theory out of the way.
Our culture should not be enslaved by a bad theory of origins. But he was largely indifferent to the, at that point to the proposal that we need to replace a bad theory with something better. And I think one of the things that came out of Pajaro and then subsequent discussions was for any working scientist, if you tell him or her there's a problem with your theory, they'll say, well, you may be right, but until you have something better for me, I'm going to hang on to this. The metaphor that I like is telling somebody who's clinging to a log in the Pacific Ocean, right out of sight of land, they're clinging to this piece of driftwood that's keeping them afloat. And you say, you know, that driftwood doesn't look very comfortable and you really have to struggle to stay with it. Just over the horizon is a high tech raft with GPS and you know, air pods and food and a nice cot. It's really comfortable. So why don't you let go of this log and swim over there because you'll be much better off. That person rationally will say, tell you what, why don't you bring the raft into sight, okay, bring it over the horizon so I can see it. Because I'm not going to let go of my log until I can see the raft. Analogously telling, a scientist has a problem with this theory. In my experience, they say, well, you know what, it's working at least a little bit. It's better than no theory at all. It's better than confusion, which is what happens when you have no theory at all. So we were able to persuade Phil, we've got to move on. And that's when intelligent design as an idea really began to gather steam. So 1996, you have Darwin's black Box from Mike Behe, prompted in part by the discussions at Pajaro. And then you have a string of books, some of which were written by Jonathan Wells, coming forward, like Bill Demski's Intelligent Design, the Bridge between Science and Theology. I think that was 1998 from InterVarsity. You have a string of books saying classical and even neo Darwinian evolutionary theory have so many problems, we need to find an alternative.
And Jonathan's work was part of that movement of actually putting down in print what the problems were and what the alternatives might be.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Interesting. And a little later I'll ask you what your favorite book by Dr. Wells is. But, but yeah, it's interesting that that string of books started to come out partly as a result of Paharo Dunes. Well, let's talk about a few other adventures that you've had with Jonathan over the years. 1994, Indiana University, there was a conference on origin of animal body plans. What happened there?
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Oh, I'll never forget this. As I said earlier, we were both working on that question, really from the evolutionary side of the aisle, because that's what you get in graduate school in the United States, right? So Jonathan's at Berkeley, I'm at Chicago. We're both looking at this question of the large scale structure of animal form.
So we are chordates, we are vertebrates, we humans, we have an internal skeleton.
And it is, you know, there's a certain architecture globally to what a human looks like that we share with a lot of other animals. But if you move away from, you know, the phylum chordata class vertebrata into mollusks or into brachiopods or into arthropods, you find, you know, strikingly different architectures. And the question is, where did those large scale architectures come from?
So this is, this is the reason for this conference, big international conference at Indiana University.
So if you look at a map, Indiana University sits in the middle of Indiana in the town of Bloomington, and it's quite a drive from Chicago down Interstate 65. So Jonathan said, tell you what, Paul, I'll fly into Chicago and then you and I can drive down 65 to Bloomington to go to this meeting.
All right? You have a lot of time to talk on a. Four hour, maybe longer. I can't remember now. It might be five hours. Anyway, it's a pretty long drive. So we're driving down and Jonathan takes me through his personal history, starting with his undergraduate years at Princeton.
I believe I am correct in saying I, because I believe what Jonathan told me. He had perfect sats, 1600 maxed out, right? 800 verbal, 800 math. He was one of the smartest people I've ever met. So he goes to Princeton, and it's in the early 1960s. And what's cooking away, the Vietnam War, the whole cultural conflagration that occurs in the 60s with the hippies and drugs and avoiding the draft.
I was a little kid during that period, right? I'm eight, nine years old. Well, Jonathan is a young man, college student, and he gets dropped into this maelstrom, this cultural churning, and there's too much to compress into one podcast, but he ends up being drafted by the army. He goes and he serves for some period of time. I don't remember exactly what it was, but then he has a Change of heart.
And he says, I'm not going to Vietnam. I don't believe in the morality of this war. And he ends up in Leavenworth for 18 months for draft evasion. Right. He is doing hard time in prison. And at this point, he was at Berkeley, and he was a rebel. He would not wear his uniform in this. In the jail cell, he insisted on being naked. So much of the time that he was in jail, he was wrapped in a blanket because he would not put on the army uniform that the army wanted him to wear.
So he's, you know, he is doing hard time. He's, you know, convicted felon. Draft evasion is a federal. I think it's a federal offense, if I'm not mistaken.
And it's in this. It's hard to imagine now just how much was going on at the time.
But one of the things this taught me as I'm learning all this from Jonathan, is his courage, his intellectual independence, his feistiness. Had a long backstory. It didn't start with the Darwin design debate. Right. He came to that debate already a rebel, already courageous, already willing to stand by himself.
So, anyway, we have this long drive down, and he walks me through all of these episodes, and I just barely scratched the surface of what there is to be told.
So we get to the meeting, and we realize as the meeting is going on, these guys, it was an international meeting. It was very well funded, a lot of very prominent speakers. These guys do not have a clue how to answer the question that has motivated this meeting.
And it was crystal clear from the lectures. And in particular, on the morning of the registration, there was a big stack of papers on the registration table by an Australian author named George Miklos, who at the time was working on the problem of the origin of body plans. Evolutionary geneticists. Big stack of off prints, and they were giving them away. Right? So you take this. I took this paper back to my room at the hotel, and I'm looking through it, and Miklo says, and I'll. I'll send the.
I'll provide a link or some way for the listener to track this paper down for themselves. So don't read. Don't let me forget about that. Miklos says we don't have the first idea how this happened in evolutionary terms. And he's so concerned to make this point, he stacks these papers up on the registration table so everyone coming in can get a copy. So Jonathan and I are looking at this. We're listening to these talks, and we realize evolutionary theory in its primary explanatory task, which is to tell you where butterflies and frogs and clams, you know, and insects came from. That's what you want the theory to do. They don't have the first clue how to, how to answer that. So driving back to Chicago, we're saying to each other, did you hear what I heard? You know, this is amazing. And this is one of the motivations then that gets Jonathan to write Icons of Evolution, his first major book.
But again, it was that kind of experience where you realize where Jonathan and I realized we may be in the minority, even dramatically in the minority. I mean, the ratio of two people over 200.
Right. Or 300, I don't remember how many people were there at the meeting. That's a pretty small fraction. But we realize we're not crazy, we're just, we're just seeing things that these guys don't see or won't let themselves see because the alternative to them, namely design, looks like magic.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: But it was, you know, it was another of those experiences that I'll be quite old, you know, I mean, already, I'm already getting old, but I'll be really old and I will not have forgotten a single minute of that whole weekend.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Wow, what a revealing experience.
Yeah, that's, that's amazing. And the fraction you're talking about, the 2 out of 200, was probably larger, but they were unwilling to, you know, entertain the notion or let anybody know. You know, I think that's been a, been a thing in the sciences for a while.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: You know, it's a reality. The science is a social enterprise.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: If, if you are concerned about your career, if you're concerned about getting funding or a 10 year decision or just getting into graduate school or whatever it is, there is a social dimension that will not go away. And many people will dial down their, their willingness to speak openly about something because they're looking over their shoulder and saying, well, he, he thinks it works, she thinks it works.
I'm going to have to, you know, tamp it down.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Yeah, well, just as you say, it's encouraging to have fellow dissenters, people who are toeing the, the line, so to speak, can also impact how you think and how you speak. Well, speaking of body plans, you had a meeting with Jonathan Wells in Southern China all about that topic in June 1999. Tell us about that.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: So I had finished up my PhD and the things that we saw happening within evolutionary theory began to happen more rapidly. So J.Y. chen is a Chinese paleontologist who became friends With American intelligent design thinkers. He began to be increasingly outspoken about what he saw as the failures of standard theory.
In fact, there's a famous quote, he came to the US to give some talks and he said, I think I.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Know the one you're talking about, about criticizing the government, criticizing Darwin.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: Yeah. In China we can't criticize the government, but we can criticize Darwin. He said here in the United States it's exactly the opposite.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Which is one of those statements that achieves instant immortality because it's so true.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: So anyway, he and some other people organized this big meeting in southern China near the Chenjiang fossil sites. So the Changjiang fauna is a fossil localities in southern China near Kunming, in the mountains there that preserve with exquisite detail a whole range of very early Cambrian forms.
And this is even earlier, I think it's estimated 15 million years earlier than the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. And again with exquisite detail of preservation right down to, you know, gill bars and soft tissue structures. So it's a flash frozen window into the events of the Cambrian explosion, the origin of the major, almost all the major animal body plans. And Jonathan and I submitted papers for this meeting.
So it's the middle of nowhere. It was a hotel on a lake, probably built by the communist authorities as a place for their senior functionaries to go and relax. Right. Very nice hotel, but the middle of nowhere and there was no escaping. So once you got on your bus from the airport and I think it was in Kunming, and drove to this location and they dropped you off, you were more or less stuck there until that bus came a week later, 10 days later, to take you back. So we show up there and it turns out that the other people who are presenting are very senior.
Eric Davidson, for instance, from Caltech, evolutionary developmental biologist, who single handedly with his lab did the developmental genetics of the purple sea urchin.
And a very feisty evolutionary theorist who said, you know, standard theory is bust, we got to try something different.
But people from all over the world, Chinese paleontologists, European paleontologists, developmental biologists, and we're, we're stuck in this hotel and we can't get away from each other. And the, the evolutionary guys were really ticked off that we were there.
They did not know that we were coming.
And I remember when our bus pulled into the, the parking lot for the hotel, Eric Davidson and a guy from usc, David Botcher, paleontologist who works on the Cambrian explosion, immediately go off whispering, kind of talking behind their hands, you know, like, do you believe who we're stuck with who's here.
Nelson Wells, Michael Denton, Marcus Ross, who was a PhD student in paleontology at the time, who set this up. But like I said, there was no getting away. So I write about this in my new book, by the way, this whole episode. So you can imagine the awkwardness socially. It's like showing up at a party with people you would never want to be seen in public with, right? And there's no escape. So we were nervous, understandably, because we were, again, in the minority. As I said earlier, Jonathan had a lot of courage and he also had a great sense of humor. So on the day that he was giving his talk, he had been praying. He told me this later, he said, I was praying, you know, God, help me to be composed, help me to deliver my material in an organized way. Help me to give a good talk.
So he's called by the moderator, Dr. Wells, will you come up and give your presentation? He stands up and he has a manila folder with all of his overheads. And everyone, everything falls out of the folder. The overheads go everywhere, right? All over the floor.
It's like, well, this is a great start. But he realized that it was so comic and so kind of Charlie Chaplin esque, right? Woody Allen, you know, on a terrible date and everything goes wrong. It was so over the top wrong that it was like a slap in the face. He instantly lost all of his anxiety, all of his nerves. It's like, well, it can't get worse than this, right? So I'm just going to go for it. And he gave a great talk, great talk. And it was like God's sense of humor. Like an angel just reaches out and says, you know what? You need to be composed. So you're going to drop every overhead right now.
And that's going to. That is slap. Okay? Nothing can get worse than that. Now go for it.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: And that didn't throw him off, did it?
[00:29:35] Speaker A: No, he gave a great talk. He picked up his overheads, reorganized them, went up and gave a great talk. Because the ultimate sort of, you know, pre talk, disaster had just occurred. So you have nowhere to go but up from that point. And one of the things I loved about Jonathan is his ability to roll with the punches, which really stood him in good stead as things went on. Because the book that he was writing, Icons of Evolution, was still down the road.
His first major book was still down the road at that point. But again, at this meeting dedicated to the question, where did these major animal architectures come from? That's what we really want evolution to tell us no one had a clue. And the evidence that we did have pointed away from an undirected natural process, random mutation, natural selection, drift, the whole toolkit of modern evolutionary theory was hopeless when confronted by, you know, the origin of trilobites.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: So again, another one of those things that I'll be putting down the story in the in the new book you.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Just don't forget, that's Dr. Paul Nelson sharing some of his many memorable experiences with Jonathan Wells over the years. In a separate episode, Dr. Nelson shares more stories as well as the traits he Most admired in Dr. Wells and what Jonathan's legacy will be moving forward. So don't miss the conclusion to this conversation.
For now. You can learn more about the work of Dr. Jonathan Wells, including his books, videos, articles and even online courses you can take at his website, Jonathan Wells.org that's Jonathan Wells.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
