You mean this pack of lies and distortion?
Conclusion — Jonathan Wells’s book: Science or Myth?
This concludes the tour of Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution. At the end of Icons, Wells includes an Appendix where he “grades” ten recent biology textbooks, giving most of them an F (Campbell et al.’s Biology — probably the most popular college biology text, by the way — comes out on top with a D+). Wells then includes “warning labels”, which look suspiciously like cigarette warning labels, which Wells thinks should be put in textbooks.
Has Wells succeeded in making the case which would justify his harsh judgements? Let us recall what Wells’s argument was supposed to be:
“Some biologists are aware of difficulties with a particular icon because it distorts the evidence in their own field. When they read the scientific literature in their specialty, they can see that the icon is misleading or downright false. But they may feel that this is just an isolated problem, especially when they are assured that Darwin’s theory is supported by overwhelming evidence from other fields. If they believe in the fundamental correctness of Darwinian evolution, they may set aside their misgivings about the particular icon they know something about.” (Icons, pp. 7-8)
But as we have seen, in every single case, the actual biological experts in their specific fields of expertise in fact agree that the actual evidence in their field supports modern evolutionary theory. Furthermore, many of these scientists have felt sufficiently strongly about this that they have published critiques of creationist misinterpretations of their work. Many of these scientists have felt sufficiently victimized by Wells to write specific rebuttals of him.
Wells might try to argue that he was talking about the “icons” rather than the general evidence in the field, but still his argument fails. In the cases of the Miller-Urey experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, vertebrate limb homology, Archaeopteryx, peppered moths, and Darwin’s finches, a fair investigation of the literature has revealed that Wells has no case, and that these “Icons” are fully deserving of inclusion in biology textbooks. In the cases of the four-winged fruit fly, fossil horses, and fossil hominids, we discover that Wells has not even included these cases in his textbook “evaluation” criteria — perhaps inclusion of these in the criteria would have raised the textbook grades too much. In any case it is evident that Wells’s problems with the four-winged fruit fly, fossil horses, and fossil hominids are not really with textbooks, but with extraneous issues — the real issues in these cases are Wells’s bizarre views about the relationship between genes and development, and his paranoia that biology textbooks are pushing the view that life is meaningless and purposeless. I will have a few final words on this subject in a moment, as it is an oft-recurring theme in antievolutionist writings.
The single “icon” where Wells has some success is with Haeckel’s embryos: the fraction of textbooks that use Haeckel’s drawings should replace them with photographs or more accurate drawings. But even here, the very authority that Wells cites against Haeckel’s embryos, namely M.K. Richardson, has clearly stated that the actual. facts of embryology do indeed support evolutionary theory, contradicting Wells’s interpretation. As Wells’s argument is explicitly based on the views of the experts in their fields, then Wells, to be self-consistent, would have to concede that he has only scored a point against certain textbooks, and not against the theory of evolution.
However, let us be generous and grant Wells a full point for the Haeckel’s embryos case. On the other nine “icons,” though, Wells has come up empty-handed. So Wells has earned a 1 out of 10. Even a generous curve would not save Wells from a flunking grade. One would think that a guy with a Ph.D. from Berkeley would have done better.
The only thing more discouraging than Wells’s grade are the rave reviews that Wells got from his peers at his current workplace, the Discovery Institute. Wells’ fellows at the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture lavished praise on Icons of Evolution, with nary a word of criticism or even mild questioning. Sure, we might expect antievolutionist demagogues to do their usual braying; for example, in his typically balanced style Phil Johnson writes of Icons, “This is one of the most important books ever written about the evolution controversy. It shows how devotion to the ideology of Darwinism has led to textbooks which are full of misinformation.” But even Michael Behe, who does know some biology and really should have known better, has apparently become radicalized enough to write, “Jonathan Wells demonstrates with stunning clarity that the textbook examples Darwinists themselves chose as the pillars of their theory are all false or misleading. What does this imply about their scientific standards? Why should anyone now believe any of their other examples?” This is the same Behe, you will recall, who accepted the evidence for common descent — i.e. the tree of life — as recently as 1996. What is the intellectual status of a movement like Intelligent Design that cannot bring itself to question even the most outrageous of Jonathan Wells’s distortions? (for the above reviews and others, see this URL: http://www.iconsofevolution.net/reviews/)
I have only had time to refute the major arguments that Wells raises in Icons; unfortunately this only scratches the surface. A truly thorough refutation would take a full book, and one rather longer than Icons at that. I fear that I have not given readers a sufficient impression of just how deceptive and devious a writer Jonathan Wells is. Through most of the book, virtually every sentence contains some sort of illegitimate slant, whether quoting a scientist out of context, or leaving out crucial pieces of information, or presenting a nonexpert opinion as an authoritative one, or simply spewing out unsupported exclamations of doubt, derision, and “dogmatic Darwinism!” Icons is an impressive bit of propaganda, and frankly, Jonathan Wells is probably the slickest operator that the antievolution movement has ever produced. His book, packed with quotes and authoritative declarations, mangling topic after topic in rapid succession, is a calculated attempt to overwhelm the reader by sheer diversity of material; even the biologically educated reader is not likely to have the necessary background to spot all of Wells’s tricks. Writing this review required a substantial amount of research and help from numerous veteran creationism/ID debaters (see Acknowledgements).
But Wells’s cleverest move of all was to attack textbooks rather than taking on the science directly. The all too common response, even from biologists, has been along the lines of “Well, sure, textbooks have problems, but this doesn’t affect the theory of evolution.” This is falling into Wells’s trap. This review has shown that the topics discussed actually do belong in textbooks, and do constitute good evidence for evolution, according to the evidence and according to the experts that Wells claims for support. The book Icons of Evolution is the real scientific travesty.
What is Icons really about?
The central irony of Icons of Evolution is that, while biologists no longer accept and indeed actively debunk the “March From Ape-to-Man” image on the cover, it appears to be closer to something that Wells believes. He apparently does not deny common ancestry of humans with animals; on page 223 (in the middle of six pages of selective quoting about the subjectivity and disagreements in paleontology) Wells admits, “Obviously, the human species has a history. Many fossils have been found that appear to be genuine, and many of them have some features that are ape-like and some that are human-like.” It seems like Wells’s next sentence ought to be “Sorry for all the trouble, folks, I guess I got a little carried away with this book...”, but of course it isn’t. As far as anyone can tell, Wells has the idea that “the human species was planned before life began, and that the history of life is the record of how this plan was implemented” (see his essay “Evolution and Design,” online here: http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/0-Toc.htm). In other words, to Wells, evolution (with some unspecified touch of ID) was marching towards a goal of humans, just like the Apes-to-Man icon on the cover of Icons of Evolution! It seems likely that the insertion of this metaphysical idea into science education, as science, is Wells’s real goal.
But is it really necessary to force theology into science? As we saw in the fossil horses chapter, Wells imputes far more metaphysical significance to words such as “random” and “undirected” than they actually have scientifically. Scientifically, evolution is described as “random” and “undirected” in the same way that the weather, earthquakes, and numerous other natural processes are described as “random” and “undirected.” (For that matter, evolution is also predictable in a way similar to weather and earthquakes.) Does describing the weather, or evolution, as somewhat “random” really have the offensive metaphysical implications that Wells thinks?
For an alternative model, we should investigate the central quote of Wells’s last chapter. Wells is severely offended by Dobzhansky’s statement “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” and decries all of the evil materialist-naturalist metaphysics he sees in it. But Wells, as usual, fails to give his reader crucial information: Wells fails to say anything about Dobzhansky’s actual metaphysics: Dobzhansky was a life-long Russian orthodox Christian. Here are some more quotes from the very same article by Dobzhansky (1973), which is available online at http://www.2think.org/dobzhansky.shtml.
“It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutual exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s, method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 B.C.; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.”
“Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy; the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.”
(Dobzhansky T., 1973, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, American Biology Teacher 35:125-9)
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html
While I don’t know much about college textbooks, you’re on pretty weak ground with high school level ones.
Public school textbooks are notorious for being highly inaccurate in virtually every subject they touch on and science, including evolution, is no exception.
I can’t believe that that many textbooks could be so wrong on so much excepting evolution. There’s no way they get only that right no matter what else they get wrong.
And that’s not even touching the issue of the qualifications of the teachers.
Ira,
I took a class on evolution in college and read Icons of Evolution at the same time. Many of the examples of fraud Wells cited were in my text book. The fact is that Wells is telling the truth and the text books are telling lies. The critics of the book are lying.
My favorite Icon is homologies because it is so ridiculous. I read the chapter in Wells’ book and thought that there was no possible way a college text would use a circular argument as proof of evolution. I turned to the chapter in my text and sure enough, the first sentence was a circular argument.
Here is a link to where Wells addresses the criticisms to Icons of Evolution. Im not going to cut and paste spam it here but you should read it. Its a point by point rebuttal that is very convincing.
http://www.discovery.org/a/1180
Any open minded person who reads this book while taking a class on evolution will come to the conclusion that the writers of text books are purposely lying and trying to deceive students. Why would a theory that is ‘fact’ need to resort to deceiving students.