Tuesday, 18 March 2025
Portrait of an iconoclast
Dismantling the Icons of Evolution
For a new episode of ID the Future, I invited Dr. Casey Luskin to share some of his memories 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. In a career spanning three decades, Wells made significant contributions to our understanding of the limits of evolutionary processes and the evidence for intelligent design.
You may be familiar with Dr. Wells’s 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. These icons encouraged generations of students to adopt an evolutionary framework at odds with the scientific evidence. Dr. Luskin describes the powerful impact Icons of Evolution had on his own thinking, and how Jonathan’s book inspired the removal of these fraudulent and misleading arguments from many biology textbooks and classrooms.
Dr. Luskin also identifies the character traits he most admired in Dr. Wells. For example, he had a reputation for backing up his claims with solid scientific citations. In other words, he never bluffed. Luskin explains why that commitment to truth is so important to science. Luskin also talks about Wells’s valiant efforts to protect his friends and colleagues from the harm that would come to them as a result of standing up to the Darwinian paradigm. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
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