This week, The Stream and the Center for Science and Culture are teaming up the ahead of the March for Science to provide some crucial ballast. From April 17-21, The Stream and the CSC will counter the March for Science’s hypocritical claims of openness and diversity with a series of essays from leading scientists and scholars.

Continuing the “Science for All” series at The Stream, Jonathan Wells writes to explain why he, a scientist, won’t be joining the March for Science on Saturday. It is, he says, because it will really be a march “for something that undermines good science.” And that is conformity. Wells continues:

March organizers say “our diversity is our greatest strength.” They say “a wealth of opinions, perspectives, and ideas is critical for the scientific process.” But they don’t really mean it. Their passion for diversity extends to race, religion, nationality, gender and sexual orientation, but not to opinions, perspectives and ideas.

Against the March organizer’s emphasis on consensus and conformity, Jonathan Wells provides a needed counter-point: consensus science has often been wrong. And the only way for science to thrive is if the scientific community encourages dissent, questioning, and following the evidence wherever it leads. Instead, he writes, philosophical and metaphysical assumptions dominate the evidence. For example, Darwin’s theory was attractive in the nineteenth century not because of the evidence supporting it, but because it was materialistic. He writes:

As a scientist, I am bothered by this. Science is supposed to seek truth by testing hypotheses against the evidence. But evolution is materialistic story-telling. And the story persists even when the evidence contradicts it. I call this “zombie science,” and I describe many examples of it in my book of the same name. I’ll mention just one here. Students are shown drawings of some embryos of animals with backbones. In the drawings, all the embryos look similar in their earliest stages. Darwin believed this showed that we evolved from fish. But the story is false. Worse, mainstream biologists have long known that the drawings are false. They know that human and fish embryos look very different in their early stages. But many textbooks recycle the lie year after year anyway. Why? Because the materialistic story must be true.

Read the rest here.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Jonathan Wells has gone to battle with false “evidence” for evolution, which he calls the “icons of evolution.” For more information, check out his latest book, Zombie Science, released today!

Image: © aerogondo – stock.adobe.com.