It is with both sadness and fondness that we report that our longtime colleague and friend Jonathan Wells died on September 19, 2024, having reached on that very day his 82nd year. He promised his wife, Lucy, that he would try to hang on and make it to his birthday, and he kept this promise.

With PhDs in molecular and cell biology (from UC Berkeley) and religious studies (from Yale), Dr. Wells was a scientist, scholar, and iconoclast who demonstrated unusual courage, not only in the science world, and wrote some of the most important literature on the controversy pitting evolution against intelligent design. His courage was evident in his youth when, as a student at Berkeley during the Vietnam War, he refused to be called back to military service. He was bundled off one morning into a black government limousine and hauled away to spend a year and a half in prison, first at the Presidio in San Francisco, where he did four months in solitary confinement, then at Leavenworth. He liked to joke that he was an “ex-con” — though in fact, it was no joke. He actually was. He later came to regret his error of not fully comprehending the threat of Communism.

Exposing Falsehoods

The experience hardened him up for his later service in the Darwin Wars. Introduced to the ID underground by UC Berkley law professor Phillip Johnson, he was among the first group of Senior Fellows with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. In 2000, his book Icons of Evolution 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. 

CSC Associate Director Casey Luskin recalls being introduced to the book as a student at UC San Diego. At the neighboring Scripps Institute, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education taught a course on the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Casey was there. Holding up a copy of the newly published Icons for the students to see, she declared, “This book is going to be a royal pain in the fanny.” That was no joke, either. Dr. Wells would continue to be a royal pain to the evolution establishment for the rest of his career.

Unhappy Enablers

His work resulted in forcing textbook publishers to correct their own work, a task they and their media enablers bitterly resented. CSC Managing Director John West recalls with amusement the New York Times article from 2001, “Biology Text Illustrations More Fiction Than Fact,” clearly based on the meticulous research of Dr. Wells. The article admitted that, “The anti-evolution movement called intelligent design has helped its cause by publicizing some embarrassing mistakes in leading biology textbooks.” That was true, too. But as if to stick it to Dr. Wells, Times reporter James Glanz refused to mention either Jonathan or his book by name.

Other books followed, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, the prophetic Myth of Junk DNA (published in 2011, before the tombstone over the myth had been fully set in place as it has been now), and the long-awaited sequel to Icons of Evolution, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution. Regardless of whether the scientific community recognized it, time after time Jonathan Wells’s scientific arguments were vindicated, and his work will continue to have a far-reaching impact that long outlives his earthly years. 

Impeccable Documentation

Dr.  Wells’s carefulness as a scientist and as a science writer was one of his outstanding qualities. He had the textbook publishers by the, er… brass tacks…because his documentation was so impeccable. Dr. Luskin remembers seeing the scientific literature in a whole new light once Dr. Wells had got done with it. The literature and textbooks were not something to hold in reverence but rather to look at critically, not taking anything for granted. The approach has become second nature for the intelligent design movement.

Wells wanted to know what was true. He summarized his view of science in an interview extra for the Science Uprising series:

Science can mean testing hypotheses by comparing them with evidence. It’s a search for the truth. That’s the science I love. But there’s another kind of science that has become popular nowadays and that’s finding materialistic explanations for everything. That’s materialistic science not empirical science. For empirical science the evidence matters the most. For materialistic science, the story matters the most.

Learned and Lucid 

I knew him primarily in my role as an editor, and so I saw another side of his meticulousness. After the first couple of articles of his for Evolution News that I was involved with publishing, he explained to me candidly that he didn’t really need to be edited since he took so much care with his writing. Again, true. The news and commentary on evolution that he delivered to me was pretty much perfect: immensely learned and lucid, yet always modest in what he was willing to assert. In coming weeks, we’ll be revisiting some highlights of his science writing.

At the launch event for Zombie Science, Dr. West spoke about Jonathan in a more personal light: 

I’ve had the privilege of knowing Jonathan Wells for around two decades. He’s all around one of the nicest, kindest, most self-effacing people you could ever want to meet. He’s almost as nice as his wife, Lucy, and that’s saying a lot. Jonathan’s character is all the more remarkable when you consider how much vituperation and nastiness has come his way because he has been willing to stand up and say the Darwinian emperor has no clothes.

A Blast in Brazil

The photo at the top, by the way, depicts Jonathan and Lucy in 2017, visiting with ID colleagues in Brazil where they had a blast.

Again, if I too may recall something personal, I believe Dr. Wells likely possessed more spiritual sensitivity than many people do. Several years ago, he told me a story, and I hope I am not butchering the details too much — that would not have been to Jonathan’s liking. The story was about his mom’s death, which occurred while he was in her home. She was in the process of dying, and he had fallen asleep outside her bedroom. He woke to see her spirit — I am picturing something like a ghost — passing out of the room where she was and down the hall. The spirit looked just like her but with all the lost vitality restored, and on her face there was a look of joy. When he went into the bedroom, he found that she had died.

Jonathan Wells suffered much from ill health in his last years, but that is over and he is free. I think all his friends picture him now, all lost vitality restored, with on his face, a look of joy.