Last Monday morning we had just finished our weekly staff meeting when John West came to my office door. The look on his face suggested something wasn’t right. He had just spoken with Jonathan Wells’s wife. Our longtime colleague had passed away. 

Jonathan was a highly accomplished scholar. But he was much more than that. For me, as for many of us, he was also a mentor and a friend. David Klinghoffer has posted a lovely remembrance of Jonathan, as have Bill Dembski and Stephen Iacoboni, and I wanted to say a few things as well.  

Supporting Students

I first met Jonathan “virtually” in 2000, the year after Phillip Johnson spoke at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). After Johnson’s lecture some friends and I had started a student group, the “Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness” or “IDEA” Club, to provide a forum for the campus community to discuss intelligent design. Johnson then invited me to join an online group of ID enthusiasts, of which Dr. Wells was a part. 

Jonathan — as he usually insisted people call him — cared about students, and he soon became a great friend to our little club. He sent us lots of materials — from bookmarks, to t-shirts, to scientific papers — that we could give away at club activities. He quickly became a mentor to me as I sought to engage with students and faculty about ID and evolution, sometimes helping us answer tough questions posed by critics.

In 2002 our club hosted Jonathan to speak at UCSD — and it was quite a lively event. Here’s what we posted on our club’s website after the lecture:

On January 29th, 2002, the IDEA Club hosted a free public lecture, “Icons of Evolution,” by molecular biologist and author Dr. Jonathan Wells in Price Center Ballroom B. Jonathan Wells has a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale. His recent book, Icons of Evolution (Regnery, 2000) sold thousands of copies, was featured on CNN, and has sparked controversy in many school districts by showing that many of lines of evidence used in biology textbooks to support evolutionary theory are false.

IDEA was very thankful for and pleased that many from UCSD and the local community came out to hear the talk. We estimate around 250 people attended. The audience was very friendly and civil, even with the many dissenting viewpoints expressed during the question-and-answer period. IDEA would like to thank the many people from the UCSD community who came to the talk. 

We passed out “opinion and response” cards during the talk. Of the 72 people who responded to the question, “How valid or convincing for you was Dr. Wells’ talk?,” here was the feedback we received:

• “I’m Convinced”: 41 (57%)
• “Mixed Feelings”: 19 (26%)
• “I Disagree with Dr. Wells”: 12 (17%)

Seeking Civility

Jonathan also had a very positive impression about the UCSD lecture. Here’s what he wrote in a recollection:

I was pleasantly surprised by the civil attitude that prevailed during the Q&A. From past experiences I have come to expect a fair amount of verbal abuse from Darwinists at my talks. Darwinists were certainly present on Tuesday: Some were handing out leaflets with a chapter-by-chapter critique of my book, and I could see several pockets of smirking, visibly unhappy grad student types in the audience during my talk. When I opened the floor to Q&A after I spoke, people representing the entire spectrum of positions came to the microphone, but the general tone was that of a lively academic discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.

This was my recollection as well — it was a lively but civil discussion. More importantly, this kind of dialogue was precisely what Jonathan desired. Although (as Bill and David noted) in a previous era he’d been a student protester at Berkeley, as an ID theorist Jonathan sought nothing more and nothing less than serious and friendly dialogue with those who disagreed. This came out in the next paragraph of Jonathan’s report on the UCSD lecture:

The only exception [to the civil attitude] was one grad student who, toward the end of the Q&A, shouted an objection concerning HOX genes from his seat without deigning to rise or approach the microphone that had been provided. After it became clear that nothing I had to say would satisfy him, I told him it might be better if we talked afterwards; but he left immediately, and I didn’t get a chance to continue the conversation.

Again, this was classic Jonathan. He was never afraid to engage with critics — and even sought them out, not for public humiliation but for private, friendly dialogue. 

A Model to Emulate

Despite the “verbal abuse” he often received from critics, Jonathan never took it personally and he did not respond in kind. Rather, he responded with the confidence of someone who has done his homework and knows the evidence is on his side. For me as a student seeking to navigate this complicated debate, Jonathan became a man to emulate — a model I still strive to follow to this day.  

Another area where Jonathan was worth emulating was in his care to always provide solid scientific citations for his claims. After some grad students distributed the attack on Jonathan at his 2002 UCSD lecture, I wrote a rebuttal to the critics. It wasn’t hard to do — in large part because Jonathan had documented his claims so carefully in his groundbreaking 2000 book, Icons of Evolution, with citations to the mainstream literature. Jonathan never bluffed. When you went to look up his technical citations, you knew they were going to say what he had said they did. 

In Light of the Evidence…

Jonathan’s commitment to the evidence came out most beautifully perhaps in the closing paragraphs of Icons of Evolution. There he addressed an often-quoted dictum from by the prominent evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky who famously said “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” 

Dobzhansky’s phrase always struck me as problematic because it sounds like a creed — something antithetical to the open-minded spirit that science is supposed to cultivate. As the great early evolutionary scientist T. H. Huxley once warned, “Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.” 

But probably no one responded to Dobzhansky better than Jonathan Wells: 

[T]he claim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is demonstrably false. A person can be a first-rate biologist without being a Darwinist. In fact, a person who rejects Dobzhansky’s claim can be a better biologist than one who accepts it uncritically. The distinctive feature and greatest virtue of natural science, we are told, is its reliance on evidence. Someone who starts with a preconceived idea and distorts the evidence to fit it is doing the exact opposite of science. Yet this is precisely what Dobzhansky’s maxim encourages people to do. 

The icons of evolution are a logical consequence of the dogma that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. All the misleading claims we have examined in this book follow from the sort of thinking represented by Dobzhansky’s profoundly anti-scientific starting-point. The primitive atmosphere was strongly reducing. All organisms are descended from a universal common ancestor. Homology is similarity due to common ancestry, vertebrate embryos are most similar in their earliest stages, and birds are feathered dinosaurs. Peppered moths rest on tree trunks, natural selection produced fourteen species of Darwin’s finches, mutations provide the raw materials for morphological evolution, and humans are accidental by-products of undirected natural processes.

How do we know all these things? Because of the evidence? No, because — Dobzhansky says — nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

This is not science. This is not truth-seeking. This is dogmatism, and it should not be allowed to dominate scientific research and teaching. Instead of using the icons of evolution to indoctrinate students in Darwinian theory, we should be using them to teach students how theories can be corrected in light of the evidence. Instead of teaching science at its worst, we should be teaching science at its best. 

And science at its best pursues the truth. Dobzhansky was dead wrong, and so are those who continue to chant his antiscientific mantra. To a true scientist, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evidence.

Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong (Regnery, 2000), pp. 247-248

As you might suspect from Jonathan’s gifted writing style, his work had a big impact. It was his research that went into Icons that raised the public’s awareness of the fact that many standard lines of evidence used to support evolution in textbooks and classrooms were simply false. This hard-hitting book gave example after example of how the evidence you were taught supported evolution was actually wrong — and again, he always backed up what he had to say with citations to the scientific literature. It was not for no reason that (as my colleague David Klinghoffer noted) the leading evolution-defender Eugenie Scott in 2000 told a class of graduate students I was in at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that Icons was going to be a “royal pain in the fanny.” From our book page on Icons:

Dr. Scott’s prophetic utterance has been eminently vindicated, as this book has served to expose errors used in many biology textbooks surrounding the evidence which supposedly supports evolution. The furor stirred by Icons has even led to the revision of some biology textbooks. 

With his work, Jonathan Wells will have a lasting effect for generations — improving biology education by removing long-standing factual errors wheeled out in favor of evolution. 

Making Lemonade out of Pushback

Telling people they are wrong, even when you say it nicely and back it up with evidence, is not usually the best way to make friends in science (or much anywhere else for that matter). But sometimes the pushback Jonathan received led to unintended but amusing consequences. A friend recently reminded me how Jonathan spent two weeks conducting research at the laboratory of an ID-friendly scientist who was a professor at a fairly prestigious research university. Why was that amusing?

Because, shall we say, Jonathan knew he was not always popular in all corners of the scientific community, to get ready for the research stint he shaved his beard and used hydrogen peroxide to dye his hair bleach blond to avoid being recognized. When he visited the Discovery Institute offices about this time, many of us were taken aback by the hilarious transformation. But in classic Jonathan style, this radical makeover was not for the purpose of protecting himself. Instead, it was to protect the principal investigator of the lab, an ID-friendly scientist who wanted to help but was fearful of the potential consequences for his own career. That was Jonathan, always putting friends first, even at the cost of, well, making himself look ridiculous. 

This story hints at Jonathan’s colorful side — literally. I remember once when Discovery Institute hosted a conference at a hotel near a lake here in Washington State. Everyone was upstairs talking intelligent design in a conference room, but during a break I went downstairs to take a phone call. There was Jonathan, sitting down at the lakeside bar in a Hawaiian shirt talking to people. He was mostly retired by this point and fully deserved the break. He may have had two PhDs, but to anyone who interacted with him, he was just Jonathan — a friendly person who always had interesting and insightful things to say. 

A Friend, Colleague, and Mentor

A lot of people hated Jonathan, not because he was a hateworthy person, but because of the bad news he delivered about their scientific arguments. His ideas threatened their paradigm, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. But he didn’t hate back. He was a kind and caring person who used his gifts to make an immense impact, helping to reform junk science that had bloated evolution education worldwide. For all these reasons, Dr. Jonathan Wells will not be forgotten anytime soon. By his many friends, readers, and others who have benefited from his research, and of course by his loving family, he will be greatly missed.