Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate)

John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells is  an author, a prominent promoter of intelligent design and an opponent of evolution, which Wells and other intelligent design proponents often refer to as "Darwinism.""In order to advance his thesis, Wells has to convey the idea that "Darwinism" pits itself against traditional Christianity: to allow pupils to learn it is to give them up to atheism, decadence, liberalism and to lose the culture war. Note that Wells does not wage war against evolution. In fact, he is at pains to make it (somewhat) clear that he wages war against "Darwinism", which in context might sound like the sort of thing any sensible Christian would want to guard against. Unfortunately, Wells isn’t exactly clear what he means by Darwinism as opposed to evolution. Easily, one of the prominent faults of Wells’s screed is a pervasive confusion between terms. Words, like "Darwinism" and "Traditional Christianity", seem to mean whatever Wells wants them to mean for that specific sentence. In many cases words are used without regard for his own stated definitions and usually without regard to usage elsewhere in his book. There are several possible reasons for this confusion in terms. First, Wells confusion may be by design. I have argued elsewhere that creationists intend to confuse their audiences when they argue. Second, if you review the acknowledgements page, you’ll read how Wells used many authors to help him prepare this text. It is possible that Wells’s editorship was so insufficient that he allowed a term that makes up part of the book’s very title to have a flexible meaning. My suspicion is that there was both disparity between the understanding of key terms by different authors as well as an intention to confuse."

In his book, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, Wells says that evolution conflicts with the evidence, and argues against its teaching in public school science classes However, his views on evolution, as well as AIDS, run counter to scientific consensus on evolution and the causal link between HIV and AIDS, skeptics of which are known as the AIDS reappraisal movement. National Science Teachers Association, a professional association of 55,000 science teachers and administrators in a 2005 press release: "We stand with the nation's leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr. John Marburger, the president's top science advisor, in stating that intelligent design is not science.…It is simply not fair to present pseudoscience to students in the science classroom." National Science Teachers Association Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush National Science Teachers Association Press Release August 3 2005 Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action Journal of Clinical Investigation 116:1134-1138 American Society for Clinical Investigation, 2006. Echoes of Lysenko: State-Sponsored Pseudoscience in South Africa University of Cape Town, Centre for Social Science Research. (PDF file) National Association of Biology Teachers Statement on Teaching Evolution IAP Statement on the Teaching of Evolution Joint statement issued by the national science academies of 67 countries, including the United Kingdom's Royal Society (PDF file) From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society: 2006 Statement on the Teaching of Evolution (PDF file), AAAS Denounces Anti-Evolution Laws Wells rejects evolution in favor of intelligent design and denies the causal link between the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The scientific community overwhelmingly accepts evolution and considers the causative role of HIV to be well proven and dissident arguments are the result of ideologically-driven cherry-picking and misrepresentation of predominantly outdated scientific data, with the potential to endanger public health by dissuading people from utilizing proven treatments. Both intelligent design and AIDS reappraisal are viewed within the scientific community as pseudoscience.

Background
After dropping out of college (where he was majoring in geology) and working as a taxi driver in New York City, Wells was drafted into the United States Army, serving from 1964 to 1966. After returning to college at UC Berkeley, he was ordered to reserve duty. Being by that time a critic of the Vietnam War, he refused to report for duty and was incarcerated for 18 months.

In the 1970s Wells joined Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. He graduated from the church's Unification Theological Seminary in 1978 with a Masters in Religious Education. He has since written extensively on Unification theology and since 1981 has taught from time to time at the Unification Theological Seminary. Wells worked for the Unification Theological Seminary until 1996 and is an ordained cleric in the Unification Church. The president of the school, David S.C. Kim, said Wells had made a great contribution to the school's development. He has also written on the subject of marriage within the Unification Church and has been called a "Unification Church marriage expert" by church sources. He is married and has two children.

In 1986 Wells earned a PhD in Religious Studies at Yale University. He then returned to UC Berkeley where in 1994 he was awarded a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology. Shortly after completing his doctorate, Wells joined former UC Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, father of the intelligent design movement, at the Discovery Institute. After receiving his doctorate, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in developmental biology; however it is alleged that this was an unpaid position arranged by Johnson.

Wells now serves as a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, hub of the intelligent design movement, and at the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, an organization that promotes intelligent design.

Opposition to evolution
Of his early student days at Unification Theological Seminary (1976-78), Wells said, "One of the things that Father [Reverend Sun Myung Moon] advised us to do at UTS was to pray to seek God's plan for our lives." He later described that plan: "To defend and articulate Unification theology especially in relation to Darwinian evolution."

Wells stated that his religious doctoral studies at Yale focused on the "root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine" and encompassed the whole of Christian theology within a focus of Darwinian controversies. He said, "I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th-century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design."

Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church paid for Wells's education. Wells said that learning how to "destroy Darwinism," the term he and intelligent design proponents use to mean evolution which is opposed by Moon's Unification Church,    was his motive for seeking his second Ph.D. at Berkeley: Wells's statement and others like it are viewed by the scientific community as evidence that Wells lacks proper scientific objectivity and mischaracterizes evolution by ignoring and misrepresenting the evidence supporting it while pursuing an agenda promoting notions supporting his religious beliefs in its stead. Massimo Pigliucci, having debated Wells, said Wells "clearly lied" during his debates and misrepresented his agenda and science. Moreover, Pigliucci wrote Wells simply does not understand some of the theories Wells tries to attack. The Discovery Institute responded that "Darwinists have resorted to attacks on Dr. Wells’s religion".

Wells has written a large number of articles attacking evolution and defending Intelligent Design. He was one of the contributors to Natural History Magazine's 2002 debate between ID advocates and evolution supporters.

Icons of Evolution
Wells is best known  for his 2002 book Icons of Evolution, in which he discusses ten examples which he says show that many of the most commonly accepted arguments supporting evolution are invalid. Icons of Evolution has been called an "influential intelligent-design book."

The book's title is a reference to the famous picture "March of Progress." This drawing, by Rudolph Zallinger, was published in the Time-Life book Early Man in 1970 and shows a sequence of primates walking from left to right, starting with an ape on the left, progressing through a series of hominids, and finishing with a modern Cro-Magnon male on the right. A version of the drawing is on the cover of the book, and Wells describes it as the "ultimate icon" of evolution.

Wells's assertions and conclusion in this book, as well as in his other writings, are rejected by the scientific community. Scholars quoted in the work have accused Wells' of purposely misquoting them and misleading readers. Biology Professor Jerry Coyne wrote of Icons, "Jonathan Wells' book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: ... textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction."

Theory of Organismal Problem-Solving
In a 2004 paper in the intelligent design journal Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Wells proposed his "Theory of Organismal Problem-Solving" (TOPS), which was intended to provide a mechanism by which intelligent design "could lead to new hypotheses and scientific discoveries". The idea is based on two fundamental assumptions, that "Darwinian evolution" is false, and that intelligent design is true. Rather than seeking experimental verification for intelligent design, TOPS "explore[s] what happens when ID rather than evolutionary theory is used as a framework to ask research questions".

In the paper, Wells sought to apply this to cancer and centrioles. Wells stated that "cancer is not correlated with any consistent pattern of DNA mutations, but it is correlated with abnormalities at the chromosomal level -- a phenomenon called "chromosomal instability", and that many researchers see cancer as a "centrosomal disease" rather than a DNA disease. This led him to centrioles.  Since centrioles look like turbines under electron microscopy, Wells used the TOPS metholody to conclude that "if centrioles look like turbines they might actually be turbines".

In response to Wells's assertion that cancer was a disease of chromosomal instability and not genes, Ian Musgrave, writing in the The Panda's Thumb replied that "this knowledge seems to have eluded most researchers in the field" and pointed out that where chromosomal translocations underlie cancer, "chromosomal instability can be traced to a mutation in a single gene".

Centrioles
Using the TOPS methodology, which assumes that intelligent design is true and "Darwinian evolution" is false, Wells revisited the issue of centrioles in a 2005 paper entitled "Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?" in Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum. Wells's paper "assumes that [centrioles] are holistically designed to be turbines", and goes on to develop a hypothesis of how they work. The Discovery Institute lists this paper as a "featured article" on their list of "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design." This has been challenged by History and Philosophy of Science professor John M. Lynch, who points out that Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum is edited by Italian creationist Giuseppe Sermonti, whose own book Why Is a Fly Not a Horse? is published by the Discovery Institute, and largely publishes only research outside the general scientific consensus. Lynch said of Rivista: "While there may be interesting ideas here, there is no indication that they represent mainstream thought in biology. And while this might be an 'internationally respected biology journal' within certain (anti-Darwinian) communities, it cannot be considered so among the majority." and "the influence of Rivista, we see that - as one would expect from the above - the journal is of negligible importance at best ... in the case of Rivista could not reasonable be called 'internationally respected'." The Discovery Institute's statement that Wells's paper is a peer reviewed article published in scientific journal runs counter to the testimony of intelligent design proponent Michael Behe in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and the judge's findings and ruling.

Kansas evolution hearings
In 2005, Wells attended the Kansas evolution hearings, which were boycotted by mainstream scientists. There Wells testifed, "I became convinced that the Darwinian theory is false because it conflicts with the evidence." When questioned about the age of the earth, he replied, "I think the earth is probably four-and-a-half billion or so years old. ... But the truth is I have not looked at the evidence. And I have become increasingly suspicious of the evidence that is presented to me and that's why at this point I would say probably it's four-and-a-half billion years old, but I haven't looked at the evidence."

Prior to the evolution hearings, in December 2000 after the Pratt County, Kansas school board revised its tenth-grade biology curriculum at the urging of intelligent design proponents to include material that encourages students to question the theory of evolution, the Pratt Tribune published a letter from Jerry Coyne challenging Wells's characterization in an article of his work on peppered moths, saying that his article appended to the Pratt standards was misused and being mischaracterized:

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design
In 2006 Wells published his second major book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The book was praised by Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, but was described by Reed Cartwright of Panda's Thumb as being "not only politically incorrect but incorrect in most other ways as well: scientifically, logically, historically, legally, academically, and morally."

AIDS reappraisal
Wells denies the consensus of the scientific community that HIV has been conclusively proved to be the sole cause of AIDS. In 1993 he signed the The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis petition calling for a "reappraisal of the evidence" for the connection between HIV and AIDS.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

 * Rowning BA, Wells J, Wu M, Gerhart JC, Moon RT, Larabell CA. link Microtubule-mediated transport of organelles and localization of beta-catenin to the future dorsal side of Xenopus eggs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1997 Feb 18;94(4):1224-9.
 * Rowning BA, Wells J, Wu M, Gerhart JC, Moon RT, Larabell CA. link Microtubule-mediated transport of organelles and localization of beta-catenin to the future dorsal side of Xenopus eggs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1997 Feb 18;94(4):1224-9.
 * Rowning BA, Wells J, Wu M, Gerhart JC, Moon RT, Larabell CA. link Microtubule-mediated transport of organelles and localization of beta-catenin to the future dorsal side of Xenopus eggs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1997 Feb 18;94(4):1224-9.

Books

 * Charles Hodge's Critique of Darwinism: An Historical-Critical Analysis of Concepts Basic to the 19th Century Debate. Edwin Mellen Press, April 1988. ISBN 0889466718 and ISBN 978-0889466715
 * Icons of Evolution. Regnery Publishing. 2000. ISBN 0-89526-276-2
 * The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Regnery Publishing. 2006. ISBN 1-59698-013-3