On February 14, 2001, Massismo Pigliucci and Jonathan Wells debated at the University of Tennessee.

During the debate, the question of Wells' religious objections to evolution was raised. At one point, Wells said he had "no theological qualms" about evolution, or at least common descent. Pigliucci then quoted from an article by Wells from the Unification Church's TrueParents website entitled "Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D." (http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm), in which Wells writes that he decided in the 1970's to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism." At one point, Pigliucci accused Wells of being "inconsistent."

On March 16, the KCFS Update reported on this exchange under the title "Wells Contradicts Himself." The article made its way to Wells, who mistakenly thought that I had written it. He wrote a response which was forwarded to me, I responded, and further dicsussion took place on the KCFS Forum (http://www.kcfs.org/forums/Forum4/HTML/000201.html)

This page summarizes this exchange.

The original KCFS Update report

Wells' response

My response to Wells

An additional clarification by me

More about Wells and common descent

Liz Craig's response to Wells

The original KCFS Update report

4) WELLS CONTRADICTS HIMSELF-

Jonathan Wells, author of the anti-evolutionary "Icons of Evolution," recently debated Massimo Pigliucci, which is available online [godzilla.ns.utk.edu:8080/ramgen/mountpoint2/cb/evdebate.rm]. During the debate, in order to bolster his self-described open-mindedness to evolution - and therefore the implication that he has reasonably considered all sides fairly and simply reached a non-evolutionary conclusion - he claims that his criticism of evolution began after he began training in biology. The following excerpt occurs at approximately 55 minutes into the debate.

"I think what is relevant is whether evolution - the modern theory of evolution - fits the evidence. That's all I'm interested in. I should add that when I started my biology graduate work at UC- Berkeley, about 12 years ago, I had no problem with the overarching pattern of Darwinian evolution. I had some disagreements about whether certain mechanisms could do what they were said to do, but the idea of descent with modification from common ancestry didn't bother me at all. The only reason I started to get bothered by it was because I saw the evidence, starting with the embryos. When I dug further, I found out that the evidence was either not there, or is distorted. That's why I object to Darwinian evolution or descent with modification - because it doesn't fit the evidence. I have no theological qualms with it at all."

[My note: it was later determined that Wells actually said "Darwinian evolution as descent with modification." This issue is covered later on this page.]

Note that Wells expressly denies having theological criticisms of evolution as late as the beginning of his biology work at UC-Berkeley. Elsewhere online, he is quoted as saying his doubts of evolution began in the early 1990s [http://www.idurc.org/wellsinterview.html].

The problem is that Wells's own words contradict him. To learn more, swing by Jack Krebs's website, which is provided below. [www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs]

Wells' response

[My note: This response was forwarded to me by another person, and posted on the KCFS website, presumably with Wells' permission. This person identified himself to me, but posted under the name "JarofClay on the KCFS website.]

From Jonathon Wells -----

21 Mar 2001

Jack Krebs, of Kansas Citizens for Science, has publicly accused me of contradicting myself in the course of my February 14 debate with Massimo Pigliucci at the University of Tennessee. I may be as capable of falling into self-contradiction as the next guy, but in this case the accusation is false.

Krebs wrote:

[Here Wells quotes the KCFS Update report shown above.]

==========================================

Krebs's accusation depends on conflating two meanings of "evolution" - a standard move by Darwinists. In this case, Krebs equivocates between evolution as "descent with modification from common ancestors" and evolution as "mechanism of modification - including, but not limited to, natural selection."

Anyone who views the archived version of my debate with Pigliucci will see that I began my remarks with this distinction (a distinction with which Pigliucci agreed, in pre-debate emails). And I repeated this distinction in the remark quoted by Kreb, above. I explained that I started my Berkeley PhD program in biology by doubting the sufficiency of Darwinian mechanisms (which cause theological problems by excluding design), but without doubting common ancestry.

I think this is reasonably clear in what I said on February 14: "...when I started my biology graduate work at UC-Berkeley, about 12 years ago, I had no problem with the overarching pattern of Darwinian evolution. I had some disagreements about whether certain mechanisms could do what they were said to do, but the idea of descent with modification from common ancestry didn't bother me at all."

I stand by this statement; despite Krebs's accusation, I have never said anything to contradict it. (See my "On Open Minded research: Response to Critics," under "Responses to CRSC Critics" on the CRSC home page, www.crsc.org.)

I have long been baffled by the Darwinists' incorrigible tendency to gloss over fundamental differences in the meaning of "evolution" in order to make their critics appear stupid -- differences which they themselves acknowledge in other contexts. (In my debate with Pigliucci, I quoted Darwinist Douglas Futuyma, who introduced his 1998 textbook on evolutionary biology with the same distinction I made above.) Are Darwinists such as Krebs simply blinded by their belief in naturalism? Or are they deliberately obscuring the truth?

Jonathan Wells Senior Fellow Discovery Institute, Seattle

My response to Wells

It was brought to my attention that a recent KCFS Update mentioned my website as a source of some information about Jonathon Wells. Wells and others mistakenly assumed that I had written the article in the KCFS Update. I have received several emails about this, including one from Wells which was forwarded to me by someone else, and which has been posted here.

I have replied to JarofClay, and asked that he forward my response back to Wells. I have both tried to clarify the situation as far as my involvement is concerned, and responded as a KCFS Board member.

Mr. XXXXX and Dr. Wells:

Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. There is some confusion here that needs to be cleared up.

First of all, I did not write the KCFS Update. My website was referenced at the bottom of the article in question, but I was not involved at all in preparing the article. However, as a Board member of KCFS, and as someone familiar with the details of the situation, I am willing to respond to some of the points brought up by Dr. Wells.

The KCFS Update was reporting on an exchange during the recent Pigliucci/Wells debate in which Wells made the statement quoted in the KCFS Update. Later in the debate, Pigliucci read from an article by Wells, "Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.," in which Wells describes the theological reasons that he decided that he "should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."

Although I understand the distinction that Dr. Wells is making between his concerns about some of the mechanisms of evolution and the idea of common descent, Wells did end the passage quoted from the debate by saying "I have no theological qualms with it at all." My understanding of Dr. Pigliucci's response was that he was challenging that statement with documented evidence that Dr. Wells does have theological qualms about evolution. It was Pigliucci who was accusing Wells of contradicting himself. The KCFS Update was reporting on this exchange.

My name was mentioned because I have a copy of Wells' article on my website. That is the extent of my involvement in this situation. It seems to me that Wells' complaints are with Pigliucci, not KCFS, and that in fact Wells has addressed those complaints in his short article "On Open Minded Research."

==================================================================

However, I certainly don't see the KCFS article as having an unreasonable slant on the situation, and I would like to reply to Dr. Wells' complaints.

Wells writes. "Krebs's accusation depends on conflating two meanings of "evolution" - a standard move by Darwinists. In this case, Krebs equivocates between evolution as "descent with modification from common ancestors" and evolution as "mechanism of modification - including, but not limited to, natural selection."

Although Wells did distinguish between mechanism and common descent, his closing statement was not clear. He said, "That's why I object to Darwinian evolution or descent with modification - because it doesn't fit the evidence. I have no theological qualms with it at all."

Notice that both "Darwinian evolution" and "common descent" are mentioned, but in the last sentence the singular pronoun "it" is used to refer to them. Also notice that Wells says "I *have* [present tense] no theological qualms ..."

I understand that these are words that were spoken extemporaneously, and that ambiguities and different understandings are possible in this type of situation. However, I also understand why Pigliucci felt it appropriate to challenge Wells on this statement, and I imagine it is in reference to Wells' denial of theological qualms that the phrase "contradicted himself" appeared in the KCFS article.

Let me make a few things clear. I don't believe anyone is claiming that Wells contradicted himself within the debate itself - the contradiction being alleged is between the "theological" statement and other statements Wells has made elsewhere. Also, I don't believe that the issue of "common descent" was the subject of Pigliucci's comments. I think Wells has been clear that his doubts about common descent came after his doubts about the mechanisms of evolution.

I also understand that Wells is arguing against evolution on empirical grounds, and that he believes the evidence supports his position. Not many scientists agree with him about this, but that in itself is not proof that he is wrong.

But he does have theological objections to the theory of evolution. If Wells were to have said "I do have theological qualms *and* I think the evidence supports my position," then I imagine Pigliucci would have been content to argue with Wells about the evidence. However, Wells denied theological qualms, so Pigliucci called him on it.

On another note, in the last paragraph of Wells' email on this issue, he writes "Are Darwinists such as Krebs simply blinded by their belief in naturalism?"

Even though, again, I didn't actually write the KCFS article in question, I would like to respond to this statement.

I am not a "naturalist" in the sense that the ID movement uses the term: one who believes that the natural world is all there is, and that all phenomena can be explained in their entirety by reference to natural causes. (Neither are the vast majority of KCFS members that I know.) I have religious beliefs that, unlike Wells', do not conflict with the theory of evolution. Also, I have evangelical Christian friends who object to ID on theological grounds, much as Wells objects to evolution on theological grounds. So this is not a "naturalist" versus a theist issue.

Secondly, I am not a "Darwinist." "Darwinist" and "Darwinism" are words that are not used in the scientific community to describe those who accept the theory of evolution. It is a pejorative term coined by anti-evolutionists to refer to the idea Wells mentions in "Why I Got My Second Ph.D" - that "living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity." Many people believe that the history of life on earth is correctly described by the scientific theory of evolution *and* that this process was under the guidance of "God's purposeful, creative activity." Well's belief that he understands "the theological basis of the conflict between Darwinism and theism" is in fact challenged by others both inside and outside the Christian community.

Wells asks that we consider the evidence, and not any theological pre-commitments one has. I ask, then, that he refrain from labeling as "naturalist" anyone who disagrees with him on the issue, as if he's cornered the market on theological understanding. I am interested in the debate about the evidence (although I trust the current judgment of consensus science), but I believe Wells is wrong about the theological issues. I resent his unwarranted judgment that I have no religious beliefs, based solely on the fact that I am a member of a group who defends the scientific enterprise as currently understood, and accepts the evidence for evolution.

I welcome any comments or further questions.

Sincerely,

Jack Krebs Lawrence, Kansas jkrebs@sunflower.com www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs

Kansas Citizens for Science www.kcfs.org

An additional clarification by me

I have extracted the relevant parts of the Pigliucci / Wells debate and put them on my website as an MP3 file so that those who are interested can listen for themselves. [I can't guarantee that this will stay on my website, due to storage limits on the server.]

The file is at http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/Pigliucci_Wells.mp3

The first section is about 3:20 minutes long, concluding with the Wells statement quoted in the KCFS update. The second part is about 2:25 minutes long, with Pigliucci reading the quote from Wells' article on "Why I Got a Second Ph.D" and Wells responding.

At about 5:25, Pigliucci accuses Wells of being "inconsistent."

In listening carefully to the exchange, which I hadn't done before, I noticed a small, but significant error in the transcript in the KCFS update.

The next to last line of the transcript states that Wells said "Darwinian evolution *or* descent with modification," but actually Wells said "Darwinian evolution *as* descent with modification." This supports Wells' interpretation of the distinctions he was trying to make.

Anyway, I urge anyone interested to listen for themselves.

So, KCFS was reporting on the exchange, and during the exchange Pigliucci said Wells was inconsistent. The phrase "contradicted himself" was used in the KCFS article, and Wells has clarified the reasons that he doesn't see this exchange as containing a contradiction on his part. Hopefully everyone involved understands the situation better now.

Also, I would like to restate that I didn't get involved with this until after the fact, when the mention of my website made some people think that I was the one who wrote the article.

More about Wells and common descent

Wells has written an article, with fellow Discovery Institute member Paul Nelson that claims that the genetic apparatus that modern science sees as the mechanism for evolution not only does not drive evolution, it does not even drive the development of individual organisms. I believe Wells made this claim in the Pigliucci debate also. See Homology: A Concept in Crisis at http://arn.org/docs/odesign/od182/hobi182.htm

In the paper, Wells and Nelson say that the "possibility remains that homologies are patterned after non-material archetypes."

They also offer the following two quotes about their claim that genetics does not cause development:

"A decade later, developmental biologist Brian Goodwin noted that "genes are responsible for determining which molecules an organism can produce," but "the molecular composition of organisms does not, in general, determine their form." (Goodwin, 1985, p. 32) And in a 1990 critique of the notion of genetic programs, H.F. Nijhout concluded that "the only strictly correct view of the function of genes is that they supply cells, and ultimately organisms, with chemical materials." (Nijhout, 1990, p. 444)"

So the question is, what does Wells think is happening? He complains, in this paper and others, that design is excluded as a possible cause even though he thinks naturalistic mechanisms are inadequate. What does he mean by design? Besides criticizing evolution, shouldn't people who believe in design be making some attempt to describe it?

The following essay may be illuminating. It is also taken from the TrueParents website, and was written in 1997. (See http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/nat-select.htm)

The part snipped out is a critique of "Darwinism" similar to the ones already referenced in this thread. The ending portion, however, gives some indication of what Wells thinks has really happened.

Evolution by Design

By Jonathan Wells

By shifting the evolutionary paradigm from one that rejects design to one that accepts it, scientists could explain various observations that Darwinian theory has difficulty accounting for.

Jonathan Wells holds doctorates in both biology (Berkeley) and theology (Yale). He is currently a postdoctoral research biologist in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and a fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Adapted with permission from the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. The original of this paper was presented at the Twenty-first International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, which met in Washington, D.C., in November 1997.

Before the twentieth century, most Western scientists believed that God created living things by design. Belief in God was part of the very fabric of Western civilization; and by viewing the world through the spectacles of faith, people saw it as God's handiwork. In the words of John Henry Newman, "I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design."

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, some thinkers reversed the traditional logic to argue from design to God's existence. William Paley wrote in Natural Theology (1802) that someone crossing a heath and finding a watch would see that "its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose" and would conclude that it had been designed by a watchmaker. Analogously, Paley argued, one could conclude that living things are designed by God.

Darwin's exclusion of design

[I took out this part]

Reintroducing design

One good metaphysical a priori deserves another. Since Darwinists have shifted their ground from science to philosophy, it is legitimate to ask whether their axiomatic exclusion of design is the only logical possibility. The answer, obviously, is no. Before Darwin, design was taken for granted by most Western scientists, and even today, a significant number of scientists view the world as designed.

For the remainder of this paper, I will assume that living things are designed--not necessarily in every detail, but in at least certain aspects. Specifically, I will assume that the human species was planned before life began and that the history of life is the record of how this plan was implemented.

The Darwinian account of the history of life begins with the most primitive organisms and works its way forward to the appearance of human beings. Although this is how events actually unfolded, from a design perspective the idea of human beings came first, followed by a plan to achieve the goal. In a sense, then, the plan took shape by working backward from the goal.1

What would the plan have to include? Any plan that places humans as the intended outcome would have to provide for such basic needs as food, water, and a suitable environment. It can be argued that humans have other needs as well, including social interactions, intellectual stimulation, and aesthetic enjoyment. Here I will focus entirely on physical needs.

When human beings first appeared, the environment must have been congenial to unprotected human life. From a design perspective, this human-friendly environment was planned. Advocates of the Anthropic Principle have pointed out that such an environment was possible only because the fundamental physical constants of the universe had the precise values they have. But these constants are consistent with a wide range of environments, whereas life requires a relatively narrow range of temperature, pressure, and other physical parameters. Therefore, in addition to the universal constants, suitable local conditions would have needed to be part of the design as well.

Humans use oxygen in their metabolism and release carbon dioxide as a waste product. Therefore, suitable local conditions must include an atmosphere containing these gases and a mechanism that regenerates oxygen from carbon dioxide. This mechanism is photosynthesis, which is carried out by green plants. It uses energy from the sun and also produces carbohydrates--another raw material in human metabolism. Photosynthesis is a remarkably efficient system for maintaining an environment congenial to human life. Unless some other mechanism is shown to be capable of fulfilling the same role, a design perspective implies that organisms very much like green plants were a necessary part of the original plan.

In addition to carbohydrates, the human body needs various other nutrients, including specific amino acids, minerals, and vitamins. Our nutritional needs are quite complex and must be met on a regular basis, so we are absolutely dependent on a variety of food sources. These are found in the plants and animals around us. Since our needs include complex organic molecules found only in other living things, those organisms are necessary for our existence.

Whatever organisms may have been necessary for human nutrition, their existence required a balanced ecosystem that accommodated their needs. The original plan must have included a self-sustaining biosphere in which reproduction and growth were balanced by death and decay. The balance among organisms in an ecosystem is normally quite complex, and ecologists frequently discover that organisms previously thought to be unessential are necessary elements in that balance. It is thus clear that planning for human beings requires planning for many other organisms as well.

Getting from there to here

The need for large numbers of organisms becomes even more evident when we try to imagine how human beings appeared on what was originally a lifeless planet.

Although there is no consensus among paleogeologists about atmospheric conditions on the primitive earth, those conditions were almost certainly different from today's. The first organisms must have been capable of surviving in those conditions and transforming them into an environment more favorable to human life.

In other words, primitive organisms had to pave the way for the stable ecosystems we see today. A barren planet had to become a garden; soils containing organic nutrients for land plants had to be produced. To use current biological terminology, ecological niches were filled by organisms adapted to survive under local conditions. Those organisms then transformed their conditions, and other living things took over.

Producing a congenial environment with nutritious foods, while necessary, would not have been sufficient. Some people believe that the first human beings were created fully grown. But even if we ignore psychological considerations and restrict ourselves to physical ones, birth and growth are essential aspects of human beings as we know them. A creature that begins life without passing through birth and childhood would be so unlike us that we could not regard it as truly human, regardless of how great the superficial resemblance. And because human babies are totally dependent on other creatures for their survival during early development, animals capable of raising the first human babies must have been a necessary part of the original plan.

Human babies need milk to survive and grow, so mammals had to exist before humans appeared. And not just any mammal. The first human baby presumably had to be nurtured by a creature very much like itself--a humanlike primate. This creature, in turn, could only have been nurtured by a creature intermediate in some respects between it and a more primitive mammal. In other words, a plan for the emergence of human beings must have included something like the succession of prehistoric forms we find in the fossil record.

Similar reasoning could be applied to earlier episodes in the history of life. For example, just as mammals were necessary predecessors of the first humans, mammallike reptiles were presumably needed to precede the first mammals, and so on. The emergence of humans thus depended on a progression of creatures that increasingly resembled us.

Although this process is superficially similar to the Darwinian notion of common descent, design theory differs from the latter in maintaining that predecessors need not be biological ancestors but only providers of essential nourishment and protection. Successive organisms are "related" in the sense that they represent planned stages in the history of life, but they are not genetically related as ancestors and descendants. A planned succession would not require the innumerable transitional forms that Darwin predicted. Design theory is thus more compatible than Darwinism with the discontinuities found in the fossil record.

Design theory also does a better job than Darwin's theory in accounting for homology. According to Darwin, features in diverse organisms are structurally similar ("homologous") because they are inherited from a common ancestor. Biological inheritance implies that such features are more similar because they are produced by similar genes or developmental pathways, but this implication is contradicted by the genetic and embryological evidence.2 In a design view, however, homologies exist (at least in part) because new organisms need to be protected and nourished by organisms somewhat like them. But homologies need not be produced by similar genes or developmental pathways, since there is no insistence on the sort of mechanistic continuity required by Darwinian common descent.

In conclusion, a design perspective on the history of life might turn out to account for the biological evidence better than Darwinian evolution can. For example, Darwinism fails to specify why any given organism exists, beyond insisting that it be able to survive. But for design theory, a variety of creatures--including green plants and humanlike primates--are necessary prerequisites for human life. A design perspective requires progressive stages in the history of life, as seen in the fossil record, but unlike Darwin's theory it does not predict innumerable transitional forms that do not exist. Design theory also suggests that homologies exist, at least in part, so that certain organisms can prepare the way for others intended to follow them. Unlike Darwinism, it does not imply that homologous features are produced by similar genes or developmental pathways, and so does not run afoul of the evidence.

This analysis, although preliminary and subject to revision, demonstrates that a design perspective has major implications for our understanding of the biological evidence. As our knowledge of ecology and human physiology increases, and as the analysis is refined and expanded, more detailed implications will follow. In this way, a design perspective may eventually provide a detailed account of the history of life more faithful to the evidence than Darwin's theory and thus offer a framework for more fruitful research programs in biology.

End of article

I invite comment.

Liz Craig's response to Wells

KCFS member Liz Craig wrote this response to Wells' email

Exhibit A: Extract from Jonathan Wells' response to Jack Krebs (note emphasized passages):

"I think what is relevant is whether evolution - the modern theory of evolution - fits the evidence. That's all I'm interested in. I should add that ***when I started my biology graduate work at UC-Berkeley, about 12 years ago, I had no problem with the overarching pattern of Darwinian evolution.*** I had some disagreements about whether certain mechanisms could do what they were said to do, but the idea of descent with modification from common ancestry didn't bother me at all. The only reason I started to get bothered by it was because I saw the evidence, starting with the embryos. When I dug further, I found out that the evidence was either not there, or is distorted. That's why I object to Darwinian evolution or descent with modification - because it doesn't fit the evidence. ***I have no theological qualms with it at all.***

Exhibit B: "Darwinism: Why I Went For a Second Ph.D." - article written by Jonathan Wells, posted on the "True Parents" (Unification Church) site (note emphasized passages): http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.

by Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.-Berkeley, CA

At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things.

He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God's involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re-interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination.

***Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism.When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.***

Darwinism

As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. In the course of my research 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. ***God created the cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God.***

According to Darwin's theory, however, the whole history of life is the outcome of random variations and survival of the fittest. Although some features of living organisms (such as eyes) appear to be designed, Darwin claimed that this is only an illusion. Living things are the result of an essentially directionless process, and we are merely the accidental by-product of blind natural forces which did not have us in mind. When I finished my Yale Ph.D., I felt confident that I understood the theological basis of the conflict between Darwinism and theism.

But Darwinism was clearly winning the ideological battle in the universities, the public schools, and the mass media, largely because it claimed to be supported by scientific evidence. I knew enough about biology to know that this claim was quite shaky, but few scientists were willing to challenge it. Those who did were often lumped together with young-earth biblical fundamentalists and thereby discredited in the eyes of most scholars.

I eventually decided to join the fray by returning to graduate school in biology. I was convinced that embryology is the Achilles' heel of Darwinism; one cannot understand how organisms evolve unless one understands how they develop. In 1989, I entered a second Ph.D. program, this time in biology, at the University of California at Berkeley. While there, I studied embryology and evolution.

According to the standard view, the development of an embryo is programmed by its genes-its DNA. Change the genes, and you can change the embryo, even to the point of making a new species. In the movie "Jurassic Park," genetic engineers extract fragments of dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquitoes, splice them together with DNA from living frogs, then inject the combination into ostrich eggs which had had their own DNA inactivated. In the movie, the injected DNA then re-programmed the ostrich to produce a dinosaur. Experiments similar to this have actually been performed, though not with dinosaur DNA.

In every case, if any development occurred at all it followed the pattern of the egg, not the injected foreign DNA. While I was at Berkeley I performed experiments on frog embryos. My experiments focused on a reorganization of the egg cytoplasm after fertilization which causes the embryo to elongate into a tadpole; if I blocked the reorganization, the result was a ball of belly cells; if I induced a second reorganization after the first, I could produce a two-headed tadpole. Yet this reorganization had nothing to do with the egg's DNA, and proceeded quite well even in its absence (though the embryo eventually needed its DNA to supply it with additional proteins).

So DNA does not program the development of the embryo. As an analogy, consider a house: the builder needs materials (such as pieces of lumber cut to the right lengths, cement, nails, piping, wiring, etc.), but he also needs a floor plan (since any given pile of materials could be assembled into several different houses) and he needs a set of assembly instructions (since assembling the roof before the foundation and walls would pose a serious problem). In a developing organism, the DNA contains templates for producing proteins-the building materials.

To a very limited extent, it also contains information about the order in which those proteins should be produced-assembly instructions. But it does not contain the basic floor plan. The floor plan and many of the assembly instructions reside elsewhere (nobody yet knows where). Since development of the embryo is not programmed by the DNA, the Darwinian view of evolution as the differential survival of DNA mutations misses the point. At most, Darwin's theory may explain "microevolution" within established lineages-such as minor differences among closely related species of salamanders. But it cannot account for "macroevolution," - the large-scale differences between shellfish and insects, or between birds and mammals. Darwin's theory is incompatible not only with the evidence from embryology, but also with the evidence from the fossil record. According to Darwinism, all creatures are descended from a common ancestor. Yet the oldest fossils show that almost all of the major groups of organisms appeared at around the same time, fully formed and recognizably similar to their modern counterparts. Darwin's theory predicts a "branching tree" pattern in the fossil record, yet that pattern is nowhere to be found. The fossils provide no evidence that all creatures are descended from a common ancestor. So the two major claims of Darwinism-that all living things are descended from a common ancestor and that their differences are due to random variations and survival of the fittest- are unsupported by evidence.

The challenge

1992 AAR In 1992, while a biology graduate student at Berkeley, I responded to some papers at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in San Francisco. The AAR includes several thousand professors of religion from colleges all over North America. At the 1992 meeting, the committee on theology and science discussed the fall, original sin, and guilt. I was too busy to write a paper, but offered to be a respondent to the others, and the committee chairman accepted my offer.

The papers, including one by James Fowler of Emory University, took it for granted that the fall of Adam and Eve was a fiction rather than a historical fact. They made this assumption because ***Darwinism had presumably proven that the human species originated as a slowly evolving population rather than as two created individuals who disobeyed God.*** Since, in their minds, the fall never occurred, the universal sense of guilt usually attributed to the fall must have originated in some other way. Fowler argued that each of us goes through a period of anxiety as we are weaned from our mother's breast, and that that anxiety gives rise to the myth that something occurred early in our history which separated us from "god" and led to feelings of guilt. According to Fowler, however, the same event propels us on the road to individual awareness and rational thought. According to this interpretation, the "fall" is actually a good thing: without it, we would never be truly human.

I responded that the paper-writers, by basing their theological reflections on implications of Darwin's theory, were relying on bad science. I explained that Darwinism doesn't fit the evidence, and concluded that the paper-writers had sold out to a passing fad. Then I criticized their theology, arguing that if evil did not enter the world through a historical act of human free will, God must have made the world evil. In his rebuttal, Fowler remarked that what each of us experiences in our own upbringing is actually "a fall upwards into consciousness."

I got the last word, and confessed to being old-fashioned enough to think that when we fall, we fall downwards. The discussion had been friendly and good humored, but after it was over I found that no one in the audience (except for a handful of my own friends) wanted to talk to me. Many (including the committee chairman) even turned and walked away when I approached them. Since the audience included almost everyone in North America who teaches about science and religion in our universities and theological seminaries, the shunning which I experienced indicated that ***virtually the entire academic establishment has sold out to Darwinism. Anyone who criticizes it and defends classical theology is considered to be acting in bad taste.*** It saddened me to realize that educators who should be interested in these issues don't even want to discuss them.

Current Activities

Since completing my second Ph.D. a few months ago, I have taught embryology at a state college and am now a post-doctoral research biologist at Berkeley, writing articles critical of Darwinism. I am one of a growing number of highly-educated and articulate critics of Darwinism, located in universities all over North America, who stay in touch via the internet and occasionally join forces at academic conferences.

These critics include embryologists, paleontologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, philosophers, and even lawyers. Unfortunately, the North American science-and-religion establishment has largely turned a deaf ear to these critics, ***preferring instead to abandon classical theology and embrace metaphysical materialism and moral relativism.*** But I see the situation as analogous to the last years of Soviet communism. A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon, to the surprise of many people in academia and the media, the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did in 1990.

Exhibit C: Jonathan Wells' published research papers related to embryology number three (3), none of which lists his name as the primary researcher.

Question to the jury:

Do these two statements, by the same person, one Jonathan Wells, contradict each other?

Do you believe Wells's mission to "destroy Darwinism" is motivated solely by his devotion to science? Or do you think he has ideological and/or theological objections to Darwin's theory?

I leave it up to you to answer these questions for yourselves, based upon Wells' own words.