Jonathan Wells

The Seattle Weekly is one of those free newsprint advertisers that you find in bins on street corners in most major U. S. cities. Their editorial boards usually consist of people too far to the left even for the establishment media, and as sources of news they’re probably about as reliable as Minju Choson, the official organ of the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea. But homeless people make good use of them.

The August 29, 2007 issue of The Seattle Weekly features an article quoting Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Despite its name, the NCSE is not about teaching science but indoctrinating students at public expense in Darwinism, the creation myth of modern secularism. Whenever critics of Darwinism raise their heads, the NCSE rushes in to bop ’em, kind of like a carnival game. Except that when the NCSE bops someone on the head it usually means the end of that person’s career in science teaching.

The peppered myth died several years ago when scientists discovered that photos of peppered moths on tree trunks – used in most biology textbooks to convince students of Darwinian evolution – had been staged. Now, in a lecture in Sweden on August 23, 2007, Cambridge University biologist Michael Majerus has disinterred the corpse. He announced that by looking out his window at moths in the back yard he had found new evidence that peppered moths are “proof of Darwinian evolution,” that humans invented God, and that there will be “no second coming; no helping hand from on high.” No, this was not on “The Simpsons.” This really happened. To read more about how someone could think that moths in his Read More ›

Materialists predict they will create “artificial life” in a test tube in the next 3 to 10 years. I have a counter-prediction: They will succeed only by re-defining “artificial” and “life.” For example, “artificial” will cover any human manipulation of an existing organism — so replacing a few genes or enzymes in an already-living cell will count as creating “artificial life.” And “life” will be anything that can undergo “Darwinian evolution” — such as an artificially engineered system of molecules — even though it can be sustained only in a carefully controlled laboratory environment. But a free-living cell? I don’t think so. We are still many years and many discoveries away from understanding the nature of life even in prokaryotes. Read More ›

Many public schools in the U.S. are still showing biology students the 2001 PBS Evolution series. This 8-hour propaganda extravaganza — like most modern biology textbooks — distorts and exaggerates the evidence to convince people that Darwinism is true. When the series was first released, Discovery Institute published a detailed 150-page Viewer’s Guide exposing the distortions and exaggerations. The Guide includes extensive references to the scientific and popular literature, as well as eight activities that teachers and students will find helpful in critically analyzing this work of pro-Darwin propaganda.

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to Getting the Facts Straight: A Viewer’s Guide to PBS’s Evolution:

I recently found myself in a conversation with two college undergraduates, both of them seniors in the natural sciences (physics and biochemistry, respectively). At one point we were discussing alchemy, which they knew as a pre-modern attempt to transmute lead into gold. I asked them whether they could name any famous alchemists. They could not, though one of them dimly recalled hearing of “someone whose name began with A.” I then predicted that Darwinian evolution would eventually fade into the same obscurity that now shrouds alchemy. Although I knew from previous conversations that my young friends were skeptical of Darwinian theory, they expressed considerable surprise at my prediction, if only because Darwinism is presently held in such high esteem by Read More ›

There’s an old lawyers’ joke about the “cracked kettle” approach to legal argumentation. Jones sues Smith for borrowing her kettle and returning it with a crack in it. Smith’s lawyer then defends her with the following arguments (in order):

1. Smith didn’t borrow the kettle.
2. The kettle was cracked before Smith borrowed it.
3. When Smith returned the kettle, it wasn’t cracked.
4. There never was a kettle.

In my book Icons of Evolution I described a 2000 conference talk in which Kevin Padian (President of the National Center for Science Education) used argumentation very much like this to defend his claim that birds are modified descendants of dinosaurs.¹ Darwinists are now using a similar approach to defend Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings.

EDITORS NOTE: This is an updated and expanded version of a previous post.

Darwinist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson showed “Flock of Dodos” in Seattle on Wednesday, February 7. Although the film sacrifices truth in order to tell a good story, it fails even at that. As entertainment, it’s a flop.

But I’m less interested in the film’s cinematic shortcomings than in the way it misrepresents the truth — and in the way Olson is dealing with criticisms of those misrepresentations.

In 1970, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod called DNA the “secret of life” and said that the discovery of its structure and function — especially “the understanding of the random physical basis of mutation” — means that “the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded” and that humans are “a mere accident.”[¹]

As a member of the Kansas Science Standards writing committee last year, Stephen B. Case adamantly opposed critical thinking in high school biology classes. A Darwinist, Case was furious when the Kansas State School Board decided that students should learn the evidence and scientific arguments both for and against evolutionary theory.

Intelligent design (ID) was not included in the state science standards, but Darwinists feel threatened by it anyway. Case writes:

“One thing is clear: The scientific community has not embraced the explanation of design because it is quite clear that on the basis of the evidence, it is just wrong. Beyond the clarity that design is not science, the smoke is hiding an attack on the religious faith and beliefs of many people.”