In the ten years since the book first appeared, Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution (2000) has itself achieved iconic status among the primary texts in the literature of scientific Darwin-doubting. ENV will celebrate the anniversary all this month with a series of videos and interviews — Dr. Wells updating the “icons,” colleagues reflecting on the impact the book had on them, an enhanced website for the book, and more. For anyone interested in educating himself about the facts behind the slogans and propaganda that pass for much of the argumentation on behalf of Darwinism, Jonathan Wells’s sweetly reasoned, scientifically impeccable presentation gives the goods on peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, four-winged fruit flies, the tree of life, and other crusted barnacles that hang on and on and on.
A Berkeley PhD in molecular and cell biology, Wells is among the most lucid and accessible scientist-writers devoted to the modern project of critiquing Darwin. When I say the book is sweetly reasoned, I don’t only mean that it’s well reasoned but that there’s an appealing geniality, a sweetness, to the man’s writing that stands out in contrast to the donkey-like braying of a Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne, the sinister coilings of a Richard Dawkins, the ugly “humor” of a P.Z. Myers. Yes, you can get a sense of a person’s character, and perhaps too his credibility, from the words he uses.
Performing the service of crushing ten venerable chestnuts of evolutionary apologetics, familiar to generations from high school and college textbooks, Icons caused no little consternation among Darwin advocates. That was evident from the reaction of critics — who, however, hardly succeeded in laying a glove on Wells — but also from the fact that textbook publishers have to a limited extent taken his criticisms to heart. Haeckel’s phony embryo drawings, for example, are harder to find in brand new textbooks now than they were before, representing a telling strategic retreat.
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