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Jonathan Wells — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Early life and education

Wells was born on September 19, 1942, in New York City. He was the third child in a family of five children, and grew up in northern New Jersey. He was raised Presbyterian. In 1960, Wells graduated from Montclair High School. After high school, he received a full scholarship to attend Princeton University. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Wells majored in geology, but dropped out of the university in his junior year.

After attending the 1963 March on Washington, Wells became a pacifist and worked as a taxi driver in New York City. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years of military service in Germany. After being discharged from the army in 1966, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he led a protest against the Vietnam War draft at Sproul Plaza. He was arrested for draft dodging and incarcerated in solitary confinement for four months, then imprisoned for eight months at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth.

Upon his release from prison, Wells re-enrolled at Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in geology and physics with a minor in biology in 1970. He recalled that, as an undergraduate, "I became an agnostic and a Darwinist". After graduation, he lived in rural Mendocino County, where "I ceased being an agnostic and a Darwinist". He joined the Unification Church of the United States in 1974, then began attending the Unification Theological Seminary in 1976. While studying at Columbia University, he recalled that he "became convinced that the Darwinian mechanism of accidental mutations and natural selection is incapable of producing the changes required by evolution".

Wells graduated from seminary in 1978 and was awarded a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at Yale University. He earned a Master of Arts from Yale in 1980 and his Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale in 1986. His doctoral dissertation at Yale, completed under theologian David Kelsey, was titled, "Charles Hodge's critique of Darwinism: The argument to design".

In 1994, Wells earned a second doctorate, a Ph.D. in molecular biology and cellular biology, from the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation at Berkeley was titled, "A confocal microscopy study of microtubule arrays involved in cortical rotation during the first cell cycle of Xenopus embryos". Among his doctoral advisors at Berkeley was the herpetologist David B. Wake.

Opposition to Darwinian evolution

Of his 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." Wells 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, which were paid for by the Unification Church, 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.

Wells said that "destroying Darwinism" was his motive for studying Christian theology at Yale and going on to seek his second PhD at Berkeley, studying biology and in particular embryology:

Father's [Rev. Moon'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.

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 place. In 2011, Wells responded in Science and Culture Today:Since then, many of my critics have quoted the now-infamous line, "Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism." (For a sampling, just do a Google search on the words.) Remarkably, Darwinists never quote much else from my essay, even though the 18 words in this one line represent only 1% of it, while a subsequent passage dealing with my scientific reasons for rejecting Darwinism represents 37%. Talk about quote mining...

Nor (as far as I know) have any Darwinists bothered to learn anything about the context in which I wrote the essay. If they had, they would know that Reverend Moon did not instruct or command me to destroy Darwinism (though years later he commended me on publishing Icons of Evolution.)

So, can I be trusted to say anything concerning the biological sciences? I freely admit that I was motivated to pursue a biology Ph.D., in part, because of my religious views. On the other hand, Francis Crick freely admitted (to historian Horace Freeland Judson) that he went into biology, in part, because of his atheistic views. What ultimately mattered in Crick's case was not his motivation, but whether his biological claims were consistent with the evidence. The same is true in my case.He wrote articles for the Discovery Institute, WorldNetDaily, Origins & Design, and other sympathetic publications attacking evolution and defending intelligent design. In 1997, he presented a paper titled "Evolution by Design" at the Unification Church sponsored International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in Washington, D.C.

In 1999, Wells debated with the New Mexicans for Science and Reason. He was one of the contributors to Natural History magazine's 2002 debate between intelligent design advocates and evolution supporters. In 2005, he debated Massimo Pigliucci on the PBS talk show Uncommon Knowledge. Pigliucci said that Wells "clearly lied" during his debates and misrepresented his agenda and science, as well as not understanding some of the theories he tried to attack.

Wells was one of the signatories of the Discovery Institute's "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism," a petition which the intelligent design movement uses to promote intelligent design by attempting to cast doubt on evolution. He is also the author of "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" for high school students, which is published by the Discovery Institute. The National Center for Science Education has issued a list of answers to the questions.

Kansas evolution hearings

In 2005, Wells participated in the Kansas evolution hearings, which were boycotted by mainstream scientists. There Wells testified:

I became convinced that the Darwinian theory is false because it conflicts with the evidence. ... I think the earth is probably four-and-a-half billion or so years old. But I'll tell you this, I used to-- I would have said, a few years ago, I'm convinced it's four-and-a-half billion 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. ... There are already scientists-- respected scientists in this country who do experiments on things that most people consider supernatural, such as prayer. When Newton proposed the theory of gravitation it was dismissed as supernaturalism because it was action at a distance. What constitutes supernaturalism in today's science may very well not be supernatural in tomorrow's science.

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:

Creationists such as Jonathan Wells claim that my criticism of these experiments casts strong doubt on Darwinism. But this characterization is false. ... My call for additional research on the moths has been wrongly characterized by creationists as revealing some fatal flaw in the theory of evolution. ... It is a classic creationist tactic (as exemplified in Wells' book, "Icons of Evolution") to assert that healthy scientific debate is really a sign that evolutionists are either committing fraud or buttressing a crumbling theory.