This article is in honor of Dr. Jonathan Wells, who passed away on 9/24/2024.
(Dr. John Warwick Montgomery also recently passed away, on 9/25. A future post will be dedicated to his work.)
There is an anecdote about a Chinese diplomat telling an American that ‘in China, you can criticize Charles Darwin but you cannot criticize the Chinese government. However, I see that in the USA you can criticize the government, but you cannot criticize Darwin.’
Darwin did not create the theory of evolution, but he did popularize it. Since then, evolution has become a sacred cow and is even hotly debated amongst Christians. Theistic evolutionists seeks to explain how evolutionary science and the Bible can co-exist, but Creationists oppose this position and demonstrate how science and the Bible can be united without evolution. In secular institutions evolution takes precedence over ‘brainless religion’ and students of all ages are hammered with various studies, experiments, and proven facts of evolution. But are these experiments and facts truly ‘proven’ and as concrete as they are made out to be?
I am not going to give an in-depth breakdown of Creation vs. Evolution, but wanted to give a brief book recommendation: Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? by Jonathan Wells. Wells received two Ph.Ds, one of which was in Molecular and Cell Biology. He was a proponent of Intelligent Design and spent much of his life’s work refuting evolution.
In Icons, Wells walks through the foundational arguments of evolution and explains how they are misrepresented, faulty, or even deceiving. These studies include the peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, and the Miller-Urey experiment. I learned about these examples in my college biology course in 2009, and over the years my students at Indiana Bible College have confirmed that they had been taught these ‘facts’ in high school.
My favorite chapters in the book cover the aforementioned peppered moths, finches, and Miller-Urey experiment, but each chapter is significant and worth reading.
A few summaries:
Wells walks through the history of Darwin’s travels and reveals that the finches were not considered evolutionary evidence until 15 years after Darwin’s initial voyage. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, the finches were not instrumental in shaping Darwin’s theory. They were mentioned once in mere passing in Darwin’s HMS Beagle journals, and not referenced at all in On The Origin of Species. Furthermore, Wells breaks down multiple studies over the decades (experiments conducted by pro-Darwin scientists) and provides scientific explanations for the differences and changes in the finch’s beak sizes. This chapter reveals how the icon of the finches has been mythologized to become more significant than it truly was.
The peppered moths have been exalted as the perfect icon of natural selection working in the wild. The thought was that one group of moths replaced another group due to environmental changes, pollution, and predators. However, Wells explains that aspects of the experiments were manipulated or faulty. One researcher placed moths on the trees when the moths are docile and do not move, thus predators could easily consume them. Some of the famous photographs of the moths were staged (researchers pinned the moths to the trees). Also, in different regions the results were the opposite of what the researchers had predicted: the pollution was not as strong a factor and the expected moths did not completely take over the regions in question. Although many details were passed over in this summary, the peppered moths do not demonstrate natural selection the way the textbooks describe it.
Miller-Urey experiment occurred in 1953. The scientists claimed the results established the fact that life could spark and evolve spontaneously. This experiment is needed if you desire to find the beginning of life without God. Wells shows that Miller and Urey had assumptions regarding the primitive earth’s atmosphere, but these presuppositions are still debated today. They assumed the earth’s young atmosphere did not have oxygen, and so created their work based on this idea. Interestingly, this bias was required if they wanted to produce anything with their experiment. Oxygen would not be suitable as a catalyst for life, thus, when the experiment yielded tiny proteins (which still would not support life, much less kickstart evolution), the scientists claimed their assumptions were correct because the experiment worked. Therefore, scientific bias and all, textbooks deem this study to affirm God is not needed for the inception of life.
These are but short summaries and each chapter needs to be read carefully to glean all of Wells’ research. Other sections include Haeckel’s fraudulent embryos, the ascent of ape to human, and Darwin’s Tree of Life. Each one of these chapters could be used in lessons to help students understand that evolution is not as established as the culture claims.