Question for the well-read here.

Rae · #1 5th September 2002, 10:34 PM

Anyone read Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells? What are his credentials, and is his theory credible? I saw the book only yesterday and it isn't mine, but it looked pretty interesting.

blader · #2 5th September 2002, 10:58 PM

The man gave a lecture at my school last year, at UCSD, at the request of the Intelligent Design Club. He has a degree from UC Berkeley in biology(?), IIRC.

If there was a "theory" at all in "Icons," I don't see it. It's just a standard Creationist critique of evolution, and the same examples of bad text books, Haeckel drawings, etc etc.

He's actually a moonie, under Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The only reason he decided to go to Berkeley and get a degree, from the very beginning, was to somehow disprove or discredit evolution.

blader · #3 5th September 2002, 11:05 PM

In Wells' own words:

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.

The "Father" here is Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whom Wells and other members of Moon's Unification Church consider to be the second coming of Christ.

Rae · #4 5th September 2002, 11:12 PM

Ah, okay. Maybe I should warn my friend, then, who's a nice Lutheran boy and all, and told me he thought it was a fascinating read. Gosh...what's this world coming to?

Rimstalker · #5 6th September 2002, 12:35 AM

Just to note, the religion of the author of Icons is irrelevant to the nature and quality of his arguments. Not that I think very highly of his arguments, though.

MSBS · #6 6th September 2002, 01:06 AM

If you are interested the talk.origins FAC has a detailed examination of the book.

Morat · #7 6th September 2002, 01:36 AM

  It's not very good, and frankly I didn't find it very honest either. It's either indictive of bad scholarship, or deliberate deception. Although, thankfully, not of the Hovind type. Mostly..deception by omission.

  Think "politics" and you'll get the idea.

 

blader · #8 6th September 2002, 02:31 AM

Originally posted by Rimstalker
Just to note, the religion of the author of Icons is irrelevant to the nature and quality of his arguments. Not that I think very highly of his arguments, though.

True. But it does give his arguments a context.

Cantuar · #9 6th September 2002, 05:44 AM

I think the book is very dishonest. It says that textbooks have out-of-date and incorrect material in them, such as Haeckel's drawings and the usual creationist objections to Archaeopteryx and the horse series and so on; it then makes the great backward leap of logic that because some textbooks contain out-of-date material, this shows that the whole edifice of evolution is a sham. Seems to me that updating the textbooks would be a more sensible alternative, but I guess I'm just not as practised in backward leaps of logic.

It's certainly true that some textbooks don't contain the latest and most correct information, and that's the case for all science subjects. Sometimes it's easier for an author to leave an old illustration in his book than to go through the hassle of getting permissions from authors and publishers to use a newer one. If Wells's book had been a plea for textbook authors to be more careful about their subject matter (usually these authors aren't specialists in the entire field the textbook covers) and more rigorous in weeding out old stuff and including new stuff, I think he'd have a point. But instead he says that because evolutionary textbooks contain material that isn't correct (setting aside the difference between creationist and scientist opinions of things like the peppered moth and Archaeopteryx, since he's claiming that's incorrect and most biologists wouldn't agree), that somehow proves that the whole discipline is in trouble. Considering some textbooks I've seen in other fields, I'd say in that case you might as well throw out the whole of science.