By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
I just learned about the passing of my friend Jonathan Wells (1942-2024), who died on his birthday two years ago.
We had the same circle of friends, so we bumped into each other on several occasions. He also wrote several books exposing the scientific problems of Darwinism.
He also covered the harm that Darwin’s teaching of superior/inferior races theory has done in society, including the Holocaust.
Wells also was able to provide much scientific evidence proving that apes cannot be turned into people by damaging the animal’s genes, a process called mutations (actually, what is taught is that apes and humans have a hypothetical common ancestor, but that common ancestor was some kind of ape).
In writing this biography, I learned a lot about Wells that I did not know before. He was a former atheist and Darwinist who, as a result of his lifetime of scientific study, rejected atheism and Darwinism and accepted creationism.
For his views on evolution, the first page of Wells’ Wikipedia page used name-calling, writing that “He was an advocate of intelligent design, a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God.” Actually, the idea that apes can turn into people via mutations is a pseudoscientific belief.
Often, theists are ignored because they lack academic credentials. In Wells’ case, his academic credentials were from the most prestigious universities in the world.
In 1960, Wells graduated from Montclair High School. After high school, he received a full scholarship to attend Princeton University to study geology.
As a liberal Democrat, he attended the March 1963 civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., which drew close to 300,000 people. The final speaker was Martin Luther King Jr., who, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in which he called for an end to racism and racial segregation.
Wells was then 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.
He was then arrested and incarcerated in solitary confinement for four months, then imprisoned for eight months in Fort Leavenworth. Upon his release from prison, Wells re-enrolled at Berkeley and graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science in geology and physics with a minor in biology.
As an undergraduate, he became an agnostic and a Darwinist. Later, when studying biology at Columbia University, he “became convinced that the Darwinian mechanism of accidental mutations and natural selection is incapable of producing the changes required by evolution to convert monkeys into man.”
Wells was then awarded a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at Yale University. His Yale doctoral dissertation, completed under eminent professor David Kelsey, was “Charles Hodge’s critique of Darwinism: The argument for design.”
He was now even more convinced that evolution was incapable of producing the changes required to convert monkeys into man and had the evidence for this conclusion.
In 1994, Wells earned another Ph.D., this one from the University of California, Berkeley, in molecular and cellular biology.
His Berkeley doctoral dissertation titled “A confocal microscopy study of microtubule arrays involved in cortical rotation during the first cell cycle of Xenopus embryos” was supervised by the famous herpetologist David B. Wake. Wells then, from 1995 to 1998, was a postdoctoral researcher in molecular and cellular biology at Berkeley.
At this time, his 18 years of education motivated him to author several articles and two books critical of Darwinism.
Because evolution was dogmatically accepted, rather than acknowledging his scientific evidence against this worldview, his critics, as is true of most who reject Darwinism, maligned him, leveling various charges against his conclusions, such as that he was motivated by religion, not science.
Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA design, freely admitted that he went into biology, in part, motivated by 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 Wells’ case.
In 2000, Wells published his book Icons of Evolution, in which he discusses 10 examples which document that many of the most commonly accepted arguments supporting evolution are invalid.
Wells also participated in the Kansas evolution hearings whose goal was to teach about evolution problems, instead of one-sided indoctrination in evolution, which is the norm now. In 2006, Wells published his second major book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, which was part of a series published by Regnery Publishing.
Dr. Wells has also published peer-reviewed articles in Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, BioSystems, The Scientist and The American Biology Teacher.
The National Association of Biology Teachers, which publishes The American Biology Teacher, faced significant criticism after publishing Dr. Wells’ article titled “Haeckel’s Embryos & Evolution: Setting the Record Straight” in May 1999.
The controversy emerged because Wells effectively critiqued Ernst Haeckel’s historical embryo drawings to argue that the broader evidence for evolution presented in textbooks was fundamentally compromised.
The journal’s editorial board faced internal and external pressure over “allowing an intelligent design proponent to utilize their platform.” Those who question Darwinism pay a major price.
Summary
Wells, one of the most educated academics in the world in science from the world’s leading universities, was attacked due to his acknowledgment that atheistic evolution will not do what its supporters believe it can do.
It cannot convert monkeys into people, even given billions of mutations — 99.9 percent of which are known to be near-neutral or deleterious — and billions of years.
I spent a great deal of time examining the information used to support evolution in textbooks from 1900 to 1940, and have concluded that most of the claimed evidence for evolution has been falsified. My research has supported Wells’ findings.
Evolutionists, while ignoring specifics, have accused Wells of almost every known academic sin, including misquoting, overgeneralizing, inaccurately reporting, distorting the findings of science and misunderstanding evolution.
None of these accusations are valid. This is another example of the hostility of the evolutionary establishment towards those who dare to question their secular worldview.
