Thomas Knierim
19th February 2004, 10:34 AM
Book Review: Icons of Evolution
Jonathan Wells, 2000
Regnery Publishing
By Thomas Knierim
Icons of Evolution is a book by Jonathan Wells that attempts an attack on the mainstream evolution paradigm. Wells identifies ten teaching examples commonly found in biology textbooks dealing with evolution. He calls these “icons of evolution” and discusses each of them individually. The author’s objective is to discredit Darwinism by raising doubts about the evidence. Wells holds that Darwinism is an unscientific myth that gets into the way of true science and the search for truth. He pronounces the relatively serious charge that “students and the public are being systematically misinformed about the evidence for evolution.” In addition, he accuses well-known biologists and institutions of distorting scientific facts in favor of the Darwinist theory. As a countermeasure, Wells suggests to attach warning labels to biology textbooks that warn students about the supposedly hypothetical nature of the findings that confirm evolution theory.
The technical level of this book is notably above that of run-off-the-mill creationist attacks. Jonathan Wells holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology and he is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture, an organization that supports the idea of intelligent design. It is somewhat peculiar that Wells does not mention the words “God” or “intelligent design” a single time in his book. Although he wants his readers to disbelieve the standard scientific view of evolution, he offers no alternative explanation on his own for the observed phenomena. Instead, the material presented amounts to a scientific conspiracy theory. At the end of the book, Wells labels mainstream biologists as “dogmatic Darwinists that misrepresent the truth to keep themselves in power.” It is obvious from the chosen examples and arguments that the author’s target audience are laymen with limited knowledge of biology. In the following section I introduce the ten “icons”, each representing a chapter in the book, by the warning label text suggested by Wells:
(1) Wells: The Miller-Urey experiment probably did not simulate the Earth’s early atmosphere; it does not demonstrate how life’s building blocks originated.
The Miller-Urey experiment makes certain assumptions about the composition of the Earth atmosphere around 4.6 to 3.8 mya. Contrary to what Wells says, these assumptions have a high probability, since the Miller-Urey experiment can be varied to work with a number of different compositions, although all of them require the absence of large amounts of oxygen. There is reason to believe there wasn’t much oxygen in the early Earth’s atmosphere. Uraninite and incompletely oxidized iron deposits in the oldest rock formations indicate that the early atmosphere was anoxic or weakly reducing. In addition to Miller-Urey style synthesis, there are other viable mechanisms of amino acid production, such as submarine vents, chemicals dissolved in water or minerals in porous rocks or clays. Wells also “forgets” to mention the extraterrestrial amino acids we found in meteorites (the Murchison meteorite for example), which indicate that similar synthesis processes took place elsewhere in the solar system.
(2) Wells: Darwin’s tree of life does not fit the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion and molecular evidence does not support a simple branching tree-pattern.
Wells makes the somewhat outlandish proposition that the fossil record contradicts phylogenetic trees. He thus attempts to raise doubt over common ancestry and Darwin’s progenitor hypothesis. Fact is that Darwin –although having proposed common ancestry– never drew phylogenetic trees. It was Haeckel who did. A phylogenetic tree shows genealogical relationships of taxa. There are occasional disparities between molecular and morphological phylogenies, and phylogenic methodologies themselves are not unproblematic. However, this does neither disprove common ancestry nor speciation. On the contrary, the majority of phylogenetic trees fit perfectly with the fossil record. To say that the Cambrian explosion puts the tree of live topsy-turvy can only be interpreted as a bluff attempt, because ancestral lines can be followed well up into the Precambrian period (i.e. 10 million years and more).
(3) Wells: If homology is defined as similarity due to common ancestry, it cannot be used as evidence for common ancestry; whatever its cause may be it is not similar genes.
Wells makes the case that biology books employ circular reasoning by explaining homology (structural similarities such as the limbs of vertebrates) in terms of common ancestry, which they were supposed to prove in the first place. Wells maybe a biology Ph.D., but he is certainly not a logician. If there were a fallacy to be observed, it would not be that of circular reasoning, but “affirming the consequent” (invalid reversal of modus ponens). This is, however, not the case. Homology is defined as structural similarity. When one looks at the bone structure of forelimbs of a human and compares them with, for example, a bat wing, a porpoise flipper, and a horse forelimb, they all look strikingly similar despite the fact that they serve different functions. One can’t help to notice that this points to common ancestry. So, the proper argument structure is (p1) homologous bone structure -> (c1) common ancestry.
(4) Wells: The pictures of Haeckel’s embryos make vertebrate embryos look more similar than they really are; it is not true that vertebrate embryos are most similar in their earliest stages.
Okay, Haeckel’s embryo drawings are not the most accurate. Since these drawings are 19th century woodcarvings this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. I haven’t seen any of Haeckel’s drawings in textbooks that I own; in fact, the first time I came across them was in Wells’ book. Wells is certainly right in saying that Haeckel’s recapitulationism is flawed. The view that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, i.e. that the embryo passes through a series of developmental stages that correspond to evolutionary stages, has been dismissed as “not fitting the evidence” at the beginning of the 20th century. However, this doesn’t mean –as Wells wants to make us believe– that comparative embryology offers no support for evolution theory at all. It certainly does. The developmental patterns of closely related organisms are similar, and they have more developmental features in common than distantly related organisms. This is a homology that supports the same argument as in (3) and it can be used to construct or reinforce phylogenetic trees.
(5) Wells: Archaeopteryx is probably not the ancestor of modern birds, and its own ancestors remain highly controversial; other missing links are now being sought.
This chapter exemplifies the method of Wells’ argument building. Whether archaeopteryx is ancestral to modern birds is actually irrelevant. What is important is that this fossil represents an intermediate between two vertebrate classes, namely birds and reptiles. It supports the theory that birds descended from dinosaurs. Wells conveniently forgets to mention other fossils of feathered and/or avian-like dinosaurs, though archaeopteryx is undeniably the clearest transitional example. Wells suggests that there are “missing links” to modern birds, thereby insinuating that the class of birds must be derived from a single (missing) ancestor, which is irrelevant and possibly wrong. He makes up for it by throwing in a humorous anecdote how scientists “discovered” bird DNA in a fossil that was surprisingly similar to that of the modern turkey, where it turned out that someone handling the fossil had a turkey sandwich that day.
(6) Wells: Peppered moths do not rest on tree trunks in the wild, and photos showing them on tree trunks have been staged; Kettlewell’s experiments are now being questioned.
This may be the most poorly conceived chapter of the book. Wells attempts to question the observation that moths in Southern England get selected for their wing color. Peppered moths (Lepidoptera) come in two colors, black (melanic) and white (normal). Obviously, the white moths are more visible on black tree stems while the black ones are more conspicuous on white stems. Therefore, their color relates to the rate at which they are spotted and eaten by birds. Now, during the middle of the 20th century, parts of Southern England were heavily polluted and trees became blacker. Consequently, populations of melanic moths rose while those of white moths decreased during that period. This phenomenon is known as “industrial melanism”; it is a textbook example of natural selection. Today, pollution in Southern England has declined on account of environmental laws and bright-colored moths are again dominant. Wells tries to poke holes into Kettlewell’s moth studies by noting that moths don’t rest on tree stems. He says that Kettlewell’s studies are inaccurate and he complains about staged textbook photos of moths resting on tree stems. Contrary to what Wells says, Kettlewell’s observations are essentially correct. They have been verified almost fifty years later by Michael Majerus. Majerus established that 25% of all moths do actually rest on trunks and that bird predation is the major factor of Lepidoptera selection.
(7) Wells: The Galapagos finches did not inspire Darwin with the idea of evolution, and oscillating natural selection on their beaks produces no observable net change.
The Galapagos finches, discovered by Charles Darwin, are an example of adaptive radiation. Adaptive radiation is a process where an ancestral species enters a new environment with unoccupied niches and evolves adaptations to exploit these niches. Adaptation may lead to speciation where an original species radiates into several descendent species, each adapted for its respective niche. This progression is thought to have occurred in the Galapagos finches. Although today’s finches look different, they are morphologically very similar to each other, only varying in beak size, song, and behavior. Wells questions the long-term studies of Galapagos finches conducted by Grant/Grant which relate the finches’ beak size to precipitation and thus to abundance and hardness of food. Wells criticism focuses on the method of extrapolation. He argues that beak size oscillates with the amount of precipitation and that speciation isn’t proven by the observed changes. At this point, he seems to have accepted natural selection as a fact (which runs contrary to the point he makes in chapter six), and he merely argues against the possibility of speciation. He ignores that none of the involved scientists claimed that speciation can be observed directly at a time scale of only a few decades and that instead the mechanisms of food specialization and selection have been observed.
(8) Wells: Four-winged fruit flies must be artificially bred, and their extra wings lack muscles; these disabled mutants are not raw material for evolution.
This is probably the only chapter that deserves positive mentioning. Wells builds up the argument that random mutations do not usually lead to beneficial phenotypic enhancements. He illustrates this with the example of drosophila. The fruit fly can be mutated in the laboratory to grow an extra pair of wings, but these wings don’t have muscles and thus disable the fly. No biologist would oppose the general thrust of this argument. Most random mutations are indeed not beneficial to the organism, only very few are. According to standard theory, those lineages with (rare) beneficial alterations are selected. Unfortunately, after making this point, Wells wanders off into the realm of fantasy by suggesting that beneficial morphological mutations are impossible. Actually, there are a number of plants that exemplify beneficial morphological mutation, such as the monkeyflower. There are also the well-known examples of insect DDT resistance and bacterial penicillin resistance, which provide further evidence that mutations can benefit the organism. However, the chapter deserves positive mentioning for another reason: Wells brings up the topics of epigenetics and evo-devo, which receive far too little attention from non-experts. These are new fields that the interested reader may wish to investigate.
(9) Wells: Evidence from fossil horses does not justify the claim that evolution was undirected, which is based on materialistic philosophy rather than empirical science.
At this advanced point in the book, Wells seems to have miraculously accepted the basic tenets of homology and common ancestry. He illustrates evolutional branches leading from Hyracotherium to the modern Equus. This is somewhat confusing, since Wells seemed to have denied the same concepts earlier in the book. He argues that horse fossils suggest directed evolution. Directed evolution? By orthogenesis? The argument flow becomes puzzling. First, Wells first describes how the old paradigm of linear horse evolution has been refuted by contemporary science. Subsequently he tells the reader how this refutation might be flawed. After all, he can draw a straight line from the Eocene horse to the modern horse. Naturally, the reader can also draw straight lines from the Eohippus to all the extinct horse lineages. And the point is?
(10) Wells: Theories about human origin are subjective and controversial, and they rest on little evidence; all drawings of ancestors are hypothetical.
The theory about human origin is about as controversial as the sphericity of Earth. In other words, the existence of a small number of flat-earth advocates does not call for labeling models of the globe hypothetical. Likewise, the existence of religious minority groups does not call for labeling the primate ancestry of modern humans hypothetical. Wells criticizes what in his view is the ultimate icon, the famous illustrations of a band led by a modern human and trailed by a quadrupedal ape with intermediate apemen in between them. These illustrations are indeed inaccurate, because –as in the case of the horse– they suggest a linear progression from one form to another, whereas in reality things are an order of magnitude more complex. Wells says: “Artists’ drawings of ape-like humans are used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident, but fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like.” I can’t figure out what relevance the first clause has to the second, yet the second clause is not quite correct. There is general agreement that australopithecine, homo habilis, and homo erectus are intermediate forms between apes and modern humans and there is general agreement about Linnaean taxonomy which puts humans into the order of primates and assigns to us the pongidae family where we also find orang-utans, bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
Summary
Although Jonathan Wells is not a creationist, his method of argument resembles the creationist approach. The principle strategy is to raise a smoke screen around the theory of evolution by citing a multitude of perplexing facts and details, each of them designed to create doubt about a certain aspect of evolution. The emerging picture is hardly coherent, yet it manages to confound readers with lacking scientific background and possibly creates distrust towards evolution theory. Wells repeatedly labels Darwinism as unscientific, but he fails to come up with an alternative theory. Although he is an intelligent design proponent, he neither mentions intelligent design in his book nor does he give us any clue on how directed evolution might work. Upon looking up the author’s biography on the Internet, it turns out that Mr. Wells holds another Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale where he wrote a dissertation on “Argument to design” and that he is a follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. From this it may be concluded that Wells’ attack on Darwinism is primarily motivated by religion and not by scientific doubts, as he claims. It therefore seems wise that the warning not to base scientific views on philosophical views –which Wells pronounces several times in the book– should be first applied to himself.
Related Web Pages
Icons of Evolution Website (http://www.iconsofevolution.com)
"Icons of Evolution" at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895262762?v=glance)
The Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org)
Alan D. Gishlick’s Rebuttal, National Center for Science Education (http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/)
Nic Tamzek’s Rebuttal (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html)
29 Evidences for Macroevolution (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)
Jonathan Wells, 2000
Regnery Publishing
By Thomas Knierim
Icons of Evolution is a book by Jonathan Wells that attempts an attack on the mainstream evolution paradigm. Wells identifies ten teaching examples commonly found in biology textbooks dealing with evolution. He calls these “icons of evolution” and discusses each of them individually. The author’s objective is to discredit Darwinism by raising doubts about the evidence. Wells holds that Darwinism is an unscientific myth that gets into the way of true science and the search for truth. He pronounces the relatively serious charge that “students and the public are being systematically misinformed about the evidence for evolution.” In addition, he accuses well-known biologists and institutions of distorting scientific facts in favor of the Darwinist theory. As a countermeasure, Wells suggests to attach warning labels to biology textbooks that warn students about the supposedly hypothetical nature of the findings that confirm evolution theory.
The technical level of this book is notably above that of run-off-the-mill creationist attacks. Jonathan Wells holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology and he is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture, an organization that supports the idea of intelligent design. It is somewhat peculiar that Wells does not mention the words “God” or “intelligent design” a single time in his book. Although he wants his readers to disbelieve the standard scientific view of evolution, he offers no alternative explanation on his own for the observed phenomena. Instead, the material presented amounts to a scientific conspiracy theory. At the end of the book, Wells labels mainstream biologists as “dogmatic Darwinists that misrepresent the truth to keep themselves in power.” It is obvious from the chosen examples and arguments that the author’s target audience are laymen with limited knowledge of biology. In the following section I introduce the ten “icons”, each representing a chapter in the book, by the warning label text suggested by Wells:
(1) Wells: The Miller-Urey experiment probably did not simulate the Earth’s early atmosphere; it does not demonstrate how life’s building blocks originated.
The Miller-Urey experiment makes certain assumptions about the composition of the Earth atmosphere around 4.6 to 3.8 mya. Contrary to what Wells says, these assumptions have a high probability, since the Miller-Urey experiment can be varied to work with a number of different compositions, although all of them require the absence of large amounts of oxygen. There is reason to believe there wasn’t much oxygen in the early Earth’s atmosphere. Uraninite and incompletely oxidized iron deposits in the oldest rock formations indicate that the early atmosphere was anoxic or weakly reducing. In addition to Miller-Urey style synthesis, there are other viable mechanisms of amino acid production, such as submarine vents, chemicals dissolved in water or minerals in porous rocks or clays. Wells also “forgets” to mention the extraterrestrial amino acids we found in meteorites (the Murchison meteorite for example), which indicate that similar synthesis processes took place elsewhere in the solar system.
(2) Wells: Darwin’s tree of life does not fit the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion and molecular evidence does not support a simple branching tree-pattern.
Wells makes the somewhat outlandish proposition that the fossil record contradicts phylogenetic trees. He thus attempts to raise doubt over common ancestry and Darwin’s progenitor hypothesis. Fact is that Darwin –although having proposed common ancestry– never drew phylogenetic trees. It was Haeckel who did. A phylogenetic tree shows genealogical relationships of taxa. There are occasional disparities between molecular and morphological phylogenies, and phylogenic methodologies themselves are not unproblematic. However, this does neither disprove common ancestry nor speciation. On the contrary, the majority of phylogenetic trees fit perfectly with the fossil record. To say that the Cambrian explosion puts the tree of live topsy-turvy can only be interpreted as a bluff attempt, because ancestral lines can be followed well up into the Precambrian period (i.e. 10 million years and more).
(3) Wells: If homology is defined as similarity due to common ancestry, it cannot be used as evidence for common ancestry; whatever its cause may be it is not similar genes.
Wells makes the case that biology books employ circular reasoning by explaining homology (structural similarities such as the limbs of vertebrates) in terms of common ancestry, which they were supposed to prove in the first place. Wells maybe a biology Ph.D., but he is certainly not a logician. If there were a fallacy to be observed, it would not be that of circular reasoning, but “affirming the consequent” (invalid reversal of modus ponens). This is, however, not the case. Homology is defined as structural similarity. When one looks at the bone structure of forelimbs of a human and compares them with, for example, a bat wing, a porpoise flipper, and a horse forelimb, they all look strikingly similar despite the fact that they serve different functions. One can’t help to notice that this points to common ancestry. So, the proper argument structure is (p1) homologous bone structure -> (c1) common ancestry.
(4) Wells: The pictures of Haeckel’s embryos make vertebrate embryos look more similar than they really are; it is not true that vertebrate embryos are most similar in their earliest stages.
Okay, Haeckel’s embryo drawings are not the most accurate. Since these drawings are 19th century woodcarvings this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. I haven’t seen any of Haeckel’s drawings in textbooks that I own; in fact, the first time I came across them was in Wells’ book. Wells is certainly right in saying that Haeckel’s recapitulationism is flawed. The view that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, i.e. that the embryo passes through a series of developmental stages that correspond to evolutionary stages, has been dismissed as “not fitting the evidence” at the beginning of the 20th century. However, this doesn’t mean –as Wells wants to make us believe– that comparative embryology offers no support for evolution theory at all. It certainly does. The developmental patterns of closely related organisms are similar, and they have more developmental features in common than distantly related organisms. This is a homology that supports the same argument as in (3) and it can be used to construct or reinforce phylogenetic trees.
(5) Wells: Archaeopteryx is probably not the ancestor of modern birds, and its own ancestors remain highly controversial; other missing links are now being sought.
This chapter exemplifies the method of Wells’ argument building. Whether archaeopteryx is ancestral to modern birds is actually irrelevant. What is important is that this fossil represents an intermediate between two vertebrate classes, namely birds and reptiles. It supports the theory that birds descended from dinosaurs. Wells conveniently forgets to mention other fossils of feathered and/or avian-like dinosaurs, though archaeopteryx is undeniably the clearest transitional example. Wells suggests that there are “missing links” to modern birds, thereby insinuating that the class of birds must be derived from a single (missing) ancestor, which is irrelevant and possibly wrong. He makes up for it by throwing in a humorous anecdote how scientists “discovered” bird DNA in a fossil that was surprisingly similar to that of the modern turkey, where it turned out that someone handling the fossil had a turkey sandwich that day.
(6) Wells: Peppered moths do not rest on tree trunks in the wild, and photos showing them on tree trunks have been staged; Kettlewell’s experiments are now being questioned.
This may be the most poorly conceived chapter of the book. Wells attempts to question the observation that moths in Southern England get selected for their wing color. Peppered moths (Lepidoptera) come in two colors, black (melanic) and white (normal). Obviously, the white moths are more visible on black tree stems while the black ones are more conspicuous on white stems. Therefore, their color relates to the rate at which they are spotted and eaten by birds. Now, during the middle of the 20th century, parts of Southern England were heavily polluted and trees became blacker. Consequently, populations of melanic moths rose while those of white moths decreased during that period. This phenomenon is known as “industrial melanism”; it is a textbook example of natural selection. Today, pollution in Southern England has declined on account of environmental laws and bright-colored moths are again dominant. Wells tries to poke holes into Kettlewell’s moth studies by noting that moths don’t rest on tree stems. He says that Kettlewell’s studies are inaccurate and he complains about staged textbook photos of moths resting on tree stems. Contrary to what Wells says, Kettlewell’s observations are essentially correct. They have been verified almost fifty years later by Michael Majerus. Majerus established that 25% of all moths do actually rest on trunks and that bird predation is the major factor of Lepidoptera selection.
(7) Wells: The Galapagos finches did not inspire Darwin with the idea of evolution, and oscillating natural selection on their beaks produces no observable net change.
The Galapagos finches, discovered by Charles Darwin, are an example of adaptive radiation. Adaptive radiation is a process where an ancestral species enters a new environment with unoccupied niches and evolves adaptations to exploit these niches. Adaptation may lead to speciation where an original species radiates into several descendent species, each adapted for its respective niche. This progression is thought to have occurred in the Galapagos finches. Although today’s finches look different, they are morphologically very similar to each other, only varying in beak size, song, and behavior. Wells questions the long-term studies of Galapagos finches conducted by Grant/Grant which relate the finches’ beak size to precipitation and thus to abundance and hardness of food. Wells criticism focuses on the method of extrapolation. He argues that beak size oscillates with the amount of precipitation and that speciation isn’t proven by the observed changes. At this point, he seems to have accepted natural selection as a fact (which runs contrary to the point he makes in chapter six), and he merely argues against the possibility of speciation. He ignores that none of the involved scientists claimed that speciation can be observed directly at a time scale of only a few decades and that instead the mechanisms of food specialization and selection have been observed.
(8) Wells: Four-winged fruit flies must be artificially bred, and their extra wings lack muscles; these disabled mutants are not raw material for evolution.
This is probably the only chapter that deserves positive mentioning. Wells builds up the argument that random mutations do not usually lead to beneficial phenotypic enhancements. He illustrates this with the example of drosophila. The fruit fly can be mutated in the laboratory to grow an extra pair of wings, but these wings don’t have muscles and thus disable the fly. No biologist would oppose the general thrust of this argument. Most random mutations are indeed not beneficial to the organism, only very few are. According to standard theory, those lineages with (rare) beneficial alterations are selected. Unfortunately, after making this point, Wells wanders off into the realm of fantasy by suggesting that beneficial morphological mutations are impossible. Actually, there are a number of plants that exemplify beneficial morphological mutation, such as the monkeyflower. There are also the well-known examples of insect DDT resistance and bacterial penicillin resistance, which provide further evidence that mutations can benefit the organism. However, the chapter deserves positive mentioning for another reason: Wells brings up the topics of epigenetics and evo-devo, which receive far too little attention from non-experts. These are new fields that the interested reader may wish to investigate.
(9) Wells: Evidence from fossil horses does not justify the claim that evolution was undirected, which is based on materialistic philosophy rather than empirical science.
At this advanced point in the book, Wells seems to have miraculously accepted the basic tenets of homology and common ancestry. He illustrates evolutional branches leading from Hyracotherium to the modern Equus. This is somewhat confusing, since Wells seemed to have denied the same concepts earlier in the book. He argues that horse fossils suggest directed evolution. Directed evolution? By orthogenesis? The argument flow becomes puzzling. First, Wells first describes how the old paradigm of linear horse evolution has been refuted by contemporary science. Subsequently he tells the reader how this refutation might be flawed. After all, he can draw a straight line from the Eocene horse to the modern horse. Naturally, the reader can also draw straight lines from the Eohippus to all the extinct horse lineages. And the point is?
(10) Wells: Theories about human origin are subjective and controversial, and they rest on little evidence; all drawings of ancestors are hypothetical.
The theory about human origin is about as controversial as the sphericity of Earth. In other words, the existence of a small number of flat-earth advocates does not call for labeling models of the globe hypothetical. Likewise, the existence of religious minority groups does not call for labeling the primate ancestry of modern humans hypothetical. Wells criticizes what in his view is the ultimate icon, the famous illustrations of a band led by a modern human and trailed by a quadrupedal ape with intermediate apemen in between them. These illustrations are indeed inaccurate, because –as in the case of the horse– they suggest a linear progression from one form to another, whereas in reality things are an order of magnitude more complex. Wells says: “Artists’ drawings of ape-like humans are used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident, but fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like.” I can’t figure out what relevance the first clause has to the second, yet the second clause is not quite correct. There is general agreement that australopithecine, homo habilis, and homo erectus are intermediate forms between apes and modern humans and there is general agreement about Linnaean taxonomy which puts humans into the order of primates and assigns to us the pongidae family where we also find orang-utans, bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
Summary
Although Jonathan Wells is not a creationist, his method of argument resembles the creationist approach. The principle strategy is to raise a smoke screen around the theory of evolution by citing a multitude of perplexing facts and details, each of them designed to create doubt about a certain aspect of evolution. The emerging picture is hardly coherent, yet it manages to confound readers with lacking scientific background and possibly creates distrust towards evolution theory. Wells repeatedly labels Darwinism as unscientific, but he fails to come up with an alternative theory. Although he is an intelligent design proponent, he neither mentions intelligent design in his book nor does he give us any clue on how directed evolution might work. Upon looking up the author’s biography on the Internet, it turns out that Mr. Wells holds another Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale where he wrote a dissertation on “Argument to design” and that he is a follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. From this it may be concluded that Wells’ attack on Darwinism is primarily motivated by religion and not by scientific doubts, as he claims. It therefore seems wise that the warning not to base scientific views on philosophical views –which Wells pronounces several times in the book– should be first applied to himself.
Related Web Pages
Icons of Evolution Website (http://www.iconsofevolution.com)
"Icons of Evolution" at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895262762?v=glance)
The Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org)
Alan D. Gishlick’s Rebuttal, National Center for Science Education (http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/)
Nic Tamzek’s Rebuttal (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html)
29 Evidences for Macroevolution (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)