Icons of evolution science or jonathan wells

Jonathan Wells is no stranger to controversy After spending two years in the U.S Army from 1964 to 1966, he entered the University of California at Berkeley to become a science teacher When the Army called him back from reserve status in 1968, he chose to go to prison rather than continue to serve during the Vietnam War He subsequently earned a Ph.D in religious studies at Yale University, where he wrote a book about the nineteenthcentury Darwinian controversies In 1989 he returned to Berkeley to earn a second Ph.D., this time in molecular and cell biology He is now a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (www.discovery.org/crsc) in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, two children, and mother He still hopes to become a science teacher Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong JONATHAN WELLS ILLUSTRATED BY JODY E SJOGREN The iconography of persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being Every demagogue, every humorist, every advertising executive, has known and exploited the evocative power of a well-chosen picture But many of our pictures are incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature These are the most potent sources of conformity, since ideas passing as descriptions lead us to equate the tentative with the unambiguously factual -Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (New York: W W Norton, 1989, p 28) Preface Chapter Introduction Chapter The Miller-Urey Experiment Chapter Darwin's Tree of Life Chapter Homology in Vertebrate Limbs Chapter Haeckel's Embryos Chapter Archaeopteryx: The Missing Link Chapter Peppered Moths Chapter Darwin's Finches Chapter Four-Winged Fruit Flies Chapter 10 Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution Chapter 11 From Ape to Human: The Ultimate Icon Chapter 12 Science or Myth? Appendix I An Evaluation of Ten Recent Biology Textbooks Appendix II Suggested Warning Labels for Biology Textbooks Research Notes Index uring my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was being taught was substantially true As I was finishing my Ph.D in cell and developmental biology, however, I noticed that all of my textbooks dealing with evolutionary biology contained a blatant misrepresentation: Drawings of vertebrate embryos showing similarities that were supposed to be evidence for descent from a common ancestor But as an embryologist I knew the drawings were false Not only did they distort the embryos they purported to show, but they also omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look very different from each other My assessment of the embryo drawings was confirmed in 1997, when British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleagues published an article in the journal Anatomy and Embryology, comparing the textbook drawings with actual embryos Richardson was subsequently quoted in the leading American journal Science as saying: "It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology." Yet most people remain unaware of the truth, and even biology textbooks published after 1997 continue to carry the faked drawings Since then, I have discovered that many other textbook illustrations distort the evidence for evolution, too At first, I found this hard to believe How could so many textbooks contain so many misrepresentations for so long? Why hadn't they been noticed before? Then I discovered that other biologists have noticed most of them, and have even criticized them in print But their criticisms have been ignored The pattern is consistent, and suggests more than simple error At the very least, it suggests that Darwinism encourages distortions of the truth How many of these distortions are unconscious and how many are deliberate remains to be seen But the result is clear: Students and the public are being systematically misinformed about the evidence for evolution This book is about that evidence To document it, I quote from the peer-reviewed work of hundreds of scientists, most of whom believe in Darwinian evolution When I quote them, it is not because I want to make it sound as though they reject Darwin's theory; most of them not I quote them because they are experts on the evidence Wherever possible, I have avoided technical language For those who want more details, I include ... evidence for Darwin's theory that most of them have been called "icons" of evolution Yet all of them, in one way or another, misrepresent the truth Science or myth? Some of these icons of evolution... words, the RNA world-like the protein-first scenario in the Miller-Urey experiment-is a dead end Originof-life researchers have been unable to show how the molecular building blocks of life formed... destroy many organic molecules, chemists often must remove oxygen and use closed containers when they synthesize and store organic chemicals in the laboratory But before the origin of life, when