 Jonathan, it's always great to have you on the program. Great to be here. If you want to learn more about him, I'll just tell you right now, www.iconsofevolution.com. You'll see more about not only the new book, Zombie Science, but the book that sprang this book called Icons of Evolution, a classic on this topic. Let me just start out, Dr. Wells, what do you mean by zombie science? What does that mean? Well, when most people think of science, they think of what Linus Pauling called the search for truth, and science searches for truth by testing hypotheses against the evidence. If a hypothesis fits the evidence, we regard it tentatively as true that if it doesn't, we have to modify or discard it. But there's another kind of science that has become prominent in recent decades. The goal of science in the second sense is to seek materialistic explanations for everything. This is materialistic science as opposed to empirical science. The problem is sometimes the materialistic explanations don't fit the evidence, and they're kept anyway. And when they're kept anyway, in spite of the evidence, I call that zombie science because it's empirically dead, but it keeps coming anyway. And you point out in the new book, Zombie Science, that some of these icons continue to be put into biology textbooks, despite the fact that they've been exposed as frauds for decades. Can you just give us an example of one of those, or a few of them, if you'd like? Sure. Well, the first one would be the Miller-Urie experiment of 1953, which supposedly showed in the laboratory how an electric spark in an atmosphere like that on the early Earth could form amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. And this experiment was regarded as proof that scientists were on the verge of discovering the origin of life. Well, the experiment was discredited in the 1980s when scientists realized that the early Earth's atmosphere was nothing like the mixture used by Miller and Urie. When you use an accurate mixture, you do not get amino acids. And yet the experiment continues to be put forward as valid and as evident that scientists are solving the origin of life. It's in most modern textbooks. And you have some of that here in the book, Zombie Science, if you want the details on that. And I remember you quoting somebody who back in 1999 said that the Urie-Miller experiment is dead as a supposed possible explanation for the origin of life, and yet they're still using it? Yes, they are. Most modern introductory biology textbooks feature the Miller-Urie experiment as evidence that we are discovering the origin of life. It just keeps coming. How about the Peppered Moth experiment or the Peppered Moth evidence? Can you describe what that is about and why that has now been debunked and yet it's still being used in biology textbooks? Sure. Charles Darwin, although he based his theory on natural selection, he admitted he had no evidence for natural selection. The first evidence to appear really was about a century later, and it came from studies of Peppered Moths in England. Peppered Moths come in two, mainly in two varieties, a dark and a white. And the white variety predotvated until the Industrial Revolution darkened tree trunks around industrial centers, and around in those areas the dark moths became more prominent. And the explanation was that the white moths were more visible on the darkened tree trunks and so birds ate them and the dark moths survived, and this was the first evidence of natural selection. The problem is that, well there were a lot of problems with the story, but the most fundamental one was that in subsequent years, scientists found that Peppered Moths don't normally rest on tree trunks in the wild. So the story was deeply flawed, and after 2000, when I wrote about it in Icons of Evolution, the story was largely dropped from many textbooks, but it's come back. It's still with us in some books and still used the same way. Now it's a complete fabrication. I think you had mentioned in the book that these moths were actually glued, they were dead moths glued to the tree trunks to show something that would supposedly support macroevolution, but in the end it didn't. Yet even if it were true that they did rest on tree trunks and the proportion changed between one colored moth and another colored moth, how does that in any way tell us that we're getting a new species, Dr. Wells? Well it does not, and that's an excellent point you raise. The distinction is between macroevolution and microevolution, a distinction that was first made by evolutionary biologists about 100 years ago. Microevolution refers to minor changes within existing species, and nobody that I know doubts that. We see it around us all the time. Macroevolution is the origin of new species, organs, and body plants, and that has never been observed. The peppered moth story, though if it were good it would be an example of microevolution, it does not get us to macroevolution. Isn't that the same problem with Darwin's finches, Dr. Wells, in the sense that all that changed was the proportion of long beak finches to short beak finches, and it changed with the weather. It didn't explain the origin of finches to begin with, did it? No, that's another story. That actually provides better evidence for natural selection than the moths. But again, it's just microevolution. It wasn't the length of the beaks, but the depth from the bottom. And what happened was, in 1977, a severe drought killed 85% of the finches on one particular island, and the remaining 15% happened to be the ones with larger beaks. Well, their offspring had larger beaks, and so this was pointed to as an example of natural selection, and indeed it was. But when the rains came back, the finch beaks went back to normal, so it was an awful waiting selection, not anything added in the direction of a new species. What is natural selection, and what does the lay person need to know about it? Well, according to natural selection, changes in the environment lead to changes in the composition of a population, and that happened in the case of the finches. It happened probably in the case of the peppered moths, too, although the classic story about birds eating them may not be true. But in both these cases, we're dealing only with microevolution, that is, changes within existing species. That's not what Darwin means. He did not write a book titled, How Species Change Over Time. He wrote a book called, The Argin of Species, and none of these phenomena explain the origin of species. What would you say to somebody who says this, and I get this on college campuses quite a bit, they'll just say, well, Dr. Wells, microevolution, if you just extrapolate it out, becomes macroevolution. Why do you think that's not a plausible explanation, or why do you think that that process of adding up a bunch of microevolutionary changes can bring you a macroevolutionary change? Well, that's really a restatement of Darwin's theory. That was the guts of his theory. The problem is, the evidence does not bear it out. We have never seen that happen. When we observe microevolution, the species always stay the same, even though they vary. So macroevolution, the origin of new species by natural selection, that is, and organs and body plans has never been observed. One of the clearest, I think, visual representations of this was the DVD that you and others put out from the Discovery Institute about 10 years ago called Darwin's Dilemma. And I want to recommend that to people as well. That is a very good 70 or so minute documentary on the problems with Neo-Darwinian theory. Today, we're talking to Dr. Jonathan Wells. The new book is called Zombie Science, More Icons of Evolution. What are some other icons that you covered in the first book in 2000, Dr. Wells, that are still showing up in textbooks today, even though they've been debunked? Well, another famous icon is a set of drawings made by Darwin's German disciple, Ernst Heckel. He drew pictures of vertebrate embryos, that is, embryos of animals with backbones, including us, that supposedly showed that we all look like tiny fish as embryos. But he exaggerated the similarities in those early embryos. His colleagues, his contemporaries, pointed it out in the fact called it fraudulent. But the worst problem with Heckel's drawings is he actually omits the earlier stages in embryo development. During the earlier stages, we looked very, very different from a frog embryo or a fish embryo or a turtle embryo. And so the story was basically an idea imposed on the evidence. And Darwin relied very heavily on it in his theory. Oh, that's an interesting way of putting it. It's an idea imposed on the evidence rather than the evidence imposing on or giving you the idea. So they're just trying to discover what they already think is true. Is that a better, another way of putting it, if you would? That is true. And in fact, what they believe is true already is that all explanations or everything in nature can be explained materialistically. So it's actually applied materialistic philosophy, masquerading as empirical science. Now, Dr. Wells, what do you say to the atheists then that they say, okay, yeah, in fact, Richard Darwin will admit he's a materialist and he admitted to Philip Johnson several years ago. He said, look, I'm a materialist, but at least I have a better explanation than you have, Dr. Johnson. And then he would go on to say, well, it's just intellectually lazy to open yourself up to intelligent causes when maybe we'll find a perfectly natural explanation at some point in the future. What do you say to that? Well, a promise of finding an explanation in the future is not good enough for empirical science. The fact is that materialistic scientists stick to their materialism in spite of the evidence and they're very candid about that sometimes. To open yourself to the idea of intelligent design is not lazy at all. In fact, those who've done that can attest to that fact. It's actually quite difficult, especially in the face of materialistic dogmatism. Intelligent design is actually a very simple idea. It simply says that we can discover from evidence in nature that some features of the world are better explained by a design than by unguided natural causes. And it's not saying we have that, but it's saying we could find them in principle. But materialists object to the very idea that we could find them in principle because that would recede materialism. And in fact, I know you've mentioned this before, Stephen Myers mentioned it. I've mentioned it in our book. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist in stealing from God. We're not just arguing from what we don't know. That would be a God of the gaps argument. We're arguing from what we do know. We're arguing that there are features of the natural world that we know in all our other experience can only be explained by a mind, including, say, the genetic code. And yet it's not a God of the gaps argument, therefore. It is actually an argument from what we do know. And the example I give our listeners here, Dr. Wells, is if you see the alphabet cereal knocked over on your kitchen table and you see the alphabet cereal spells take out the garbage mom, you don't assume an earthquake shook the house or the cat knocked the box over. You know that that's positive evidence for an intelligent being. In other words, you don't just lack a natural explanation. That's positive evidence for an intelligent being. And that's what you're saying at the Discovery Institute. That's what you're saying in your new book, Zombie Science, which I highly encourage our listeners to get by, again, Jonathan Wells. That's what Stephen Myers saying. And it just makes common sense to say that if something appears designed, it might actually be designed, but the atheists are actually just ruling that out in advance. There's another section in the new book, Zombie Science, that traffics in this idea of DNA. Explain what that chapter is about. Well, before I mentioned my chapter, I'll mention Stephen Myers book, Signature in the Cell, in which he developed very well this argument that the information in DNA points to design because in our universal human experience, such complex specified information only comes from a mind, from intelligence. He makes a very good case for that. In my chapter on DNA in Zombie Science, I'm actually pointing out that that's just a small part of the story. There's much more to a living cell than the information in its DNA. And the evidence for that has been accumulating for decades. And it's quite clear now that cells are designed, but there's much more to it than the design in DNA. In fact, one of the points, and I'm looking in your book right here, right now about it, you have it in here on page 86 about epigenetics. That was one of the points I took away from Stephen's book, Darwin's Doubt, that there's something in the cell called epigenetic information, which can't be modified by DNA. And Stephen's point was basically that you could mutate DNA from now till doomsday. You'll never get a new body type because DNA alone is not enough to give you a new body type. Can you unpack that a little bit for us from the biological side of things, Dr. Wells? Sure. Well, if you imagine the cell, the DNA is in the nucleus. The DNA is transcribed in the RNA. The RNA is translated into protein. But the RNAs and proteins that originate in the nucleus have to go somewhere in the cell to do their job. And where they go isn't just haphazard. They have to go to very specific places. It's kind of like a postal system with a zip code. So an RNA might have a zip code attached to it, a molecular zip code. But unless that zip code is already specified in advance, it's absolutely meaningless. You can't just put a letter in a mailbox with a number attached to it and expect it to go where you want it to unless that number corresponds to a geographic area that has already been identified. It's the same with the cell. The spatial coordinates of the cell have been specified before the DNA even starts to do its work. And when the cell multiplies or reproduces, that spatial information has to be passed on as well. Some of it we know is in the membrane, for example. And that spatial information is there before the DNA. So there's a lot more going on than DNA. Now you mentioned that, I think it was in your video, you mentioned that last year, well it was actually November of 2016 that the Royal Society, the Scientific Society out in the UK convened a conference to try and come up with a new theory, naturalistic theory of evolution because they knew the neo-Darwinian viewpoint of mutating DNA endlessly won't get you a new body plan. Was it partially because of this recently or relatively recent discovery of epigenetic information that people are finally going, you know what? Our neo-Darwinian theory just won't work, we gotta come up with another one. Yes, actually recent discoveries in epigenetics did play a large part in that. It was a very interesting meeting. I was not there, but several of my colleagues were. They started off by saying neo-Darwinian theory, that is the idea that natural selection acting on mutations in DNA can produce everything we see. That idea is no longer attendable, it doesn't fit the evidence. So during the meeting they tried to find an alternative, a naturalistic alternative and they did not succeed, they didn't find one. But what they were all very clear about is that we cannot allow intelligent design. Anything with intelligent design, they were quite clear on that point. We were talking about the Royal Society meeting in the UK, November of 2016, and you said they were trying to come up with a new theory of macro evolution and naturalistic theory. They were not open at all to intelligent design theory. I have my hunches as to why that is. Why do you think they're not open to intelligent design at all, Dr. Wells? Well, it's always difficult to ascertain someone's motives and they vary, people are different, but I have had many people on that side of the fence tell me in private anecdotally that they do not want to be accountable to a higher power and that's why they exclude the idea of design and God. That's probably true more often than we think and you actually say you have people admitting that. I've had people admit that to me privately as well that it's not really about the truth. They're not on a truth quest or on a happiness quest and they don't want there to be a God because basically they wanna be God of their own lives. Now, obviously we can't say this is true of everybody but why would there be so much animosity to an idea that there might be an intelligent designer out there? I don't see why there would be so much animosity unless there was something else involved and it seems to be accountability might be part of it. I agree. I always ask them, why do you say no? If it were true, you wouldn't believe it and ultimately they admit it's a moral issue. It's an accountability issue, it's not an intellectual issue. Let's go back to some of the evidence you have in this fabulous book, Zombie Science. Dr. Wells, you also talk about in this book, what is the situation with so-called junk DNA? Well, when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, that point biologists subscribed to something called the central dogma, which is DNA makes RNA, makes protein, makes us. In other words, DNA runs embryo development and we are our DNA so to speak, a very materialistic idea. The problem was that soon after that they discovered that 98% of our DNA does not code for protein and so many of them Crick concluded, concluded that the non-protein coding DNA was junk left over from evolution. Accidents happened along the way and it sort of just got carried along as a hitchhiker or a parasite and so this 98% of our DNA for many years was labeled junk. Well, some intelligence design people said it's unlikely that that much of our DNA would be junk and starting in the 1970s and 80s and more in the 90s functions for the so-called junk were discovered and finally by the 2000s it was quite clear that much of this 98% does in fact serve functions. So the idea of junk DNA which some people still push is in fact a myth. Dr. Wells, you have written that the science stopper is not ID or being open to intelligent design. The science stopper in many cases is a belief in Darwinian evolution and you wrote about that with regard to junk DNA. How did a belief in junk DNA cause people to stop doing science? Well, just imagine yourself being a scientist and being convinced that some feature is just junk. You would not be at all motivated to try to find out what its function is if you're already convinced that it's junk. So Darwinism convinced many people that non-protein coding DNA was junk and so research into its functions was delayed for many, many years. Now we know that much of it does serve function but it was only researchers who basically ignored the Darwinian mindset. Not that they were ID people but they just did good science and they started discovering that this non-protein coding DNA is extremely important to us and very functional. Weren't you doing some research into and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was you that was doing this or colleagues of yours that were doing this that you had to disguise yourself to go into some universities in order to do research, to figure out ways to stop cancer because the non-protein regions of DNA, the regions that evolutionists thought were just junk, those non-protein regions may turn on and off functions in the cell and if you could turn off a cancer cell you might be able to stop cancer. Was that you doing that research or somebody else? Well, that was me. It actually was not about junk DNA. It was about a feature in the cell that was very poorly understood and I wanted to do some experiments on it. And I went to visit a lab of a fellow who was willing to do the experiments but he didn't have tenure yet. Oh. And so my wife, Buster Hart, bleached my hair and my brows and I shaved my beard and I went into scot. Oh no. So he wouldn't be, at that point I was well enough known that people were spotting me, people I didn't know were spotting me on the ferry on college campuses for having seen me in videos. So I didn't want anyone to see me with him because he could possibly lose his job. This is unbelievable. This is the open, tolerant, inclusive, diverse group that if they saw you in the lab, they would toss you out and your friend wouldn't get tenure because he's associated with somebody who thinks that intelligent design is a possibility. This is amazing. I can't believe this, but that's the current state of so-called inclusion, tolerance, and diversity. You're excluded. Even when you're doing science and biology, can you believe this, friends? That's where we are right now. Now, I wanna clear up something for our audience that I think is misunderstood so often, Dr. Wells. You hear Athe is talking about, and Darwin is talking about the idea that 90 plus percent of our DNA is just like, say, the Great Apes. And so doesn't this show that we're ancestrally related? But that's not quite right, is it? Yeah, that's another argument, a different argument. And it's true that our DNA and that of a chimpanzee are very similar in many respects. That is in the sequence of the subunits of our DNA. But we don't need that to see that chimps and humans are anatomically very similar to each other. The DNA really doesn't add to our knowledge at all. One problem with the DNA comparison is that since DNA only has four subunits, comparing any two molecules of DNA on average will give you 25% similarity. So humans are, say, maybe 30% similar to daffodils. But what does that tell us? Not much, really, unless you already have evolutionary dogma to overlay the evidence and give you the answer. Dr. Wells, let's also talk about the human eye because I hear all the time that the human eye is somehow not wired properly. A human engineer could do a better job than the so-called intelligent designer. What say you about that? Well, since the 1980s, Richard Dawkins and other Darwinists have been arguing that the human eye is an example of bad design and therefore points to evolution, unguided evolution, rather than design. The reason they say that is because in the human retina, the light-sensing cells point towards the back, away from the light. And they argue that that's crazy. No designer would do it that way. And therefore, it's due to evolution. Problem is, they haven't looked at the evidence, all of which was available before they started writing this. And the evidence shows that the light-sensing cells in a vertebrate eye are so sensitive that they have a very high metabolic rate. So they have to be nourished by an abundant supply of blood. And that supply of blood is behind the retina. So the cells point into the supply of blood to get their nourishment. If the retina were oriented the other way, with the blood between the light and the cells, we would be blind because blood is opaque. So the Darwinists actually have quite a goofy argument. And as I said, the evidence for the optimality of the human retina design was all there before Dawkins wrote his piece in the 1980s. They're just not interested in the facts, it seems, Dr. Wells. And I think the other point that we could make, of course, is that even if something weren't designed according to our standards, that doesn't mean it's not designed. Welcome back to Cross-Examined with Frank Turrick on the American Family Radio Network. I'm talking to my friend Dr. Jonathan Wells, his new book, The Science for Icons of Evolution. They just keep coming despite the fact that they've been debunked over and over again. And Jonathan, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about the biggest icon of evolution. Everybody thinks the Tree of Life really is the right way to look at biological history, but you say there is no Tree of Life. Please explain why you don't think it actually exists. Well, Darwin's theory was that all living things are modified descendants of one or a few common ancestors. And he portrayed this as a tree with a common ancestor as a trunk. And then branching off from that, all the species that followed, including the ones that are alive today. Now, that's a theoretical construct. Darwin actually knew that the fossil record was a problem for the tree, because the innumerable transitional forms are nowhere to be found. And in fact, certain phenomena like the Cambrian explosion directly contradict the tree. In the Cambrian explosion, the major forms of animals appeared abruptly in the geological record with no signs in the fossils that they come from a common ancestor. But yet it persists. They keep putting this Tree of Life in the textbook. Has any one of these prominent evolutionists that you interact with, that they ever admit that the Tree of Life is more an imposition on the data rather than they get the Tree of Life from the data? Actually, some do admit that. But the Tree of Life is still presented to the public as essentially a fact. Now, when the fossils didn't work, modern biologists have used comparisons of molecules like DNA or RNA or protein. And at first, that looked promising. But the more molecules they studied, the worse it got. One study would conflict with another, and another sometimes studies on the same molecule would conflict. And so that drove some biologists to conclude that the Tree of Life is not a fact and that the history of life cannot be portrayed as a tree. Now, the illustration that you gave in Darwin's dilemma, you said that if you had to use a biotanical illustration, it would be a lawn rather than a tree. Would you unpack that for us? Yes, rather than coming from a common trunk or ancestor, it appears that the groups, the major groups of living things originated separately, like grass and a lawn. The problem with the lawn image is that it doesn't fit the materialistic story, according to which there can be no breaks in the naturalistic progression from the ancestor to its descendants. And so they're not big fans of your lawn illustration. They want to cut that down. That's playing wildly. Now, there's another icon of evolution that we definitely need to talk about, and you talk about it in your new book, Zombie Science. I hear this all the time, that somehow, antibiotic resistance is evidence of evolution. You say no. Why isn't it? Well, in antibiotic resistance, we treat a disease with an antibiotic. But a few of the organisms are resistant to the antibiotic. They survive and multiply, and we end up with a population of antibiotic resistance bacteria. This happens. In fact, it's a serious medical problem. But it's an example of microevolution. Antibiotic resistance tuberculosis bacteria are still tuberculosis bacteria. There are no new species involved. So it's not evidence for macroevolution. I think that it may have been you that I learned this from. Is there a researcher by the name of Linsky? Is he at Michigan State or Penn State? I can't remember where, who has done some research on this for over 30 years now. Can you explain what he discovered in his research? Yes, Richard Linsky at Michigan State has been doing an interesting experiment. He's been growing E. coli bacteria in his lab for tens of thousands of generations and watching them evolve. Well, not too long ago, his bacteria, or one strain of his bacteria, developed the ability to use citrate, which is an organic molecule, as its carbon source. Well, before it could not do that, at least not in the presence of air. So it had the ability, but not the ability to do it in the presence of air. So he proclaimed this to be evidence of macroevolution. His claim was disputed by his critics, of course. In my view, he's still demonstrating microevolution, not macroevolution. It's not a new species. And he started with E. coli bacteria. And after 30 or so years, which would be equivalent to what, a million years of human evolution? I forget the figures, but it's quite a lot. Yes, because a generation in E. coli can be as short as 20 minutes, unlike the 20 years of human evolution. So he starts with E. coli bacteria. He ends with E. coli bacteria. And isn't he intelligently prodding the E. coli to do certain things? Is that right? Yes, of course. The experiment is carefully designed and managed. Another biologist, Scott Minnick at the University of Idaho recently published an article showing that Lensky's result is partly an artifact of his method. And then, in fact, if a different method is used, this ability to utilize site trait evolves very rapidly because it's already there. So if anything, the research of Richard Lensky seems to indicate that there isn't enough variation in a living thing to ever produce macroevolutionary changes. He starts with E. coli and he ends with E. coli. And yet, the persistence of the zombie science, which tries to say that you can add up microevolutionary changes into macroevolutionary changes, it's just not there. And that's what Dr. Jonathan Wells points out. We need to talk about what you have a chapter in here on antibiotic resistance and cancer. What does cancer have to do with evolution? Well, not much, honestly, but some biologists claim that a cancer is an example of a new organism because it grows independently of the body, somewhat at least, and therefore constitutes a case of macroevolution. They also argue that cancer cells develop new abilities. The second claim is very questionable because actually what the cancer cells are doing is using existing abilities abnormally. In any case, it's kind of a strange argument when you're setting out to explain the origin of life and all the species we have. And your best evidence is a degradative process that leads to death. It's kind of upside down. It's like saying, I have a theory for the development of modern civilization and my best evidence is the night of a living dead. Cancer ends life. It doesn't prolong it. So I'm trying to figure out how that is somehow an argument for evolution. But don't they try and say things like, outside of evolution, nothing makes sense in biology? How do you respond to that? That's nonsense. Actually, most biology is done without any attention to evolution at all. And biologists will admit this, at least in private. Evolutionary theory is important to evolutionary biology by definition. But outside of evolutionary biology it has turned out to be practically useless. In fact, I remember you writing, I think it was in the first book on icons called Icons of Evolution. You said something like this. I remember it because I put it in, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. You said most biologists, and correct me if I get something wrong, you said most biologists are honest, hardworking people who think that the really good evidence for macroevolution is in some other area of biology that they don't know about. And so everybody thinks, well, I don't see it in my blender area of expertise, but it must be in some other area that I don't know about. Am I quoting you correctly? Pretty much, yes, that's exactly what's going on. Biologists know that macroevolution does not work in their area, but because they hear all the time that it's been proven they assume it works in some other area. But when you look at each area individually, the evidence comes up short. Now, before we go, Dr. Welk, you're doing some work down in Brazil. Briefly tell us what that's about and how people can learn more. Sure. Now, in November, my wife and I traveled to Brazil as guests of the Brazilian Society for Intelligent Design. I gave seven lectures at five different institutions down there, universities, to a total of several thousand people. So there's an enthusiastic response to intelligent design in Brazil. Of course, there are opponents there, too. But what's interesting is that it's flourishing overseas, Brazil, Korea, several other countries I would mention, but I don't want the people there to be persecuted just yet. Dr. Welk, we're gonna have to leave.