"Nature"
12 April 2001 Vol 410 no. 6830

Creationism by stealth

JERRY A. COYNE

Jerry A. Coyne is in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, University
of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
 

Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About
Evolution is Wrong by Jonathan Wells
Regnery: 2000. 362 pp. $27.95

Opposition to evolution is found in many corners of the American religious
landscape, including the Unification Church. Church founder Sun Myung Moon
has frequently condemned darwinism for giving God no role in the history
of life. In 1976, Jonathan Wells, a student in Moon's seminary, answered
his leader's call. He writes, "Father's [Moon'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 PhD program in 1978, I welcomed the
opportunity to prepare myself for battle." The University of California
supplied Wells with his weapon, a PhD in biology and, with Icons of
Evolution, Wells has fired the latest salvo in the eternal religious
assault on Charles Darwin.

This personal history, taken from the Unification Church website
(http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/0-Toc.htm), is
conspicuously missing from the author's biography in Icons. The book,
aimed at the non-specialist, masquerades as a scientific critique of
classic examples of evolution, but is actually a polemic intelligently
designed to please Father Moon. Icons is a work of stealth creationism,
and strives to debunk darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical
creationists, including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete
summaries of research, and muddled arguments. But because Wells has
scientific credentials, studiously avoids mentioning religion or God (who
appears only under the alias "intelligent design"), and presents his book
as an objective critique (complete with 70 pages of references and
research notes), it is easy for the non-scientist to be taken in. Icons
has been embraced with glee by anti-evolutionists, who want it included in
the American school science curriculum.

Wells's book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks
illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented
in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction. The
second premise is not generally true, and even if it were, the conclusion
would not follow. To compound the absurdity, Wells concludes that a cabal
of evil scientists, "the Darwinian establishment", uses fraud and
distortion to buttress the crumbling edifice of evolution. Wells's final
chapter urges his readers to lobby the US government to eliminate research
funding for evolutionary biology.

To see his argument at work, let's look at development, which Wells has
referred to elsewhere as "the Achilles' heel of Darwinism". As Darwin
first realized, some aspects of vertebrate development - especially
transitory features - provide strong evidence for common ancestry and
evolution. Embryos of different vertebrates tend to resemble one another
in early stages, but diverge as development proceeds, with more closely
related species diverging less widely. This conclusion has been supported
by 150 years of research.

Wells tries to refute this mountain of work by noting that, in 1891, the
German biologist Ernst Haeckel published illustrations of vertebrate
embryos that exaggerated their similarity, and that some biology textbooks
still display these doctored drawings. This embroidery, however, was first
reported by the British zoologist Adam Sedgwick in 1894, and has
repeatedly been used to show the failings not of darwinism, but of Haeckel
(see, for example, Nature 410, 144; 2001).

Despite Wells's arguments, one does not need Haeckel's wishful pencil to
draw copious evidence for evolution from developmental biology. Human
embryos, for example, have pharyngeal pouches, a tail and six aortic
arches - all features found in embryonic fish. But our pouches become
glands and ducts instead of gill slits, our tail disappears, and our
aortic arches (which remain six in some fish) either disappear or
retransformed into carotid, systemic and pulmonary arteries. In our first
trimester we develop the lanugo, a coat of hair that is shed before birth.

Are these patterns mere whims of the Intelligent Designer, or evidence of
our common ancestry with fish and furry primates? Embryos of whales and
some snakes develop hindlimb buds that regress before birth; embryos of
baleen whales possess teeth that later disappear; and horse embryos have
three well-developed toes, with the outer two shrinking to leave the
single-digit hoof. Such examples abound, but you won't find them in Icons.

Wells also notes that the earliest vertebrate embryos (mere balls of
cells) are often less similar to one another than they are at subsequent
stages when they possess more complex features. According to Wells, this
counts as evidence against biological evolution, which supposedly predicts
that the similarities among groups will be strongest at the very first
stages of development. But darwinism makes no such prediction. Darwin
himself noted that embryos must adapt to the conditions of their
existence, and the earliest stages of vertebrate embryos show adaptation
to widely varying amounts of yolk in their eggs. Wells repeatedly fails to
grasp the evidential value of phenomena that can be understood only as the
result of a historical process, even if the results were not predictable.
Perhaps an observer in the early Cenozoic could not have predicted that a
lineage of ungulates would lose their hindlimbs as they became aquatic,
but the development of the hindlimb in embryonic whales can be understood
only as a result of descent with modification from a four-legged ancestor.

When discussing other 'icons', Wells uses the same tactic of selective
omission to distort a body of literature he pretends to review. Nowhere is
this more visible than in his chapter on human evolution. Faced with a
series of hominid fossils showing transitions from ape-like to modern
human traits over 4 million years, Wells can only mumble about the
Piltdown Man hoax, and imply that the vigorous scientific debate about the
course of human evolution proves that humans did not evolve.

It is telling that, although Wells repeatedly attacks evolution, he gives
no hint of his own ideas about the origin and development of life. There
is good reason for this. As one learns from his website sermon, Evolution
by Design, Wells believes that "the human species was planned before life
began, and that the history of life is the record of how this plan was
implemented". To Wells, the fossil record does not represent a continuum
of ancestry, but a succession of creations by the Intelligent Designer,
with each species carefully devised to nurture the next product of
creation up to the final goal, humans.

But this argument is blasphemous, for its logical consequence is that the
pinnacle of evolution is not Homo sapiens but our ectoparasite Pediculus
humanus, the body louse. It also turns the Great Designer into a Great
Deceiver, who, in the manner of Satan, put fossils in the rocks - and
tails on embryos - to mislead biologists of the future.

Finally, Wells's main theme about the collusion of evolutionary biologists
is simply wrong. Authors of some biology texts may occasionally be sloppy,
or slow to incorporate new research, but they are not duplicitous. And,
far from representing a conspiracy, it is invariably evolutionists
(including myself) who have noted problems with some classic icons of
evolution. Wells has it backwards. It is creationists like him who are
conspiring to purge evolution from American education. They hide their own
differences about issues such as the fossil record and the age of the
Earth, they pretend to be disinterested seekers after truth, they fail to
do their own scientific research, and, like Wells, they avoid at all costs
revealing their own theories about the history of life. Icons is exactly
as even-handed and intellectually honest as one would expect from someone
whose "prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying
Darwinism".