Jonathan Wells

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

Archives

The Receding Myth of “Junk DNA”

Jonathan Wells
October 6, 2011
Since I published The Myth of Junk DNA in May, there has been no response from the pro-Darwin authors I criticized in it. On September 23, 2011, however, John Farrell reviewed it for the Huffington Post.

Zombie Genes?

Jonathan Wells
August 24, 2010
On August 19, Gina Kolata reported in The New York Times that geneticists “have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.” According to Kolata, the human genome “is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years–the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk,” though some of those genes “can rise from the dead like zombies.” Now a supposed “zombie gene” is implicated in a type of muscular dystrophy abbreviated FSHD–a hereditary disease that affects about 1 in every 20,000 people. Kolata cites a recent Science article that begins by reviewing work dating back to the 1990s that establishes a link between FSHD and a specific region on human chromosome …

The Fact-Free “Science” of Matheson, Hunt and Moran: Ridicule Instead of Reason, Authority Instead of Evidence

Jonathan Wells
June 8, 2010
I was not in Los Angeles on May 14, when Stephen Meyer debated Stephen Matheson and Arthur Hunt at Biola University. But I have followed some of the blog war that preceded and followed the debate–a blog war that now includes Richard Sternberg and Laurence Moran. Since Matheson, Hunt and Moran are all tenured professors at institutions of higher learning, one might have expected a discussion based on reason and conducted in a collegial spirit. And since the discussion is about science, one might have expected lots of references to evidence published in the scientific literature. But Matheson, Hunt and Moran have abandoned reason and resorted to ridicule; and instead of citing evidence they expect us to bow to their authority. Round One: Who’s WhoMeyer is a …

Has Craig Venter Produced Artificial Life?

Jonathan Wells
May 24, 2010
“Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived.” So proclaimed The Economist on May 20th, after a team of scientists headed by J. Craig Venter announced that it had replaced the natural DNA in a bacterial cell with DNA they had artificially synthesized. According to University of Pennsylvania philosopher and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, “Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life. In doing so they bring to an end a debate about the nature of life that has lasted thousands of years. Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, …

PBS: Pushing Bad Science

Jonathan Wells
December 28, 2009
As 2009 comes to an end, so does the delirium of “Darwin Year.” From “Darwin Day” on February 12 (Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday) to November 24 (the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species), Darwin’s disciples spared no expense (using mostly taxpayers’ money) in their exuberant celebrations, even though most of Darwin’s ideas were mistaken and his contributions to science were insignificant compared to those of hundreds of others–including (to name just a few) Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein in physics; Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier and Willard Gibbs in chemistry; and Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier and Gregor Mendel in biology. What Darwin promoted was not empirical science but …

How to Make Eighteen Equal Twelve

Jonathan Wells
December 7, 2009
Occidental College professor Donald Prothero, who along with Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg on November 30, complains that folks at the Discovery Institute are now attacking him with “everything they have.” Prothero writes on the NCSE’s blog Panda’s Thumb, “Normally, it is not worth dignifying their garbage with a response,” but in this case he wants people “to get the straight facts.”According to Prothero: When evo-devo came up in Monday’s debate, Meyer and Sternberg began arguing with each other about reconstructions of a 12-winged dragonfly that I had published in my book. They tried to get a laugh by claiming that such a bug has never been found. As usual, they completely missed the point of that …