The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [15]
An inveterate iconoclast, Wells doesn’t shy away from controversy. After a two-year stint in the Army, he became an antiwar activist at Berkeley and ended up doing jail time for refusing to go to Vietnam as a reservist. While later living a Thoreau-like existence in a remote California cabin, he became enthralled by the grandeur of creation and gained new confidence that God was behind it. His spiritual interest rejuvenated, Wells explored numerous religious alternatives, visiting gurus, preachers, and swamis. 7
I hadn’t come to Seattle, however, to seek spiritual wisdom from Wells. Instead, I sought him out because of his scientific expertise—and because he authored a book whose title intrigued me the moment I first saw it.
Icons of Evolution, which was published in 2000, takes a clear-headed, scientific look at the very same visual images that had convinced me of the truth of Darwinian evolution. The Miller experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, Haeckel’s embryos, the archaeopteryx missing link—they were all there, along with several other symbols of evolution. The book’s subtitle especially piqued my curiosity: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution Is Wrong. 8
Here was my chance to put these images—and the broader question of Darwinism’s overall reliability—to the test. I eased into a comfortable chair that squarely faced the bearded and bespectacled Wells, who was sitting behind a wooden desk. He was casually dressed in a striped, short-sleeve shirt. While soft-spoken and mild-mannered as we chatted informally before our interview, he would quickly become animated as we began delving into his hot-button topic of evolutionary theory.
I flipped through my yellow legal pad to find a fresh page and took a pen in hand. More than thirty-five years after these icons of evolution led me on a journey into naturalism and atheism, I was anxious to get the real story. 9
INVESTIGATING THE ICONS
Starting at the beginning, I briefly recounted for Wells how the four images of evolution had influenced my slide into atheism. In a subtle expression of empathy, he would nod almost imperceptibly as I talked, as if to reassure me that he understood what I had gone through. At the conclusion of my story, I gestured toward a copy of his book that was on the desk.
“You included all four of those symbols in your book, along with several others,” I said, “and you called them ‘icons of evolution.’ Why did you use that term?”
Wells leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “Because if you ask almost any scientist to describe the evidence for Darwinism, time after time they give these same examples,” he said. “They’re in our textbooks. They’re what we teach our students. For many scientists, they are the evidence for evolution.”
“What are the other icons?”
“In addition to the four that influenced you, there is the similarity of bone structures in a bat’s wing, a porpoise’s flipper, a horse’s leg, and a human hand. This is touted as evidence of their origin in a common ancestor. Then there are the pictures in textbooks of peppered moths on tree trunks, showing how camouflage and predatory birds result in natural selection. Of course, there are Darwin’s finches—the Galapagos Island birds that are also used to support natural selection. Probably the most famous icon, though, is the drawing we see parodied in so many cartoons—the march of ape-like creatures as they slowly evolve into human beings, which suggests that we’re merely animals that evolved by purposeless natural causes.”
I paused for a moment while I took some notes. “Before we go any further,” I said, “let’s get our definitions straight. When some people say ‘evolution,’ they mean merely that there has been change over time. But that’s not an accurate description,