CBN.com - The theory of evolution is taught as fact to students throughout America’s public schools, but now it seems some of the so-called facts are merely fiction. Pat Robertson spoke with Dr. Jonathan Wells, author of the book Icons of Evolution, about the errors in our textbooks and the powerful influence of the evolutionary establishment.
Pat Robertson: You wonder when the so-called scientific community is going to wake up. They will never wake up as long as they refuse to acknowledge that there's a God in heaven who created mankind. As long as they are convinced atheists, they're going to hold on to this religion [of evolution] with all of their might. Well, Jonathan Wells is the author of the book we were just discussing called Icons of Evolution. He joins us now from our Washington Bureau. Dr. Wells has a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from the University of California at Berkeley. He has a second Ph.D. from Yale University, and serves as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. And Dr. Wells, in your own words, what are the key findings about evolution in these textbooks that you've been looking at?
Dr. Jonathan Wells: Well, as I studied biology at Berkeley, I was surprised to find that a famous set of embryo drawings that supposedly show that humans share a common ancestor with fish were actually faked in the 19th century. Since I was studying embryology, the truth was obvious to me. I began following up on other famous textbook images and I found that they likewise misrepresent the truth, and in some cases are actually faked.
Robertson: These books that you're looking at, do they have any merit aside from these evolutionary errors, which are not merited at all?
Wells: Well, most of what's in these textbooks is quite good when they deal with molecular biology or physiology or anatomy or something like that. It's only when they come to evolution that the serious distortions creep in.
Robertson: There's obviously a censorship that's part of political correctness. To what extent do the evolutionary biologists censor opposing viewpoints?
Wells: Quite vigorously, if you want to know the truth. As soon as someone criticizes Darwinian evolution, they're effectively banished from the scientific community. They're labeled a creationist. This happened to me and it's happened to many other people. So you no longer are a scientist if you criticize Darwinian evolution, and that settles it.
Robertson: Frankly, how can biology teachers get away with this? They're teaching a philosophy. They're teaching a religion instead of science.
Wells: Well, the truth is that most biologists are not even aware of the misrepresentations in the textbooks, because they were raised on the same textbooks that you and I read. So I think there's a relatively small number of biologists who are dogmatic Darwinists who push this line, and they've been very effective at it. They've organized and they've used a lot of tax money — your tax dollars and mine — and promoted this view in the public schools. So people are actually afraid to stand up and dissent from it.
Robertson: Can you quantify that number? There's been quite a bit of outcry from the left about President Bush and faith-based initiatives. How many tax dollars do you suppose goes into supporting the evolutionary establishment?
Wells: It's very hard to determine exactly. In fact, in my book, I propose that we have some legislative hearings to find out just how much money is being spent on this. But these textbooks, for example, cost usually anywhere from $50 to $100 apiece. And in a public school system, the taxpayers are paying for those textbooks. Furthermore, teaching jobs in public schools and at the university level, certainly public universities, are also being paid for with tax dollars. So my estimate is that the number runs into the billions of dollars every year.
Robertson: I know about what happened just recently in Kansas, an uproar about the fact that they would think there's any competing claim besides evolution in the Kansas City schools. What happens to school districts when they go against evolution?
Wells: Well, typically, the whole weight and might of the nationwide Darwinian establishment comes down on them. For example, in Pratt, Kan., it's a small community of about 6,000 people, the local school board decided that students should learn the evidence for and against Darwin's theory and be allowed to consider alternatives. And they were immediately subjected to the same nationwide campaign of humiliation that the entire state of Kansas was subjected to when they tried to limit the teaching of Darwinian evolution.
Robertson: Basically what's the answer? What do you do in a situation like that? How do you fight it?
Wells: Interestingly enough, according to all the polls that I've seen, the percentage of dogmatic Darwinists in this country is really quite small — probably around 10 percent. They depend entirely on the other 90 percent of those of us who believe in God to support them. Well, this is not a stable situation for them and some of them know it. And I think if the American people become educated as to how their children are being misled about the evidence at their expense, I think the American people can put a stop to this.
Robertson: Thank you for the work you've done and for your book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth. Interesting illustrations in this book. Professor, thank you very much.
Wells: Thank you for having me.
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Lee Webb: If you suppress the truth about the Creation, you suppress the truth about the Creator. Gordon, it’s easy to see why the Darwinian establishment is so zealous about their religion.
Gordon Robertson: Well, it became very political. I went to college in the '70s. Sort of the standard line was “It's intellectually dishonest to really believe in God,” that you were taking a dishonest leap of faith that wasn't based on what science had already established as fact. And the fact supposedly was that evolution was not just a theory, but it was now an established fact. At the same time, those very scientists were ignoring some obvious flaws in the theory, namely the Cambrian explosion of species that's contained in the fossil record. Here you have an incredible outpouring of new life forms and they were trying their best to explain it within evolutionary terms, and you cannot in terms of classical Darwinism. So they came up with new things, that perhaps there was some kind of quantum leap thing that goes on in evolution, or maybe the Earth got bombarded with all kinds of radiation at that point in time. But they've missed in the fossil record that has been established since I was in college, which shows that life began on Earth from the very beginning. You go back 4 billion years to those fossils and you will find life forms. You cannot have some kind of thing that evolves over billions of years if it's there at the beginning of our planet according to the scientific fossil records.
So please be informed about this. Don't let the 10 percent of hard-core Darwinians have their influence on the rest of us. And again, you have to get into the whole issue of intellectual dishonesty. Is there an agenda here where they want to get rid of Christianity, a belief in God, that there are moral absolutes in the world? Are they trying to find excuses for their own behavior patterns? What are we really dealing with? Because if you do say scientifically there can be no Creator, there is no creation, then we become mechanistic. And no longer do you have a right to life.
Lisa Ryan: It seems like most people, though, believe in some kind of an intelligent design theory, that we didn't just all evolve from amoebas somehow, but I think maybe scientists get hung up with people who take the Bible extremely literally and say, well, it all has to have happened within 6,000 years. There still is room. I think God is big enough to intelligently design all of us in an incredible way, and we may not understand how times and dates line up, but I think most people believe there is some kind of intelligent design.
