Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate)
American intelligent design advocate (1942–2024)
John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells (September 19, 1942 – September 19, 2024) was an American molecular biologist, cell biologist, and theologian. He was an advocate of intelligent design, a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God.
Wells joined the Unification Church of the United States in 1974. He earned a doctorate in religious studies from Yale University in 1986 and a second doctorate in molecular and cellular biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. He subsequently wrote that the teachings of Sun Myung Moon and his studies at Unification Theological Seminary convinced him to devote himself to "destroying Darwinism". He became a member of several scientific associations and published in academic journals.
In his book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? (2000), Wells argued that a number of examples used to illustrate biology textbooks were erroneous or exaggerated. Wells said that this shows that evolution conflicts with the evidence, and so argued against its teaching in public education. Some reviewers of Icons of Evolution have said that Wells misquoted experts cited as sources and took minor issues out of context, basing his argument on a flawed syllogism.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.