simply a summary of his book.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/Creationist Jonathan Wells, an intelligent-design advocate affiliated with the Discovery Institute, has written a book entitled Icons of Evolution, which states that some of the best-known evidences for evolution -- such as the peppered moths, the Miller-Urey abiogenesis experiment, and the finches of the Galapagos islands -- are false, fraudulent or misrepresented in college-level textbooks. Articles found here refute Wells' book and demonstrate that the traditional, mainstream-science-supporting interpretations of these "icons" are correct.
http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/The paradigm of evolution
Evolution is the unifying paradigm, the organizing principle of biology. Paradigms are accepted for their overall explanatory power, their "best fit" with all the available data in their fields. A paradigm functions as the glue that holds an entire field together, connecting disparate subfields and relating them to one another. A paradigm is also important because it fosters a research program creating a series of questions that give researchers new directions to explore in order to better understand the phenomena being studied. For example, the unifying paradigm of geology is plate tectonics; although not all geologists work on it, it connects the entire field and organizes the various disciplines of geology, providing them with their research programs. A paradigm does not stand or fall on a single piece of evidence; rather, it is justified by its success in overall explanatory power and the fostering of research questions. A paradigm is important for the questions it leads to, rather than the answers it gives. Therefore, the health of a scientific field is based on how well its central theory explains all the available data and how many new research directions it is spawning. By these criteria, evolution is a very healthy paradigm for the field of biology.
In his book Icons of Evolution (2000), Jonathan Wells attempts to overthrow the paradigm of evolution by attacking how we teach it. In this book, Wells identifies ten examples that are commonly used to help to teach evolution. Wells calls these the "icons," and brands them as false, out of date, and misleading. Wells then evaluates ten "widely used" high school and college biology textbooks for seven of these "icons" with a grading scheme that he constructed. Based on this, he claims that their treatments of these icons are so rife with inaccuracies, out-of-date information, and downright falsehoods that their discussions of the icons should be discarded, supplemented, or amended with "warning labels" (which he provides).
According to Wells, the "icons" are the Miller-Urey experiment, Darwin's tree of life, the homology of the vertebrate limbs, Haeckel's embryos, Archaeopteryx, the peppered moths, and "Darwin's" finches. (Although he discusses three other "icons" -- four-winged fruit flies, horse evolution, and human evolution -- he does not evaluate textbooks' treatments of them.) Wells is right about at least one thing: these seven examples do appear in nearly all biology textbooks. Yet no textbook presents the "icons" as a list of our "best evidence" for evolution, as Wells implies. The "icons" that Wells singles out are discussed in different parts of the textbooks for different pedagogical reasons. The Miller-Urey experiment isn't considered "evidence for evolution;" it is considered part of our experimental research about the origin of life and is discussed in chapters and sections on the "history of life." Likewise, Darwin's finches are used as examples of an evolutionary process (natural selection), not as evidence for evolution. Archaeopteryx is frequently presented in discussions of the origin of birds, not as evidence for evolution itself. Finally, textbooks do not present a single "tree of life"; rather, they present numerous topic-specific phylogenetic trees to show how relevant organisms are related. Wells's entire discussion assumes that the evidence for evolution is a list of facts stored somewhere, rather than the predictive value of the theory in explaining the patterns of the past and present biological world.
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And the book in question:
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/icons.htmAs we have seen, however, the icons of evolution misrepresent the evidence. One icon (the Miller-Urey experiment) gives the false impression that scientists have demonstrated an important first step in the origin of life. One (the four-winged fruit fly) is portrayed as though it were raw materials for evolution, but is actually a hopeless cripple - an evolutionary dead end. Three icons (vertebrate limbs, Archaeopteryx, and Darwin's finches) show actual evidence but are typically used to conceal fundamental problems in interpretation. Three (three tree of life, fossil horses, and human origins) are incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature. And two icons (Haeckel's embryos, and peppered moths on tree trunks) are fakes. (Icons of Evolution, p. 229-230)
Jonathan Wells is a post-doctoral biologist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and holds PhDs from both Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of several scientific associations and has been published widely in academic journals. He lives with his family near Seattle, Washington.
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