I come to bury Wells, and certainly not to praise him.
Jonathan Wells was a genuinely odd man. He seems to have been a bit of a hippie at one time, and spent some time in prison for avoidance of military service. Later he came to the view that he ought to have been more of an anti-communist, though how that cause might have been advanced by his turning up for the Vietnam war was never made clear.
Somewhere along the line he fell victim to Sun Myung Moon’s peculiar brand of religion, and that seems to have had something to do with his becoming a creationist. He wasted a spot that might have gone to good use at Berkeley, obtaining his Ph.D in biology there in 1994. He explained this decision:
“Father’s words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”
His style was more Viet Cong than US Army, as suited his position. A war between actual biology and creationism fought with both full armies in the field would last thirty seconds and end in the entire destruction of the creationist force, so guerrilla warfare was the only option. But it was not so much guerrilla warfare as guerilla theater, another discipline Wells might have learned in his student-protest days.
A Jonathan Wells argument was always more ritual and mum play than rhetorical force. One would behold some object, raise it before the crowd, and incant upon it: Haeckel’s embryo drawings, naïve depictions of the phylogeny of horses, photos of peppered moths, for example. As none of these talismans hold any actual power, there never was anything to do with them but to utter some ritualized form of words and halt. No coherent response to critics, no forward-looking work to explain the phenomena under examination, no admission of being caught lying again, and again, and again.
But his audience demanded no more. Like the adherents of Punxsutawney Phil, they required performance, not scientific rigor. And trade books are an ideal venue for these mum plays, with no voice but the author’s between the pages.
Outside, of course, actual biology went about its business, and ignored him. But to his favored audience of pinched intellects, he was a hero, a god. They had seen the plays; they knew that the dragon Darwin was always slain at the end, even if the dragon was just two other creationists in a badly-resewn horse costume.
Is there honor in mountebankery? P.T. Barnum is a sort of folk hero, but in Barnum’s defense, his audiences were looking more for entertainment than for objectivity. So what if the Cardiff giant was a roughly-carved block of gypsum? Wells belongs to another sort: the swindler class, the man who both separates rubes from their money and leaves them intellectually reduced and starved. Like William Jennings Bryan, he stoked the bitterness of the ignorant, in service of a culture war that harms everyone on all sides. He will be missed, no doubt, by someone.
Christopher Hitchens made a remark upon Jerry Falwell’s death which is apt here, and which is familiar enough that I need not repeat it. May the funeral be inexpensive.
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