Blast from the Past: Jonathan Wells Gets Politically Incorrect About Darwinism

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Society & Culture, Philosophy, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Perhaps no one in the intelligent design research community of recent decades was more qualified to tackle the debate over Darwinism and design than Dr. Jonathan Wells. We lost Dr. Wells in 2024, but his work lives on in his groundbreaking books, articles, interviews, and even a full-length online course. Today's ID The Future out of the vault takes us all the way back to the summer of 2006 when Discovery Institute's Director of Communications Rob Crowther interviewed Dr. Wells about his new book of the time, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Senior Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti has called Darwinism the “'politically correct' of science,” — that is, something that is held not because it is true but rather because of peer-pressure. Thus, Dr. Wells’s book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design” is aptly named because it ignores this peer-pressure to expose the weaknesses in the evidence for Darwinism with both humorous anecdotes and illuminating explanations of the most common sources of confusion.

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.0	Welcome. I'm Robert Crowther at the Center for Science and Culture, and on this program, I'm interviewing CSC Senior Fellow, Molecular Biologist, and author Dr. Jonathan Wells.
0:29.2	Dr. Wells is probably best known for his unveiling of some of the most common and most unsupported so-called proofs of Darwinian evolution in his
0:39.8	book, Icons of Evolution. Now, Dr. Wells has a brand new book that will be out on August 25th,
0:46.6	The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, published by Regnery Publications.
0:53.4	The series of politically incorrect guides has been wildly popular for Regnery with previous
0:58.5	titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science by Tom Bethel and the politically
1:04.2	incorrect guide to American history by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
1:08.2	So it's no surprise that they wanted to continue that by tapping into one of the
1:12.6	hottest, most controversial topics today, which is the battle between Darwinism and design.
1:18.9	And there's no one more qualified to tackle the subject than Dr. Wells, who has not one, but
1:24.3	two PhDs, one in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley,
1:30.6	and one in religious studies from Yale University. And he's been published in such journals as
1:36.1	proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Biosystems, the scientist, and the American biology teacher.
1:46.8	Dr. Wells, thank you for being with us today.
1:52.3	It's a pleasure to be here, Rob. I was excited to hear that you were doing this book,
1:58.7	following icons of evolution, and I kind of wondered, what was the motivation for this particular book,
2:01.4	the politically incorrect guide to Darwinism and intelligent design? Well, of course, I've been interested in the topic for many years. In fact,
2:07.2	my Yale PhD dealt with the 19th century Darwinian controversies. And then when I was at Berkeley,
2:14.6	I studied evolutionary developmental biology or Evo-Devo. So I have a long-standing
2:21.3	interest in it, but the reason for this particular book is that I see a lot of confusion in the
2:28.1	public mind about this topic. And one of my purposes in writing the book was to clear up some of that confusion.
	...

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