"[2][3][4][5] After gaining a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University, Wells became Director of the Unification Church's inter-religious outreach organization in New York City.
(2000), Wells argued that a number of examples used to illustrate biology textbooks were grossly exaggerated, distorted truth, or were patently false.
[6][7][8] 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.
[14] He also acted as the director of the International Religious Foundation, a Unification Church affiliated organization which sponsors interdenominational conferences.
[13] After receiving his doctorate, he worked at a position he described as "a post-doctoral research biologist at Berkeley, writing articles critical of Darwinism.
"[3] Shortly after that Wells joined Phillip E. Johnson, father of the intelligent design movement, at the Discovery Institute.
[22] Wells appeared on a panel at Harvard with Stephen Palumbi in November 2001, which his supporters lauded as a "home run".
[28][29] Of his student days at Unification Theological Seminary (1976–78), Wells said, "One of the things that Father [Reverend Sun Myung Moon] advised us to do at UTS was to pray to seek God's plan for our lives."
[3][31] He said: ...I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time.
[42][43] He is also the author of "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" for high school students, which is published by the Discovery Institute.
[47] There have been 12 detailed reviews of Icons, from scholars familiar with the subject matter, which have come to the consensus that the book's claims are a politically motivated exaggeration and misrepresentation of a scattering of minor issues.
[57]Prior to the evolution hearings, in December 2000 after the Pratt County, Kansas, school board revised its tenth-grade biology curriculum at the urging of intelligent design proponents to include material that encourages students to question the theory of evolution, The Pratt Tribune published a letter from Jerry Coyne challenging Wells's characterization in an article of his work on peppered moths, saying that his article appended to the Pratt standards was misused and being mischaracterized: Creationists such as Jonathan Wells claim that my criticism of these experiments casts strong doubt on Darwinism.
... My call for additional research on the moths has been wrongly characterized by creationists as revealing some fatal flaw in the theory of evolution.
It is a classic creationist tactic (as exemplified in Wells' book, "Icons of Evolution") to assert that healthy scientific debate is really a sign that evolutionists are either committing fraud or buttressing a crumbling theory.
[59] A quote from the book linking evolution to eugenics, abortion and racism appeared on Starbucks paper cups in 2007.
[63] In the Washington University Law Review, Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey faulted Wells, Johnson, and others for denying the HIV/AIDS connection and promoting denialism via a petition which did not have any scientific support.
A confocal microscopy study of microtubule arrays involved in cortical rotation during the first cell cycle of Xenopus embryos.