Icons of Evolution

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This is one of our favourite books! Icons of Evolution (Regnery, 2000), by molecular biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells highlights how mythology, falsehoods and hoaxes within today's scientific circles pass for evidence of Darwinian evolution.

Icons of Evolution tackles ten of the most prominent arguments neo-Darwinists use as examples of evidence for evolution and shows how each is misrepresented and misused to support Darwin's theory of naturalism.

Many leading high school and undergraduate biology textbooks present students with drawings of similarities between fish and human embryos, and claim that these similarities are evidence that fish and humans share a common ancestor yet embryologists have known for over a century that these drawings were faked.

Photographs of light- and dark- coloured moths on tree trunks are used to teach students how natural selection altered the proportions of the two forms when trees were darkened by pollution during the industrial revolution. Yet scientists have known since the 1980s that the moths do not even rest on tree trunks, and all of the pictures have been staged.

Besides Haekel's fraudulent drawings and the myth of the peppered moth, some of the other false or misleading images described in detail by Dr. Wells in Icons of Evolution include:

• a laboratory flask containing a simulation of the earth's primitive atmosphere, in which electric sparks produce the chemical building-blocks of living cells;
  
• the evolutionary tree of life, reconstructed from fossil and molecular evidence;
  
• similar bone structures in a bat's wing, a porpoise's flipper, a horse's leg, and a human hand that point to their origin in a common ancestor;
  
• fruit flies with an extra pair of wings, showing that genetic mutations can provide the raw materials for evolution;

"In Icons of Evolution Jonathan Wells has brilliantly exposed the exaggerated claims and deceptions that have persisted in standard textbook discussions of biological origins for many decades, in spite of contrary evidence. He has done us all, the scientific community, educators, and the wider public, a great service" - Dr. Dean Kenyon, Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University.

"Wells demonstrates with stunning clarity that the textbook examples Darwinists themselves chose as the pillars of their theory are all false or misleading" - Dr. Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, and Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

"This is one of the most important books ever written about the evolution controversy. It shows how devotion to the ideology of Darwinism has led to textbooks which are full of misinformation" - Phillip E. Johnson, professor of law, University of California at Berkeley, author of The Wedge of Truth and Darwin on Trial. 

Dr. Jonathan Wells is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture and has a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Hardback. 338 pages