Kerby Anderson

Biology books that teach evolution tell certain stories to illustrate the evolutionary process. Back in 2000, Dr. Jonathan Wells wrote the book, Icons of Evolution. He explained that these ten icons of evolution were false. Many of them were fraudulent and known to be so. Nevertheless, they appeared in these textbooks.

In his latest book, Zombie Science, he asks a simple question. If these icons of evolution published 17 years ago were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? In his book, he also adds a number of other icons that are also wrong. The book’s title, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, gets its name because these false icons of evolution don’t die but live on to mislead the next generation of students.

When he was on my radio program, he talked about Darwin’s tree of life and provided a catalog of what he calls the survival of the fakest. This includes scientists’ prebiotic simulations, Haeckel’s embryos, the Peppered Moths, and Darwin’s Finches. These erroneous icons were present in textbooks decades ago, and continue to show up in textbooks today.

One of the newest icons of evolution is the “walking whales.” This story shows up in many textbooks today because paleontologists found a wolf-like creature they claim would be the ancestor of the blue whale. Jonathan Wells spends a chapter critiquing that spectacular claim.

In a previous book, he also dealt with the claim that we have so much junk DNA and addresses that again in this book. If evolution is true, we might expect to have lots of leftover and unused DNA. He shows that is not the case.

This book not only will be helpful to science students with questions, it can also be a manual for activists. After all, our tax dollars each year go to purchase textbooks that have erroneous icons of evolution.