Remembering Jonathan Wells

A key figure in the intelligent design movement passes on

Jonathan Wells

For over three decades, Jonathan Wells was to me a close friend and colleague. Born September 19, 1942, he died exactly 82 years later on his birthday. He and I coauthored an intelligent design textbook (The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems) as well as a spinoff from that book on the origin of life (How to Be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist—Or Not). Both books remain of current interest.

In writing this remembrance, I’m doing more than simply honoring a friend and colleague. In an age of compromise where all sectors of society seem up for sale, Jonathan was a shining example of someone who could not be bought. But more importantly for this remembrance, his life suggests lessons on how we can keep ourselves from being bought.

I met Jonathan in late June of 1993 at Pajaro Dunes, south of San Francisco. Intelligent design as a movement had yet to be launched. Phillip Johnson, as a master strategist, was laying the groundwork for such a movement. To that end, he raised funds for a meeting of scientists and scholars he thought might be key to getting such a movement off the ground.

Mike Behe, Steve Meyer, Walter Bradley, Paul Nelson, Douglas Axe, Jonathan Wells and I were at that meeting along with several others. You can see some low-res video from that meeting, showing much younger versions of ourselves, early in the documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life. If any single event was decisive in launching the ID movement, this meeting at Pajaro Dunes was it.

In the year before the meeting, I was closely collaborating with Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson. At the time the time of the meeting, I was working on a second doctorate in philosophy (University of Illinois at Chicago), having earned a doctorate in mathematics in the late 1980s (University of Chicago).

Steve and Paul were telling me about someone named Jonathan Wells who was about 20 years older than me and who was likewise working on a second doctorate. Jonathan had his doctorate in theology already (from Yale) and was working on a second doctorate in biology (at UC Berkeley). As it is, we both successfully finished our second doctorates, me in 1996, he a year or two earlier.

Jonathan and I hit it off immediately. The Pajaro meeting was by the Pacific ocean. We took a long walk on the beach, and by the end of it we were fast friends. In my life, I’ve experienced this sort of simpatico on rare occasions. This was one of them. In subsequent years I got to know Jonathan better. Let me share here a few things that have stood out to me about him:

• Unflappable. I never saw him lose his temper or self-control. Not that he didn’t experience plenty of provocation. But his was an even spirit that was not going to get sucked into petty emotions.

• Resolute. Convinced that Darwinian materialism was the underlying fault line in higher education and culture, and regarding design in nature as scientifically defensible as well as true, he was unyielding in refuting Darwinism and advancing intelligent design.

• Incorruptible. Jonathan no doubt realized that he was past redemption in the eyes of the mainstream academy. In any event, his hand was steady in refusing its temptations. I never had to worry that he could be bought. He was a man of principle.

• Crystal Clear. Jonathan was an exceptionally clear thinker and writer. In fact, he was so clear that it might be easy to think he was missing some key insights and dumbing down his expositions. But that’s only because he had already done the hard work, making it easy for his listeners and readers.

• Rigorous. In his tackling of subjects and writing projects, he always did his homework, conferring with colleagues and doing extensive literature searches. I never had the sense that he cut corners in his scholarship.

• Strategic. He could see how the locus of debate over Darwinism and design was shifting, adjusting his work so that it was at the center of the action. When around 2000 he was writing his now classic Icons of Evolution, he remarked that this book would open up a new front in the war over Darwinism. He was right.

• Humble. Jonathan had an immense intellect. He had to put up with many fools who vilified him and his work. If he responded to these attacks, he did so without responding in kind. And he never became condescending, always focusing on the substance of the challenges rather than on the personalities behind them.

I could expand on this catalogue of Jonathan’s virtues and traits, but I want to focus for the remainder of this remembrance on one that seems to me central to staying on the straight and narrow. The best way I can think of characterizing this virtue is as a willingness, and indeed commitment, to take the harder path.

So much in our contemporary culture is about alleviating hardship. And yes, we don’t want to court hardship unnecessarily. But hardship or adversity are part of life, and doing too much to circumvent it can in fact sap life of its energy and purpose.

In my view, the greatest fault of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is that it rewards indolence and mediocrity, thereby excusing people from taking the harder path that would make them better people and the world a better place.

The defining moment in Jonathan’s life in which he took the harder path occurred when he was called up for reserve duty by the US Army. His views about the Vietnam war had changed and he could no longer in good conscience serve his country in that war. Because of his refusal to report for reserve duty, he had to spend over a year at the penitentiary in Leavenworth.

Interestingly, when I spoke to Jonathan about the cost he paid in standing for his principles, he remarked that his decision to do prison time contained a blessing. As he put it to me, “it got it out of my system.” He paid the cost and he was done with it. He added that, by contrast, some of his friends who had evaded the draft by escaping to Canada were to this day still dealing with and fretting about their decision.

There’s also an interesting irony in Jonathan’s decision to do prison time, namely, that it opened academic doors for him. He was super bright, getting a full-ride merit scholarship at Princeton in the early 1960s (unlike the current Princeton that only gives need-based scholarships). But in his junior year he left Princeton. And subsequently he became a Berkeley radical. His education therefore got stalled.

By the time Jonathan was looking to do graduate studies, first at Yale in theology and then at Berkeley in developmental biology, he was older than most applicants and did not fit the standard profile preferred by graduate admissions committees at elite schools.

And yet, elite schools like Yale and Berkeley prided themselves on their liberal sensibilities. As Jonathan shared with me, his stint at Leavenworth actually provided the key that unlocked the door for him to get accepted into these institutions.

So the irony here is that by doing time at Leavenworth, Jonathan ended up advancing his education. It also made his work on intelligent design harder to dismiss. Indeed, having Yale and Berkeley in his academic pedigree helped to strengthen his standing in the debate over Darwinian materialism. All things work together for good…

The last time I saw Jonathan was in March of 2021 in Seattle. Along with some colleagues from Discovery Institute, he and I enjoyed a fine meal at a Brazilian steakhouse. Because I get to Seattle at least once a year on account of the COSM technology conference, which takes place annually in the fall, I was hoping to see Jonathan at one of these conferences.

But by the summer of 2023, he was permanently confined to a wheel chair. I wish I had extended my trip to Seattle that fall and gone to visit him. But his mother had lived to be a hundred, and I thought his genes would give him more time.

A friend of mine was a close friend of Jonathan’s during their graduate days at Yale. We had been communicating just at the beginning of this month (September 2024) about getting out to Seattle later this year and visiting with Jonathan. Alas, that was not to be.

The last email communications I have from Jonathan were from July 2023. But I did receive one letter by regular mail from him dated January 29, 2024. I called him to thank him for the letter and to chat, but I got his lovely wife Lucy, who explained that Jonathan was unable to answer the call. In the letter, he wrote:

As we reach the end of the first month of 2024, I am filled with gratitude. I am grateful for the honor of working with you for the past few years on defeating Darwinian materialism and developing and promoting intelligent design.

The honor is all mine, Jonathan. You are now in a better place. The day will come when the truth of God’s work in designing the world will be clear and uncontested. I look forward to celebrating that day with you.