Jonathan Wells On Intelligent Design and Scientific Revolutions
Today’s ID The Future coincides with the release of a new online course from biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells on the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. On this blast from the past from 2006, Casey Luskin interviews Wells about evolution, intelligent design, scientific revolutions and historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn argued from the history of science that reigning scientific paradigms do not give way gently and rationally before new and conflicting evidence; instead, the proponents of the old paradigm tend to dig in their heels and resist till the bitter end. Wells sees this dynamic at work with the reigning paradigm in origins biology, the modern theory of evolution, as it is challenged by the theory of intelligent design. Wells describes examples of how the current conversation among scientists about evolution and intelligent design matches many of the key characteristics of earlier paradigm shifts outlined in Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As part of the conversation Luskin and Wells also highlight Wells’s incisive and sometimes irreverent book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.