Opposition to evolution is found in many corners of the American religious landscape, including the Unification Church. Church founder Sun Myung Moon has frequently condemned darwinism for giving God no role in the history of life. In 1976, Jonathan Wells, a student in Moon's seminary, answered his leader's call. He writes, "Father's [Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a PhD program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle." The University of California supplied Wells with his weapon, a PhD in biology and, with Icons of Evolution, Wells has fired the latest salvo in the eternal religious assault on Charles Darwin.

This personal history, taken from the Unification Church website (http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unifi...), is conspicuously missing from the author's biography in Icons. The book, aimed at the non-specialist, masquerades as a scientific critique of classic examples of evolution, but is actually a polemic intelligently designed to please Father Moon. Icons is a work of stealth creationism, and strives to debunk darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical creationists, including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete summaries of research, and muddled arguments. But because Wells has scientific credentials, studiously avoids mentioning religion or God (who appears only under the alias "intelligent design"), and presents his book as an objective critique (...), it is easy for the non-scientist to be taken in.
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Icons is exactly as even-handed and intellectually honest as one would expect from someone whose "prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism".