The scene is set in a boardroom high above the noisy bustle of the financial district. The room is filled with rich and powerful would-be investors, eagerly listening to the story unravelling before them.

“Just imagine it, ladies and gentlemen — a once in a lifetime opportunity, and here’s the proof.” The stock promoter’s face breaks into a sly smile as he flashes up the impressive, full-colour slide showing the growth of the shares. He continues: “As you can clearly see from this information, these shares have grown a staggering nine per cent for each of the years 1997, 1998, and 1999. You simply can’t lose if you invest at this juncture!”

At this point the stock promoter pauses, knowing that he can stop the hard sell. He has won them over. He can tell by the looks on their faces that they have trusted his evidence and believed in his specialised knowledge of the company. They’ll be pulling out their chequebooks at a moment’s notice.

However, the stock promoter has not told the investors the whole story. While it was true that the stock he is promoting had indeed risen by more than nine per cent in 1997, 1998, and 1999, he failed to tell them it declined 12 per cent in 2000, and figures for the first half of 2001 were just as dismal.

He chose to withhold that information because, after all, who would buy into an investment that appeared to be a losing cause?

Such behaviour would earn him a jail sentence for stock fraud under United States securities laws.

The scenario described above is an amplification of an illustration used in Jonathan Wells’ book Icons of Evolution. Wells, who holds two doctorates (one in biology), compares the shifty actions of the stock promoter with the behaviour of evolutionary theorists within the biologi­cal scientific establishment.

In this lively and eye-opening book, Wells methodically picks apart the main tenets or “icons” of evolution and shows them all to be either outright fakes, mis­representations of the real data, or, as in the case of our fraudulent stock promoter, only providing evidence which fits easily into evolutionary theory and ignoring data which doesn’t.

Wells stops short of calling evolution­ary theorists outright frauds; but the glar­ing deceit and distortion he uncovers makes me wonder why we haven’t risen up against evolutionary theory not simply as an incorrect theory to describe the ori­gin of living species, but as just plain bad science.

One of the best examples of the ‘bad science’ evolutionists are employing is the infamous use of embryological sim­ilarities between different animals species. The two diagrams accompanying this review are both from Wells’s book and show how incredible this deceit can be.

Originally put forward by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel before 1900, his diagram shows embryos of several different animal species which are virtually indistinguish­able in their early phases and only become different from one another in later stages of development. This similarity appears quite obvious to anyone who examines this scientific evidence, regardless of whether they have any scientific training or not.

Once you see the similarities between the early stages of the developing animal embryos, it isn’t a great stretch of the imagination to extend this idea of similarity back to the origin of species, to a com­mon ancestor.

Charles Darwin and those who fol­lowed after him theorised that the dra­matic similarity of the early stages of embryonic development are direct evi­dence that all these animal species have a common ancestor and that these similari­ties reflect the characteristics of the sup­posed common ancestor.

Haeckel’s hand-drawn diagrams are so stunningly clear in their support for evo­lutionary theory that they are still in wide use in biology textbooks today as evi­dence for evolution. I remember seeing them in the introductory textbooks I used when studying my undergraduate degree in biology. In fact, as a high school science teacher, I have referred students to this diagram as evidence for evolution when teaching the topic of evolutionary theory in my classroom.

So what is the harm in this one little diagram, so ubiquitous and seemingly faultless as proof? It seems the evolution­ary theorists have it sewn up. They have told us they have the proof, and they have been presenting it in ways like using Haeckel’s embryos for decades. Evolution is proven fact, they say, so why don’t we just accept it?

Because of evolution’s iron-clad sup­port, I have struggled at times with trying to work out how my own Christian faith could be reconciled with what I know to be rational, scientific evidence. How could anyone come to any conclu­sion other than evolution when presented with all the facts? This is precisely where Jonathan Wells comes in.

Wells expertly and deftly cuts through the haze of history to unravel the truth about the “proofs” for evolution, includ­ing Haeckel’s embryos. It has opened my eyes to the reality of evolutionary evidences and washed away any lingering doubts I had concerning the truth behind the theory.

What the textbooks don’t tell you, and what the evolutionary theorists have neglected to tell the public, is that it has been known within academic embryology circles for quite some time that Haeckel intentionally faked his drawings in order to emphasise the similarities between them. Not only did he fraudulently pre­sent his findings, but Haeckel also hand­picked those animals species which would best support his theory.

The real scope of things shows that the embryos are actually very different early in development, in strange and complex ways that science is only beginning to understand. Only part-way through development do the embryos reach their highest similarity, and even then the true representation shows that the similarities are weak. From there, the embryos develop further, becoming very different indeed by the time they are fin­ished.

If Haeckel had more accurately depicted his observations, if he had cho­sen several other animal species or had more widely surveyed the animal king­dom in his analysis, he would have found that there was actually a great diversity among animal embryos, not similarity.

Why then does this example still persist as a teaching device in proving evolutionary theory? Why the need among evolutionists to put forward exam­ples and “proofs” which aren’t really true at all?

As Jonathan Wells aptly describes, the problem with evolutionary theory is that it isn’t just a scientific theory. It goes beyond the scope of science as a tool to discover more about the natural world and instead rests upon a philosophical viewpoint called naturalism.

According to naturalistic philosophy, the only thing that exists in reality is this physical world. There can be no spiritual realm nor can there be any supernatural causes invoked to explain any of the phe­nomena we observe in the world around us. Thus, a creation which was formerly seen as the handiwork of a supernatural God has been reduced to being the result of mere chance playing upon the leftover stardust of a yet unexplained Big Bang.

Evolutionists begin from the philo­sophical viewpoint of naturalism, and allow that philosophy to dictate what can and can’t pass for science. As a result, nat­ural selection is the only possible option. It is circular reasoning, which by defining science as only dealing with natural causes, automatically eliminates any other explanation of the natural world. It also relegates the science they do to a devotion to an ideology rather than an objective pursuit of the truth.

Wells’s book is one of several which have been written in recent years to com­bat this problem. In Icons Of Evolution, Wells exposes the exaggerated claims and deceptions of the main evidences for evo­lutionary theory. Others, such as Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box and William Dembski’s Intelligent Design have pro­posed an explanation of life centred on design by an intelligent agent.

Together, these approaches provide a two-pronged attack on the Darwinian establishment. By exposing the false and misleading evidences of current evolu­tionary theory, and by simultaneously constructing an intellectually sound, objectively based theory reflective of the reality of creation, it may be possible, with God’s help, to bring the discipline of biol­ogy back within a biblical framework.