A. E. Wilder-Smith - Biography

Biography

Wilder-Smith became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Illinois Medical Center in 1963. He had serious problems with evolutionary views of the origin of life in his book The Creation of Life and Man's Origin, Man's Destiny according to Walter L. Bradley. He contended "that the conversion of energy flow into information remains, at present, undemonstrated and without theoretical basis." Some considered him Europe's leading creationist. He was not afraid to correct creationists when they were wrong as when he made the comment to Francis Arduini in 1984 that Morris "didn't know a thing about thermodynamics".

In 1966 he published the book Herkunft und Zukunft des Menschen which promoted Burdick's and other's claims that dinosaur and human footprints existed together at Paluxy River. Wilder-Smith included in his book plates showing the Paluxy site including plates attributed to himself, Burdick and Taylor. With the exception of plate 6 from Burdick all plates claiming to be man tracks were in situ. In the mid-1980s the footprints were shown to be not of human origin, and some specimens were shown to be doctored or carved, in particular the loose blocks attributed to Burdick.

According to the National Center for Science Education, Wilder-Smith's 1981 work The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution contains a variety of falsehoods and errors. Kenneth Christiansen, Professor of Biology at Grinnell College, reviewed the book stating "the most fundamental flaw of the book is an apparent confusion or ignorance (it is hard to tell) concerning our present understanding of the evolutionary process." He further noted that Wilder-Smith's work disregarded basic literature in the field discussed. In 1986, Wilder-Smith and creationist physicist Edgar Andrews (President of the Biblical Creation Society) debated biologists Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the Oxford Union.

Wilder-Smith has also been claimed to be the "father" of the intelligent design movement. In 2005, intelligent design advocate William A. Dembski wrote that Wilder-Smith's "intuitive ideas about information has been the impetus for much of my research." However this was refuted by Nick Matzke, writing in 2007 for the science blog Panda's Thumb. He asserts that "intelligent design" as such originated in the 1989 textbook Of Pandas and People, and that claims of links with earlier works were "a desperate attempt to obfuscate the basic historical point ". While it is true that Wilder-Smith also discussed young Earth creationist concepts, he had never used the phrase "intelligent design" itself. The closest phrasing is found in his 1968 publication Man’s origin, man’s destiny: a critical survey of the principles of evolution and Christianity, which with its argument that the mammary glands in whales could not have arisen by chance mutations. Wilder-Smith wrote that (emphasis added) "To deny planning when studying such a system is to strain credulity more than to ask one to believe in an intelligent nipple designer, who incidentally must have understood hydraulics rather well."