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Ken Miller Rewrites his Textbooks, then Rewrites History: Miller’s Evolving Position on Haeckel and Evolution
Last year I wrote about some memory lapses that Brown University biologist and textbook author Ken Miller apparently had while testifying during the Kitzmiller trial regarding his own textbooks. Ken Miller has authored many biology textbooks, and his first textbooks (from the early 1990’s) used Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings and blatantly promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. To his credit, Miller fixed later editions of his textbooks — he took out Haeckel’s drawings and replaced them with real embryo photographs, and he also stopped promoting recapitulation theory. Like many Darwinists, however, Miller then tried to rewrite history and pretend that these mistakes had not been promoted by biologists for many decades. First, read what Miller & Levine’s 1994 version Read More ›
Ken Miller Twists William Dembski’s Methods for Inferring Intelligent Design
A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title “A War on Science.” In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity in the bacterial flagellum by citing the type 3 secretory apparatus, giving his usual misrepresentation of irreducible complexity. But it gets incredibly worse. Miller egregiously twists the basic arguments of leading ID theorist, mathematician William Dembski. To paraphrase Miller’s argument (Miller’s exact words are given ***below), when cards are dealt out in a game of poker, the hand you get is unlikely. But obviously that hand wasn’t intelligently designed. Therefore, unlikely and non-designed things happen all the time, so evolution can happen even if it’s unlikely, and we should Read More ›
Quick, Nurse, Give the Patient a Tautology!
Is Darwinism essential to understanding bacterial resistance to antibiotics? Consider the following conversation, at the bedside of a patient with a serious antibiotic-resistant infection: Nurse: Nothing’s working, Doctor!Doctor: I know. All of our antibiotics have failed. Penicillin, Cipro, Tetracycline. Nothing is working.Nurse: Let’s ask the Darwinists for help!Doctor: (Slaps forehead) Of course! Darwinism is the foundation of our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Quick, Nurse, give the patient a tautology! Darwinists claim that Darwin’s theory, which is the theory that all biological complexity arose by random variation and natural selection, is essential to our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. What exactly does Darwinism teach us about antibiotic resistance?
Censoring Science in the Name of the “Consensus”: Will the History of Science Repeat Itself?
Darwinists often tell us that scientific views which challenge Darwin should be banned from classrooms or scientific discussion because they are outside the “consensus” of the scientific community. Darwinists love to make this appeal to authority because it is a very effective form of peer pressure which appeals to our respect for science and the conformist tendencies in society. Yet they rarely define the meaning of “consensus,” and they also ignore the fact that true respect for science implies that we should never accept something merely because it’s the “consensus.” Simply put, that’s because the consensus can be wrong, and we should accept something only because of the evidence. As Stephen Jay Gould and other scientists warned the U.S. Supreme Read More ›
What is Wrong with Sober’s Attack on ID? (Part I): Defining ID and its Historical Origins
University of Wisconsin philosopher Elliott Sober has published an article in Quarterly Review of Biology entitled, “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” It seems that mainstream biology journals are more than willing to publish articles attacking intelligent design (ID) while choosing not to include any companion piece supporting ID. Regardless, from Sober’s article it would appear that very little is wrong with ID because he ultimately fails to disclose the predictions of the theory. He starts by defining ID fairly well in a vague sense, stating “mini-ID is that … complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer.” He even acknowledges that those who state the designer is supernatural “go beyond mini-ID’s single Read More ›