Tag: blood clotting
How Kenneth Miller Used Smoke-and-Mirrors to Misrepresent Michael Behe on the Irreducible Complexity of the Blood-Clotting Cascade (Part 3)
In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller purported to refute Michael Behe’s arguments about the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade, but actually badly misrepresented Behe’s arguments to Judge Jones. In short, the purported knockout experiments (in the form comparative biochemistry) that Ken Miller cited to Judge Jones, where the blood-clotting cascade still worked in the absence of certain factors, dealt entirely with factors that Behe specifically did not claim were part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. Behe explained this problem in Miller’s argument to Judge Jones, but apparently Behe’s testimony fell on deaf ears. In Part 2, I discussed how Miller might not have even refuted the more expansive arguments for irreducible complexity of Read More ›
How Kenneth Miller Used Smoke-and-Mirrors to Misrepresent Michael Behe on the Irreducible Complexity of the Blood-Clotting Cascade (Part 2)
In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments about the irreducibility of the blood-clotting cascade to Judge Jones during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, such that Judge Jones wrongly ruled that “scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.” To briefly recap, Miller told Judge Jones that Behe’s discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Darwin’s Black Box was “essentially identical” to the discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Of Pandas and People, implying that any critiques of Pandas also applied to Behe. But unlike Pandas, Behe explicitly did not argue that all of the components of the blood-clotting cascade were required for it to function properly. Read More ›
How Kenneth Miller Used Smoke-and-Mirrors to Misrepresent Michael Behe on the Irreducible Complexity of the Blood-Clotting Cascade (Part 1)
During the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial three years ago, biologist Kenneth Miller claimed that biochemist Michael Behe’s arguments in Darwin’s Black Box regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade were false. Miller’s testimony led federal district court judge John Jones to assert in his decision that “scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.” But an analysis of Miller’s arguments demonstrates that he refuted Behe in no way whatsoever, and that in fact it was Behe who refuted Miller at trial, although Judge Jones ignored Behe’s testimony. Miller continues (I am told) to go around lecturing on this topic, claiming that the blood-clotting cascade of lower vertebrates demonstrate that Read More ›