Tag: Ken Miller
Truth or Dare with Dr. Ken Miller: A Lecture Guide to the Anti-Intelligent Design Claims by Dr. Kenneth Miller
Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture Guide Permission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1 (This Article): Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”? • Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design • Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution • Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils • Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum • Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade • Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Introduction Brown University biologist Dr. Kenneth Miller Read More ›
Ken Miller Confuses Weak Assertions of Common Ancestry With Darwinian Evolution of Blood Clotting Cascade (Updated)
Update 8/7/13: Since this response to Ken Miller was posted, even stronger evidence of function for the beta-globin pseudogene has been reported in the scientific literature, further refuting Miller’s argument. See Dover Revisited: With Beta-Globin Pseudogene Now Found to Be Functional, an Icon of the “Junk DNA” Argument Bites the Dust. In his book Only a Theory, one of Dr. Kenneth Miller’s main response to Michael Behe’s arguments for the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade is that sequence similarities between various blood clotting factors demonstrates that they share a common ancestry. Indeed, in his response to me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade, Miller again conflates evidence for common ancestry with evidence for Darwinian evolution. Read More ›
Discover Magazine Fails With Miller’s Failure To Refute Behe
This latest installment of my ongoing responses to Ken Miller regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade will critically analyze Professor Miller’s citation of a 2008 paper co-authored by blood clotting expert Russell Doolittle. Citing to Doolittle, Miller claims that the lamprey lacks blood clotting components that Michael Behe, in Darwin’s Black Box, actually did describe as being part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade. The problem for Miller is that Doolittle’s conclusion was based on there allegedly being only one gene in the lamprey homologous to blood clotting factors V or VIII, but Doolittle’s reported data belies that conclusion: it shows there were multiple potential homologues for those factors — including at least Read More ›
Ken Miller’s Double Standard: Improves His Own Arguments But Won’t Let Michael Behe Do the Same (Updated)
In a recent post, I noted that Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade in his book, Only a Theory. When I blogged at the end of last year about Miller’s similar mistakes at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Dr. Miller responded by making me aware of something I did not previously remember: apparently Michael Behe wrote the section in Of Pandas and People on blood clotting. The treatment of the blood clotting cascade in Pandas (1993) could possibly be subject to Miller’s arguments, but as I showed, Behe’s treatment of the topic in Darwin’s Black Box (1996) would not be refuted in any way by Miller’s arguments. To summarize and review, Read More ›
Ken Miller’s Only a Theory Misquotes Michael Behe on Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade
Recently, I posted responses to some errors in Kenneth Miller’s book Only a Theory and promised to end the series with a look at Dr. Miller’s treatment of the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade. (For those prior posts, see here and here.) Discussing Ken Miller’s treatment of the blood clotting cascade in Only a Theory first requires a little backstory. Last December 2008 and early January 2009, I published a series of 3 posts that responded to Ken Miller’s arguments, during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, about irreducible complexity and the blood clotting cascade (BCC). (For the posts, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Those posts showed that in his Dover trial testimony, Dr. Miller misrepresented Read More ›