Tag: Ken Miller
There He Goes Again: Ken Miller Misrepresents Behe’s Arguments on the Immune System
Recently, I discussed how in his book Only a Theory, Kenneth Miller badly misrepresented intelligent design (ID) as it relates to common descent. Another egregious error in the book comes in Dr. Miller’s section titled “Just Not Good Enough” (pgs. 70-74). Anyone familiar with the Dover trial knows exactly what Miller’s error is and where this is going. Dr. Miller claims that when the plaintiffs’ attorneys at the Dover trial did a literature-dump bluff on Michael Behe during cross-examination — placing before him over 50 papers and nearly a dozen books purportedly explaining the evolution of the immune system — Behe said, in Judge Jones’s report of the exchange, that they were “not ‘good enough.’” Miller even goes so far Read More ›
Ken Miller’s Only a Theory Attacks Straw Man Version of Intelligent Design on Common Descent
A friend recently wrote me an e-mail asking if I had any critiques of Ken Miller’s 2009 book Only a Theory. Writing back to him, I observed that the book has many problems, but that I would offer a few quick responses to two or three of its most egregious errors. This serious of three posts (or three topics, really) will look at three errors and mischaracterizations of intelligent design (ID) in Only a Theory, starting with Miller’s mischaracterization of ID and common descent. On page 51, Miller states: What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the Read More ›
Responding to the Youtube Challenge to Discovery Institute: Does Any Critic Out There Understand Intelligent Design? Anyone? …Anyone?
Any critic making the inaccurate claim that Stephen C. Meyer is the “President of the Discovery Institute” is bound to be fairly uninformed about both intelligent design (ID) and the Discovery Institute.1 Thus, when I recently viewed a YouTube video making this very mistake while allegedly “Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover,” I first thought: Why should I accept a challenge from someone who can’t even correctly “discover” the identity of our organization’s president? Regardless, this video was enlightening, but not in the way that its creators intended. Rather than posing any difficult challenge for ID, the video unwittingly exposes the unfortunate ignorance that apparently abounds regarding the nature of the theory of intelligent design and how we detect and Read More ›
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 ›