A List of Selected Responses to Kenneth R. Miller
For as long as Darwinian biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth R. Miller has attacked intelligent design (ID), design proponents have refuted him. While there are occasions where Miller has wisely dropped his refuted objections, more often he will keep trotting out the same stale arguments. His tendency to hold onto his misconceptions means design theorists have to continually point out how he misrepresents their arguments. Several of these responses to Miller are worth revisiting, and because we've recently had some new rebuttals to Miller, we've now put together a list of links to some of the best:
Summary: This rebuttal reveals that Ken Miller gave inaccurate information about his own textbooks during his testimony at the Dover intelligent design trial. Miller is widely promoted as a "theistic evolutionist," yet this rebuttal exposes how one of his early textbooks clearly stated that "Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism."
Summary: Biologist and Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells analyzes the data from decades of published scientific studies to show how Miller manipulated statistical data to falsely claim that peppered moths rest on tree trunks. Wells' claims are backed by statements from many other moth experts.
Summary: Michael Behe refutes Ken Miller's arguments against irreducible complexity from Finding Darwin's God by showing that Miller's example of the evolution of the lac operon provide "exactly what one expects of irreducible complexity requiring intelligent intervention, and of limited capabilities for Darwinian processes."
Summary: Leading design theorist and mathematician William Dembski provides a comprehensive rebuttal to Ken Miller's attempt to account for the evolution of the bacterial flagellum. Dembski demonstrates that Miller's account is essentially based on a single, woefully insufficient intermediate stage, requiring vast leaps which remain unexplained. Miller also conflates ID with interventionism, a mistake about which Dembski says Miller "should know better." Yet to this day Miller continues to conflate the two when arguing against ID.
Summary: Behe again exposes a failed attempt from Miller to refute irreducible complexity. This time, Miller attacks the irreducibly complex nature of the blood-clotting cascade by invoking the "magic wand" of gene duplication while ignoring the deadly deficiencies which would be experienced by Miller's proposed evolutionary intermediates.
Summary: In this report on Miller's testimony in the Dover trial, Jonathan Witt explains Ken Miller's contradictory arguments. Miller claims that ID is neither testable nor falsifiable, then attempts to test and falsify Behe's ideas about irreducible complexity.
Summary: This report shows how Ken Miller, a biology professor, tried to teach about the legal background of the Santorum Amendment, which recommends teaching the full range of scientific views about evolution. The point-by-point rebuttal documents Miller's false accusations against supporters of the Santorum Amendment.
Summary: Ken Miller wrote an op-ed claiming that a Cobb County, Georgia disclaimer in one of his own textbooks was struck down by a judge because the disclaimer "served no scientific or educational purpose." John West explains how this completely misrepresents the court's thinking, which actually found that the sticker had a legitimate purpose of fostering "critical thinking."
Summary: During the Dover trial, Ken Miller claimed that the presence of a fused chromosome in humans is strong support for common ancestry with apes. This rebuttal demonstrates that this evidence actually tells us very little about whether humans shared a common ancestor with apes and may be explained by common design rather than common descent.
Summary: Biologist Jonathan Wells responds to Ken Miller's false and misleading testimony before the Ohio State Board of Education regarding peppered moths, Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the Cambrian explosion.
Summary: This rebuttal shows that Ken Miller misrepresents the non-universal nature of the genetic codes found in different types of organisms.
Summary: Biochemist Michael Behe once again exposes Ken Miller's failed attempts to refute irreducible complexity and also rebuts Miller's arguments about Behe's common example of the irreducibly complex mousetrap.
Summary: Pro-ID biologist Mike Gene explains that Miller's attempt to refute ID by citing tooth-growing birds fails because birds would have lost the ability to grow teeth long ago if this were truly a non-functional, undesigned, vestigial characteristic.
Summary: Mathematician and leading design-theorist William Dembski exposes Ken Miller's hypocrisy for attacking Dembski for talking about God, when Miller regularly talks about God in his own book.
Summary: During the Dover trial, Ken Miller testified supporting evolution by discussing the presence of "pseudogenes" in humans and other organisms. As Jonathan Witt explains, some scientific papers have reported function for pseudogenes, making Miller's science-stopping arguments suspect.
Summary: When testifying at the Dover trial, Ken Miller's testimony provided a fallacious definition and method of testing for Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity.
Summary: Ken Miller claims that William Dembski infers design by finding mere unlikelihood of an event, but ignores that Dembski always requires both complexity (related to unlikelihood) and a specified pattern to infer design.
Summary: Ken Miller's textbooks once used Haeckel's embryo and promoted Haeckel's false recapitulation theory. To his credit, Miller rewrote his textbook and fixed those errors, but now he's trying to rewrite history by claiming that biologists stopped promoting Haeckel's ideas long ago. Miller's own textbooks refute his false account.