Brown University Catholic biochemist Ken Miller is to receive the Stephen Jay Gould Prize prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution because
Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method. Dr. Miller received his PhD in Biology from the University of Colorado and taught from 1974 to 1980 at Harvard University. While at Harvard he frequently interacted with and was inspired by Stephen Jay Gould. He first became aware of antievolutionism as a beginning professor at Brown University.
“The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.“
“There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.“
Past winners:
2009 Dr. Eugenie C. Scott
2010 Dr. Sean B. Carroll
Sources say he’s their man all right.
His passion and skill at rebutting the claims of creationists eventually led him to serve as a key witness in several important and high-profile evolution-creationist court cases, including the well-known Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in 2005, the decision for which effectively forestalled further attempts to mandate the teaching of intelligent design in high school science curricula. Dr. Miller is also well known for his widely used high-school biology textbook, Biology, co-authored with Joseph Levine.
With its strong unifying theme of evolution, this book was at the heart of court cases in 2004 and 2005 and has been defended from creationist inroads through Miller’s several debates with school board members and other decision-makers, helping to educate them as to the importance of the inclusion of evolution in their standards and curricula. He has written insightfully about the relationships between science and religion in his 1999 book Finding Darwin’s God, and his most recent book Only a Theory – Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (2008) was named to Amazon’s list of Best Science Books of 2008 and was a finalist for the National Academy of Sciences’ Communication Award in 2009.