Ken Miller in Birmingham
Noted Brown University biologist and slayer of windmills, Kenneth Miller, came to Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday November 5. The room was packed with what seemed to be about 200 (mostly students and some faculty). Overall, Miller displayed the affable but subliminally arrogant attitude I’ve come to expect in some academics. Miller began by giving a long list of his publications interspersed along with some obligatory self-deprecating humor, the apparent take-home message being “look at what a smart and prolific boy I am.” He then launched into Kitzmiller v. Dover and said (whether out of genuine misinformation or outright disingenuousness I cannot say) that the Discovery Institute “put them [the school board] up to it.” After giving a wholly inaccurate definition of ID as the idea that “design in the form of outside intelligent intervention is required to account for the origin of living things,” he launched into the bulk of his lecture most of which simply gave examples of common descent as “proof” of Darwinian evolution. I must say that I was surprised by the degree to which Miller absolutely savaged ID. It’s not that he simply disagrees with ID, the substance of his message was that ID is a creationist group (no one was mentioned by name) with the Discovery Institute as its front organization working (in his words) “against scientific rationality.” The thrust of his ID comments were wholly denigrating and dismissive. Miller later admitted that evolution was the product of “design in nature” in search of “adaptive spaces.” His discussion of design was frankly bizarre; at times he almost sounded like a Gaia proponent—I couldn’t figure out if by design he meant just some sort of unfolding or self-direction or if “design” was somehow synonymous with natural selection. The entire presentation in this regard was quite fuzzy. There was a lot of conflation of concepts—my personal favorite being his conflation of evolution, genetics, and Gregor Mendel. Anyone listening to Miller on this would have thought that Mendel was simply carrying Darwin’s ideas forward; he did not, of course, point out that Darwin’s adherence to pangenesis and the notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics was quite different from that of Mendel. The rest was pretty predictable.