Kenneth R. Miller
Kenneth R. Miller
Kenneth Raymond Milleris an American cell biologist and molecular biologist who is currently Professor of Biology and Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University. Miller's primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, especially chloroplast thylakoid membranes. Miller is noted as a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is particularly known for his opposition to creationism, including the intelligent...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth14 July 1948
CountryUnited States of America
A true conservative is on the side of science.
Once upon a time, growing up male gave little boys a sense of certainty about the natural order of things. We had short hair, wore pants, and played baseball. Girls had long hair, wore skirts, and, no matter how hard they tried, always threw a baseball just like a girl.
Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.
Any suggestion that science and religion are incompatible flies in the face of history, logic, and common sense.
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.
For much of history it was possible to believe that the great diversity of life on Earth was a fixed creation, that the living world had never changed. But when the first stirrings of industry demanded that fuel be dug from the earth and hillsides be leveled for roads and railways, the Earths true past was dug up in abundance.
I am always struck by the fact that human awareness of our place in nature, like so much of modern science, began with the Industrial Revolution.
The anti-evolution forces have been searching for a new strategy that would accomplish the same end. That purpose is, if not to get evolution out of the schools altogether, then at least undermine it as much as possible in the minds of students.
Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.
The piano's world encompasses glass-nerved virtuos and stomping barrel-housers in fedoras; it is a world of pasture and storm, of perfumed smoke, of liquid mathematics.
The scientific argument advanced for intelligent design at the Dover trial, those arguments collapsed, scientifically and intellectually
We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution.
Whether conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or agnostic, the more students learn of biology, the more they accept evolution.
Science is about nature. And God, if he exists, transcends nature.