Kenneth R. Miller > Quotes

“ARE WE REALLY JUST ANIMALS? Of all the questions a skeptical person might ask about Darwin, I’ve come to believe that this is the most important one. Does evolution mean that we are nothing more than beasts? Unlike questions about the age of the earth or the transitional fossils that link mammals to their reptilian ancestors, this is not the kind of question that scientists can easily answer, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s simply not a scientific question. To many of my scientific colleagues, that means that it’s not a question worth answering. But they’re wrong. In some ways, it’s the only question about Darwin’s work that really matters.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“It is high time that we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk through the gates, aware of the dazzling richness of the genuine biological world, there might even be a smile on the Creator’s face — that at long last His creatures have learned enough to understand His world as it truly is.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution – The Critically Acclaimed Investigation into the Controversial Evolution Debates

“If taken at face value, the miraculous explanation would tell us that science is not worth the trouble, that it will never yield the answers we seek, and that nature will forever be beyond all human understanding. Sterile and nonproductive in its consequences, the claim of miracle would put a lid on curiosity, experimentation, and the human creative imagination.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution – The Critically Acclaimed Investigation into the Controversial Evolution Debates

“The mousetrap, ID’s favorite real-world example of an irreducibly complex machine, has been chosen to make this rather complex biochemical point comprehensible to the general public.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“The second point is that, while they acknowledge that small evolutionary changes—“microevolutionary” ones—are possible in the normal course of development, major changes—of the sort they call “macroevolutionary”—are not.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Taking what is unknown, unexplained, or undiscovered today and claiming that it will remain forever beyond our understanding isn’t just poor logic—it’s a lousy bet, considering the rate at which science continues to advance.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“To do so would be to reveal that one is not “open” to other ideas, and that would be an academic sin of the first order.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum even managed to get ID-friendly language inserted into the Senate version of a bill that implemented President Bush’s groundbreaking efforts at education reform.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“As he explains: “Macroevolution is the study of higher level (species, genera, and above) evolutionary patterns that occur on time scales ranging from thousands to millions of years. The speciation, diversification, adaptations, rates of change, trends, and extinction evidenced by fossil horses exemplify macroevolution.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Evolution really does tell us something deep and profound about the world in which we live—something that Darwin glimpsed but that is much more obvious today. As it turns out, there really is a design to life, but it’s not the clumsy, interventionist one in which life is an artificial injection into nature, a contradiction of its physical laws. Rather, it is a design in which life emerges from the laws of the universe around us. That conclusion is unavoidable, robust, and scientific. The elegant universe is a universe of life. And the name of the grand design of life is evolution.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Attorneys for the board, as part of their defense, had promised they would show that ID met the legitimate standards for a scientific theory.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“It is often said that a Darwinian universe is one in which the random collisions of particles govern all events and therefore the world is without meaning. I disagree. A world without meaning would be one in which a Deity pulled the string of every human puppet, and every material particle as well.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search For Common Ground Between God And Evolution

“Science, first and foremost, is a revolutionary activity. A genuinely new discovery changes our view of the world around us. Truly great science overturns our accepted ideas of nature, and therefore always presents a threat to the established order.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Why such a fuss? The issue in this trial was whether the actions of the Cobb County Board of Education, in affixing this sticker to the inside of thousands of public school science textbooks, amounted to a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“As the United States rose to world prominence in the nineteenth century, it became a country uniquely hospitable to science, and science flourished here as never before.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Do the antievolution and intelligent design movements represent genuine revolutionary scientific ideas?”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“The inescapable conclusion that comes from honestly applying the idea of design to the fossil record is that the great intelligence behind ID is a serial creator. He brings into being new species again and again, inexplicably fashioning each one so that it bears a striking resemblance to a species just lost to extinction. In other words, intelligent design is actually a hypothesis of progressive creationism.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“In the language of intelligent design, a mousetrap is “irreducibly complex,” and there you have it—that’s the argument that Paley missed, that’s the cornerstone of the new, scientific, intelligent design movement.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“That principle is “irreducible complexity, ” the claim that complex biological systems are composed of multiple parts, and that the removal of just one part would effectively cause the system to stop functioning.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“To Bloom the great tragedy of modern intellectual life is that the “openness” found in America’s universities is actually an unwillingness to apply reason to solve human problems.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“The antievolution movement consistently identifies evolution as politically leftist (or even communist) and sees Darwin’s theory as the cutting edge of dangerous social trends that act against the traditional, conservative foundations of American law and society.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“The overall pathway of clotting is complex enough to torture college biochemistry majors, and some of my colleagues use it (intentionally or not) for exactly that purpose.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“For more than a century America has occupied a position of scientific leadership and has gradually come to take it for granted. Although neither war nor economic depression nor political conflict has been able to threaten it, I now fear that that is about to change, for something has arisen that may indeed signal a change in our national character. That something is most visible in the debate over evolution, but it extends far beyond the teaching of a single subject in the curriculum of a single scientific discipline. It reveals a deep and profound split in the American psyche, an unease that threatens the way we think of ourselves as a people, the place we hold for science in our lives, and the way in which we will move into the twenty-first century.
What is at stake, I am convinced, is nothing less than America’s scientific soul.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“If that definition seems a bit ordinary, consider that the parts of any living cell (proteins, sugars, even nucleic acids) are just molecules—complicated molecules, to be sure, but just inanimate, dead molecules.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“If I or other witnesses actually had misrepresented ID or the ideas of its proponents, those misrepresentations would have been easy to correct.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“This allowed ID proponents to claim, persuasively but inaccurately, that the new education law required the examination of scientific alternatives to evolution such as intelligent design.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“But what Paley should have added to his argument, the argument from design, was that their complexity is “irreducible.” Take a part away, and useful function disappears.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“American universities and research institutions lead the world in nearly every category of science, a fact borne out by statistics.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“Civil War historians, of course, have written volumes on the profound contradictions in American history and society that made the conflict possible, even inevitable. A thorough study of war, after all, is only partly about troop movements, weapons, and the possession of high ground.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“The second pattern in the fossil record is unmistakable to anyone who examines its individual species in detail.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul