Ken Miller has written a nice piece for the Boston Globe debunking Ben Stein’s Expelled, and the whole ID movement with it.
A voice like Ken Miller’s is important – because he is a Christian who also accepts the fact of evolution. If any religious-minded readers feel uneasy about this compromise, please do have a look here.
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I myself am wholly sympathetic to the careful maintenance of religious belief in the light of new science. Far better, in my opinion, not to form beliefs about the world on the basis of religion in the first place. But people like Ken Miller should at least provide a voice of reason to those who are religious.
As I final treat I’m embedding a brief video in which Miller talks about a specific prediction that our common ancestry with the (other!) great apes makes about our genome. In particular, while the other apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, we only have 23. This means we “lost” one since our last common ancestor with the chimps. But it didn’t just disappear – we can see where the two older chromosomes fused to form our chromosome number 2. This kind of stuff is just too cool – and also shows the way science works.
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May 14, 2008 at 11:03 am
Brett
Nice article. I watched The Truth Project and noticed that no voice was given to theological evolutionists (or whatever you want to call God-fearing Darwinists).
May 16, 2008 at 9:31 am
kurisuke
I think there tends to be a lot of misrepresentation (intentional or not) about the status of evolutionary theory and the scientists behind it. There’s this sense that some people have which says “This can’t be true, because if it was, then belief X would be in trouble” or something along those lines. Needless to say, I don’t find this to be a very sound sort of reasoning pattern. In any case, it’s always more interesting and informative to hear things straight to the horse’s mouth, as they say.