Kenneth Miller

Dear Readers,At the end of his first post squabbling with Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin, Brown University Professor Kenneth Miller refers to some great new work by UC San Diego Professor and member of the National Academy of Science, Russell Doolittle. Doolittle, of course, has worked on the blood clotting cascade for about fifty years! (I discussed some of his work in Chapter 4 of Darwin’s Black Box.) In a new paper Doolittle and co-workers analyze DNA sequence data from a primitive vertebrate, the lamprey, thinking that it might have a simpler clotting cascade than higher vertebrates. (1) It is difficult work, because the sequences of lamprey proteins — even ones that are indeed homologous to the proteins of other vertebrates — are significantly Read More ›

Yesterday, in the first part of my response to Kenneth Miller’s review, in which I addressed his substantive points, I ended by showing that a reference he cited did not contain the evidence he claimed it did. In this final part, I more closely examine Miller’s tendentious style of argumentation. Speaking of throwing around irrelevant references, Miller writes: Telling his readers that the production of so much as a single new protein-to-protein binding site is “beyond the edge of evolution”, [Behe] proclaims darwinian evolution to be a hopeless failure. Apparently he has not followed recent studies exploring the evolution of hormone-receptor complexes by sequential mutations (Science 312, 97-101; 2006), the ‘evolvability’ of new functions in existing proteins — studies on serum paraxonase (PON1) Read More ›