Here’s the third of Ken Miller’s three guest posts on blood clotting, evolution, and intelligent design. (In case you missed them, here are the first and second posts.)

If you’ve had the patience to follow Part 1 and Part 2 of my replies to Casey Luskin’s postings on the blood-clotting cascade, you might be wondering why he’s gone to such trouble to beat a horse (Kitzmiller v. Dover) that left the barn more than three years ago (when that decision was filed). Quite frankly, I wondered a bit about that, too.

Continue reading “Ken Miller’s Final Guest Post: Looking Forward” →

As promised, here’s Ken Miller’s second post on intelligent design, following on yesterday’s introduction. [And here’s the third and final post.]

In Part 1, I showed that Casey Luskin’s charges with respect to my testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover were completely false. Michael Behe did indeed argue, throughout his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box [DBB], that the “entire blood-clotting system” was “irreducibly complex,” and I cited examples from that book to prove it. Therefore, the existence of a living organism missing so much as a single part of that system was indeed a falsification of ID’s blood-clotting argument.

Continue reading “Ken Miller’s Guest Post, Part Two” →

Well, it’s 2009, and my first blog post over at the Year of Science web site is up. I explain why I think this is such a cool image. 

Originally published January 2, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

In September 2005, Ken Miller, a Brown University biologist, took the witness stand during a lawsuit known as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The plaintiffs, a group of parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, objected to “intelligent design” being required to be presented as an scientific alternative to evolution. Miller, the first expert witness called by the plaintiffs, showed that the key claims made by advocates of intelligent design are false. The plaintiffs won the case, and the people of Dover voted out the members of the Dover board of education who had pushed through the intelligent design requirements.

Continue reading “Smoke and Mirrors, Whales and Lampreys: A Guest Post by Ken Miller” →

May all your parasites in 2009 be as lovely as this one, sent from Bonaire by my friend David Fishman. 

Originally published January 1, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.