Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul | 
| Author: Kenneth R. Miller
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
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Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
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Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 067001883X
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.8071073
EAN: 9780670018833
ASIN: 067001883X
Publication Date: June 12, 2008
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Product Description
A leading scientist examines the battle between evolution and Intelligent Design in America
At the dawn of the twenty- first century, the debate over Darwins theory of evolution is nearly as contentious as it was in the notorious Scopes trial a century ago. Today, however, people who believe that evolution is only a theory have put their hopes in a concept known as Intelligent Design.
In Only a Theory, Kenneth Miller dissects the claims of the ID movement in the same incisive style that marked his testimony as an expert witness in Pennsylvanias landmark 2005 Dover evolution trial.
Unlike other books on the subject, Only a Theorys critique of ID goes far beyond the scientific claims of the movement. To Miller, Americas soulits place as the worlds leading scientific nationis at risk because of this struggle. As he explains, the tactics of this new assault on science mimic earlier efforts of the academic left to remake science as a relativistic, culturally determined enterprise, rather than a rational search for truth about the natural world. Such marginalization, he argues, would effectively destroy American science.
Despite this analysis, Miller refuses to play the role of pessimist. He sees this as a teachable opportunity, a moment at which public understanding and support for science can be redeemed, and offers nothing less than a prescription for how America can save its scientific soul.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 If you don't get defensive, will make non-evolutionist think July 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Miller does a great job of making his thoughts understandable to the non-scientist such as myself. He also does very well building his argument, but does not convince me that evolution is more than "only a theory." His fear of ID I do not fully understand, because his belief "the world that knew we were coming" is itself ID, even if not to the extent of how ID is defined today.
The first four chapters address specific "flaws" in evolution theory as viewed by ID, giving answers to them from scientific findings that give credence to evolution. The next two chapters "Life's grand design" and "The world that knew we were coming" I found written to address purpose in life. Because science is a study of the material world, these chapters look to be written to address a primary issue from those adhering to ID, and show that a person can believe in evolution and in god and purpose in life.
Miller's greatest concern seems to be for the America's scientific soul, which is the primary target of the last two chapters. In addressing this he is quite critical (though also respectful, which he is throughout the book, something I appreciated very much in his writing) of christians seeking to bring God into the science area. However, while he disagrees with Steven Jay Gould's belief in no God, he is not equally critical of this thought being brought into the discussion of evolution. When it comes to the origin of life, I do not see how God can be eliminated from discussion. While I understand god is beyond the technical definition of science, most people would at least question a god/intelligent designer/greater beiing, when studying the origin of life/earth/universe. Many evolutionists, such as Gould, have been quite vocal of how their understanding of science has impacted their belief in god. If you are going to take belief in god out of science then it needs to be both ways not just believing in god.
Even though I have my disagreements with Miller, I think it is an excellent book and it made me think and give more consideration to what I believe. When a book does this, it is worthy of reading.
 A former evangelical's review. July 17, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Last year I left evangelicalism in favor of agnosticism. A major reason for my departure was twenty-four years of negative experiences within the Church. However, another important impetus was an exposure to deeper levels of science and rationality through the works of Hitchens, Dawkins, Stenger, and others. I had become tired of living with the tension between various conflicting ideas that Christianity requires of a believer, and these authors suggested a more rational alternative. One area of tension in particular was the dissonance between evolution and intelligent design (ID). "Only A Theory" addresses this battle, and it's one of the best and most tactful books I've read on the subject. Indeed, it should act as the obsolescence notice that ID has needed for a long time.
"Only A Theory" focuses on the American battlefront concerning evolution and ID. The two foes recently went head-to-head in Pennsylvania, where both camps were put on trial as a result of the Dover Board of Education's desire to add ID instruction in public school. After hearing testimony from both sides (including the author and ID proponent Michael Behe) and examining the evidence, the court ruled that ID was another name for religious creationism, and it was thrown out of the academic setting. Mr. Miller was encouraged by science's courtroom triumph, but given the strength and righteous indignation of the ID movement, he fears for the future of evolution and the scientific method. The title of this book reflects that concern, since one of ID's biggest catchphrases is that evolution is "only a theory," and therefore other competing "theories" like ID deserve equal hearing.
The author has reason to be afraid. As a former evangelical Christian and seminary graduate, I can affirm that ID is a user-friendly term for a faith-based system of thought that stands at odds with rational science. I've seen "Darwinism" portrayed by the Church as a subtle tool of satanic forces arrayed against God's faithful. Rationalism is considered a slippery slope to atheism and moral relativism, as exemplified by Nietzsche, Nazism, and Communism. To counter this darkness, believers such as Henry Morris responded with scientific creationism. However, that term sounded too religious, so the name was changed to the more palatable "intelligent design." ID star Michael Behe wrote books advocating ID-centric ideas like "irreducible complexity" (IC) to show that gradual evolution could not have produced complex biological organs or processes. Do the proponents of ID have a point, or are they simply in over their heads?
The author argues the latter. He categorically rejects the idea that ID has any scientific merit, and correctly labels it as a philosophical branch of evangelical Christianity. However, far from the polemic statements made by Dawkins and Hitchens, Mr. Miller presents the facts underlying modern science and evolution in a non-inflammatory way. Although he acknowledges that individuals can be biased, he casts science as a non-ideological truth-seeking discipline because of its reliance on natural laws, provable facts, and repeatable results that are independent of political leaning. With that in mind, he's not afraid of demolishing irreducible complexity by citing recent scientific discoveries about its favorite examples, such as the eye, blood clotting, and bacterial flagellum.
But the author is most concerned with ID's dual fatal flaws, two gaping logical holes that would damage American leadership in science and rational progress if ID supplanted evolution as a basis of life's origin. First he shows that ID is really just a fancy term for creationism by quoting ID documents and statements made by its proponents. Bottom line, ID ultimately relies on untestable and unrepeatable supernatural influence vs. testable and repeatable processes based on natural laws. Second, Mr. Miller is convinced that ID encourages laziness of thought, as demonstrated by irreducible complexity. IC makes it easy to view an evolutionary difficulty not as a knowledge barrier to overcome, but as a demonstration of God's creative ability that might as well be left unchallenged. That's a dangerous attitude because it discourages rigorous scientific investigation, ironically by introducing a relativist religious bent based on one faith's concept of God.
This approach was exemplified by my last Christian mentor, who sternly told me that I should simply have faith and accept the writings of Josh McDowell and C. S. Lewis - or face God's corrective "2x4 and lightning bolts." Needless to say, I was not impressed with his line of "reasoning." This "don't ask questions" attitude permeates ID (not to mention church dogma), and flies in the face of rational thought and proven scientific methods. If science merely accepted past findings and failed to innovate, we'd still be riding horse and buggy and living without electricity (much as the Amish faithful do today). I couldn't live with checking my brain at the church door, so I parted ways with my teacher and my faith.
My above experience enables me to identify with the author's fears for the future of science and rationalism, especially due to the rise of conservative evangelicalism in America. As a former evangelical, I know how tenaciously Christians cleave to their belief system. Even thoughtful and well-meaning believers tend to ask safe questions and avoid confronting the holes in ID and church dogma because they fear God's wrath or loss of Christian fellowship. But as in the movie "300," I hope that the advocates of rationality will triumph over the forces of mysticism. Well-written and thoughtful books like "Only a Theory" will certainly help, and it has my highest recommendation. Other good books that deal with science and faith are "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design," by Michael Shermer; "God: The Failed Hypothesis," by Victor J. Stenger; and "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin" by David Quammen.
Evolution, Science, and America's Scientific Soul July 17, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Science has prospered in this country because to a great degree its character matches the American character. In short, America as a scientific soul. We are practical, pragmatic, demanding. We want to see the evidence, and because we tend not to rely on authority, we want to see it for ourselves.... We serve as an incubator of ideas, an engine of scientific creativity that has lifted the condition of mankind everywhere and opened new horizons of ndersatnding from which the rest of the world can draw." Miller, Only a Theory, p. 15)
That, of course, is one view of America. One might sardonically say, using Miller's words, that it is "only a theory." A chart presented on page 214 of the book presents another: according to the 2005 survey presented therein, the US scored in 33rd place in its citizens' acceptance of evolutionary theory. We are one place ahead of Turkey, one palce behind Cyprus and a chief economic rival - Japan - is 29 places above us at number 5.
Ken Miller writes Only a Theory out of concern that the intelligent design movement threatens to compromise the state of America's barely-surviving scientific preeminence. To borrow his words, ID threatens to gut America of its "scientific soul." It does this by changing what it means to do science: if science can be theistic, then why even bother looking for natural explanations to things? If you can't get enough real evidence for your claim, set up a court hearing and let judges decide. Can't get published in journals? Write a books for the popular press, do some op-eds for a newspaper, and get political support. If intelligent design succeeds in its current missions, all of these methods will be validated and, in turn, nations that actually do science will become the scientific leaders in the world.
Of course, before we can ask what will happen if people actually believe that stuff, we have to demonstrate why believing that stuff is sloppy thinking and bad science. Miller does and does and does. His method is to take ID at its word: does it offer a solid research program? No. Has it ever? No. Is the fossil evidence more consistent with design than evolution? Very much no. (Miller points out that if design were true, that would mean that the designer would have had to keep on designing new forms as the previous ones die out, all of which slightly resemble their predecessors to the point of plagarism. Or is it more likely that they evolved?)
Miller offers countless examples to show evolution much more likely and sensical than ID. If ID were true, how would it account for the idea that apes, chimps and humans - no other animals - have 23, rather than 24, pairs of chromosomes, and that ONLY these three species have a chromosome two that consists of two fused-together chromosomes? If evolution is used, the explanation is simply that our common ancestor carried this genetic "misstep" and, as descendents of "it," we also inherited this. ID has no great answer. Genetics also shows that several benign copying errors are found on many related species while not found on other species. Time after time after time Miller presents us with evidences that fit completely well into an evolutionary scheme, but would appear convoluted and nonsensical under a scheme which denied macroevolution. True to our American love for pragmatism, Miller shows that evolution makes sense of the disperate data and is corroborated time after time. ID, on the other hand, is as useless in its ability to make prediction, to generate ANY line of independent research (as the only place for it to go is into theology), and to fit the known facts. (No, I do not pretend that Miller's evidence against ID will be strong enough to convince its proponents, but I don't think much will.)
After Miller shows why it is foolish to believe intelligent design, he goes on to show why it might be dangerous to science in the long run. First, he shows that ID is "irreducible theology" in that it seeks to redefine sciecne to allow supernatural theories to qualify as scientific. Of course, doing that is simply death to science. Why try and find out any more about HIV, if we can just scientifically posit that God did it to punish us for our sins? Why bother to discover how DNA began, if we can just posit that an invisible "designing fairy" did it? In short, Miller rightly worries that if supernaturalism is allowed to be scientific, we can just stop the whole discipline right there, as we could "theologize" explanations for any- and everyhing. (Miller even shows us a great example where Behe advocated that research into a certain area was hopeless, only to find out how wrong he was. Thank goodness Behe's supernaturalism didn't win the day.)
Lastly, Miller sets out a case that, were ID to win the day, it would succumb science to the type of relativism (all claims are on equal footing), politicization (let the courts and Rick Santorum deicde) and rhetoricization that has chewed apart so many humanities and social science fields. Using Allan Bloom convservative "Closing of the American Mind," Miller argues that the very thins Bloom could railed against in academia are now being used by the ID crowd to rip science apart.
As Richard Dawkins (among others) have remarked, "there is a thing called being so open-minded that your brains fall out." This is largely the case made in Miller's book. Science may be hospitable to the American character of questioning authority, but it is not the democracy that ID would make it into. All claims are not created equal. Evolution has shown itself to be the clear winner amongst the sciences. ID has shown itself to be the clear winner amongs Evangelical churches, one think tank in Seattle, and public opinion polls. MIller's argument may sound undemocratic, but it is quite valid: science is what science does, and science does evolution.
A must have July 16, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Dr. Ken Miller is a churchgoing Christian that also happens to be a trained biologist and one of the most vocal and capable defenders of evolution. One of Miller's strengths is that he has a keen understanding of the political, social, and legal conditions that have given rise to the intelligent design movement.
The intelligent design movement is really a legal strategy designed to circumvent court rulings that forbid the teaching of creationism in public school science classes. It is also, however, a grassroots political strategy designed to unite persons of faith against evolution.
The pursuit of the former goal is, of course, the reason that ID proponents are so adamant about replacing the word "God" with the euphamistic "intelligent designer". In pursuit of the latter goal, they relentlessly attempt to portray evolution as being the equivalent of atheism. If they can successfully convince persons of faith that they must choose between evolution and their religion, they can scare up quite a bit of grassroots political support. This strategy, unfortunately, ignores the reality that there are millions of deeply religious Americans that accept the scientific evidence for evolution. Dr. Miller is one such person and, as such, his is a voice that needs to be heard.
Miller has a real gift for demolishing unsound arguments in an easy to understand, easy to read, entertaining way. His tone is consistently respectful and mature -- a welcome change from the venom that so often characterizes evolution-creationism debates.
Behe, Dembski, and the other intelligent design advocates attack evolution by pointing to highly complex biological systems and arguing that they could not have evolved because they have too many crucial components to have developed gradually. They seem to think that complex, multi-part biological systems can evolve only by accumulating, one by one, component parts that are useless until the complete system is in place. The flaws in that argument have been pointed out by many already, but I haven't seen anyone do it better than Miller does here. Miller gets it exactly right -- complex, multi-part biological systems evolve by co-opting elements of pre-existing systems and modifying them (or modifying a copy of them) for a new use. He walks us through several specific examples that show, in plenty of detail, how this happens. He does an excellent job of working the reader through the logic in a way that allows the open-minded reader to clearly understand the error that Behe and Dembkski are making.
Another major argument of the intelligent design crowd is the claim that complex biological information (such as the information encoded in DNA) cannot arise through natural processes. Often, the claim is that the information content in DNA cannot increase. As a biologist, Miller is keenly aware of the vast scientific literature that shows that complex specified information CAN evolve through natural processes such as duplication of a gene, followed by modification of one of the copies to serve a new function. Again, Miller provides specific examples, and does an admirable job of explaining them in terms that the layman can easily understand.
This, I think, is Miller's great strength -- he has an unparalleled ability to work through the logic of the various arguments and explain them in a way that is easy to understand and fun to read. Along the way, he also manages to convey to the reader his own sense of awe at the beauty and complexity of living things and the evolutionary processes that gave rise to them. He also conveys to the reader a sense of his own deep religous faith and how that faith can fit comfortably with evolution.
 Half-Baked Creationism July 10, 2008
6 out of 19 found this review helpful
Kenneth Miller is a skillful and imaginative expository writer who has shown his ability in high school and college textbooks. In this book, however, he presents an eclectic mix of ideas that begs more questions than it answers.
In the chapter entitled "Embracing Design" he briefly discusses Michael Behe's central argument in The Edge of Evolution, all the while missing the whole point of that argument. He quotes Nick Matzke's statement that "chloroquine resistance [in malaria] is both more complex and vastly more probable than Behe thinks." But Behe's number for the probability of chloroquine resistance is not merely "what he thinks"; it is the empirical result of a study of the frequency of occurrence of malarial resistance to chloroquine done by Nicholas White.
In the chapter "Life's Grand Design" he briefly discusses Evo Devo, mentions the "genetic toolkit" of master regulatory genes, and asserts peremptorily that the gap between micro- and macro-evolution has now been closed. But he never wonders in these pages how this complex genetic toolkit, which is present across phyla and across eons of time and apparently had considerable evolutionary foreknowledge, ever got there in the first place and how it fits together with convergent evolution.
In the chapter "The World That Knew We Were There," he presents what is basically a teleological view of cosmic history that has a distinct creationist ring to it. God created the universe and endowed it with physical constants that from the beginning were finely tuned for the emergence of life. God directed the evolution of life, not by acting on genes directly, but by providing for the presence of complex "adaptive spaces" containing niches that have to be filled, one way or another, by convergent evolution every time Stephen Gould's "evolutionary tape" is rewound and rerun. Since self-aware human beings are products of convergent evolution and have their own pre-ordained adaptive space, even if on a rerunning of the evolutionary tape vertebrates are extinguished or never come into being, there will be, perhaps, self-aware mollusks.
Kenneth Miller worries that the notion of intelligent design could undo four centuries of Western science, but he should recognize that the view that the world is intelligently ordered certainly did not hamper the philosophical or scientific thought and work of, among others, Plato, Aristotle, William of Ockham, Nicholas Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. On the contrary, it motivated them to investigate that order. He is right that a "Closing of the Scientific Mind" would be a tragedy, but he does not consider the possibility that lack of imagination and a dogmatic adherence to Darwinism could be a part of that closing.
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