Even though it has been 162 years since Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking treatise, On the Origin of Species, many misconceptions and outright falsehoods about the theory of evolution through natural selection continue to persist. I was therefore incredibly honoured to be joined in this episode by renowned biologist, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, one of America’s foremost public defenders of evolution, to help clear up some of the confusion. For instance, I asked my guest to dispel the oft-repeated claim that evolution is “only a theory.” In his excellent book, Finding Darwin’s God, Dr. Miller contends that the theory of evolution should be understood as both history and mechanism, so I asked him to elaborate upon what he meant. We further discussed another common creationist misrepresentation, namely that evolution is simply a random process that could not possibly account for the appearance of design we see throughout the natural world. I asked Dr. Miller about the evidence for evolution, which as I claimed now consists of many mountains, and not merely a single Himalaya, as it were, and he homed in on upon three major areas, namely the extensive fossil record, genetics, and the ability to date the age of the earth using radioactivity. We also discussed transitional or intermediate fossils, how evolution is a vast branching process and not a teleological one culminating in humans as the apex of some scale of nature, the difference between micro and macro evolution, often misused by creationists, and why the second law of thermodynamics definitely does not invalidate the theory of evolution. I received a short anatomy lesson about the poorly designed nature of the human eye, which is interestingly still used by creationists, drawing selectively and disingenuously from a single paragraph in On the Origin of Species, as a supposed refutation of Darwinian evolution. The last area of scientific interest we delved into is the call by some for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis to incorporate epigenetics, which is an exciting new area of evolutionary biology that is expanding upon and enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution. At a few points in the discussion Dr. Miller references the relevance of evolution to the current global Covid-19 pandemic, reminding listeners that the term variants should be understood as evolution in action, while the remarkably rapid breakthroughs in developing vaccines are thanks in large measure to the flourishing field of modern genomics.

Dr. Miller’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Miller

Kitzmiller V. Dover Area School District Trial Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District

‘Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial’ documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2xyrel-2vI

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