It's a Scary Time to Be a Scientist (with Dr. Kenneth Miller)

Dr. Kenneth Miller is an American cell biologist, molecular biologist, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brown University. He has thoughts about the Trump administration's war on vaccines, public safety, and the scientific community.

VIDEO of this discussion

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 3 (00:56):
Quick clarification and correction before I get into my conversation
with doctor Ken Miller, a world renowned cell biologist. This
guy is highly respected in his field, an educator, and
just he's the real thing. He is also religious. He
is a very public and professing Catholic, and so I

(01:17):
spent the first twenty minutes talking about the Church and
his faith and all those things, and around the five
minute mark I mentioned an official proclamation by the Church
that evolution was in opposition to sacred scriptures. And while
the Church has been wildly schizophrenic on evolution and all

(01:38):
kinds of other science, and has in many ways been
anti science. In my opinion, that particular quote, that reference
was poorly sourced, and that is my fault. So in
the video version you can actually see the corrective note
appear on screen that says my bad, but you can't
see it in the audio, and I want to do
the right thing. Accuracy is important. I referenced something that

(02:01):
was not properly sourced. I am now correcting the record
because that is what good science does. But the conversation
itself is fascinating, and I think you're going to enjoy it.
So here we go. It is a pleasure to speak
to my special guest today. Doctor Ken Miller is a

(02:24):
cell biologist. He is a molecular biologist and Professor Emeritus
of Biology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He
also stands in opposition to the literal Biblical creation story,
and he lays out his case for an evolved human
being in his book Finding Darwin's God, Only a Theory

(02:48):
and the Human Instinct. Doctor Miller is highly respected even
in the atheist, skeptical, secular scientific community because he is legit.
I've also heard rumors he is a pretty swell guy.
Doctor Ken Miller, thanks for being here, my friend.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Happy to do that. I'll see how I can dispel
those rumors. But but let's.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Go true story. I was at a convention in twenty
eleven and I was there with my friend Abby Smith,
who's a virologist, and we were talking about Michael bah
and the Discovery Institute and those cats, and so she
was going hard at him and like, you got to
be kidding me. This is wrong, this is factually untrue.

(03:33):
This is a misrepresentation of the science. And your name
came up and she just lit up like a Christmas tree.
She's like, he's totally legit. And ever since then, I thought, well,
I sure would like to have a conversation with this guy.
But it only took fourteen years to make that happen,
but I'm glad it finally did. So you're on the

(03:53):
front lines standing up for science these days. We are
necked deep in the war on science. Before we talk
about that, I have to do my due diligence and
get in front of the whole Catholic thing. I just
have to ask the question. The Catholic Church has been
a bit you know, it's had multiple personalities on biblical

(04:17):
creation versus evolution until I think it was what eighty
eight when Pope John Paul the Second finally came forward
and said, hey, it's legit. I don't know, how do
you deal with Catholicism and evolutionary science.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, you're a bit out of date. It wasn't nineteen
eighty eight. It was nineteen forty eight.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
And the first pope to write favorably about evolution was
Pious the twelfth and he made very clear that the
scientific story of human evolution was compatible with Christianity. So
that has been Catholic thinking for a long time. If
you walk into the beautiful Life Science building at Notre

(05:02):
Dame University, one of the country's great Catholic universities, you
will see inscribed on the floor a quote from Theodosius Dobzansky,
possibly the most eminent evolutionary geneticis of the twentieth century,
and the quote is nothing in biology makes sense except

(05:23):
in the light of evolution. So I think the attitude
of the Church in terms of embracing science. You're right,
has been back and forth over the centuries, but certainly
in the last several decades the Church has made no
bones about the fact that it supports science, it supports
scientific inquiry. And I can go back if you really

(05:45):
want me to. I can go back to Saint Augustine,
Bishop of Hippo talking about Genesis and how Genesis should
be interpreted in the light of science.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
But wasn't there pushback when on the origin of species? Was? Probably?
I mean? And I think even in the mid twentieth
century the Church had called this, They'd called evolution opposed
to sacred scripture. And maybe this is just the clerics
being clerics, human beings disagreeing, as clergy often do when

(06:16):
it comes to the interpretation of their faith. Would that
be fair?

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Well, I'm not sure where you get that quote about
it in being an affront it's a sacred scripture or
who might have said it. But the thing I can
tell you right now is that I've been, as you know,
I've been outspoken in the defense of evolution. I co
authored a high school textbook which makes evolution the centerpiece
of the study of biology. I was the lead witness

(06:40):
in the Kitsmeller trial in Pennsylvania twenty years ago on
the issue of intelligent design, and since then I've actually
received an embarrassingly large number of honors from Catholic institutions.
I can rattle them off if you want, but me
any list of honors is pointless. The fact of the
matter is that at the current time, and certainly over

(07:02):
the last several decades, the Church has done its best
I could get, you know, I can get a little
goofy about this and say that the Church realizes it
behaved rather badly during the whole Galileo thing, and they've
they've been trying to make up for it ever since.
And by the way, John Paul the Second actually convened

(07:22):
a panel which absolved Galileo. Now Galileo doesn't care much anymore,
I don't think. But one of the signals that John
Paul the Second gave to the scientific community was that
absolution of Galileo. And John Paul the second also convened
a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which draws

(07:46):
really eminent scientists from all over the world, and wrote
them a letter basically pointing out that there was considerable
evidence in favor of evolution and that it really was
not a challenge to the faith. So I am as
a scientist, I feel very much at home within the
Catholic Church, a church that, by the way, has done

(08:07):
a lot of things to test my faith, but its
attitude towards science is not one of those things.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Okay, well, I mean I didn't bring you on to
go hard at Catholicism. That is a conversation I think
we can have. I mean, they were pretty late to
the party on Galileo, among so many other things. And
we talk about, you know, does someone who is a
professing Catholic, you know, does that give cover to the
abuses within the church. And there have been so many oh.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
God, you know, And like I said, I have many
problems with the church, and I can One of the
things that I think people often underestimate is how absolutely
infuriating the clergy sexist abuse scandals have been two Catholics,
because those are our kids, and in that respect, it

(08:57):
really really hit home. And I've even seen that become
an issue in my own parish. And it's just extraordinary.
Like I said, the church is the church is a
human institution. And I don't mean to say that to
excuse anything. The sins and abuses of the church are extraordinary.
My father, who was really quite a religious guy, who

(09:19):
had actually studied for the priests for a couple of
years before, as he was to tell me later, he
decided to like girls too much. My father used to say,
there are popes in Hell, perhaps the majority.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Wow, well I'm not. I'm not giving covered to the
Catholic Church when I say that. A lot of what
we don't talk about beyond the Catholic Church across Protestant faiths.
So I think the statistic of abuse is pretty close
to the same, and yet we're not talking as much.
I guess we're talking about the Southern Baptist Convention quite
a bit these days because they think it's the year eleven.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
But the whole sexual abuse thing is really an issue
of people in institutional authority. And I'll tell you another
institution with which I am proud to have been associated,
and that is the Boy Scouts. I love Scouting. I
was in well it's never in past tense. I am
an Eagle Scout and for several summers I was a

(10:18):
camp counselor in northern New Jersey, teaching scout craft and
swimming and life saving. And the Boy Scouts of America,
as you know, suffered tremendous sexual abuse scandals, had to
pay an enormous amount of money bankrupted itself. It's an
institution which I loved because scouting meant a lot to

(10:40):
me growing up, but it certainly hasn't covered itself with
honor with respect to policing sexual abuse.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
I want to call you Ken and I, but I
want to respect the title. You know, doctor Kenneth Miller.
May I asked the next question, but I don't want
to be so formal about it.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
But I have to tell you something, which is my
late mother, who by the way, was a nurse, once
heard somebody refer to me when they discovered I was
a college professor as doctor Miller, and my mother immediately
grabbed that person's arm and said, he's not a real doctor.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
So are you a Ken or a Kenneth? Growing up?
Did you? Was it Kenny might be hot.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
When I was growing up? I was Kenny, I decided,
and that was true in high school too, And I
decided when I went to college that Kenny was in
the past, that I was going to be Ken. So
so that's how my my college friend and friends and
professional associatesnomy is Ken.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
So tell me about Pope Leo No I when Francis
came on board. I was a bit I don't know,
back and forth on him. Obviously, I'm, you know, those
on the gilded thrones in a world with so much suffering,
I do struggle with that. I struggle with their position
on like why aren't women in positions of leadership? And
then we get in here. But I you know, he

(12:00):
was more egalitarian. God loved everybody, and he I think
he was very supportive of LGBT people, and occasionally the
people conclave would have a heart attack when he would
speak his mind in these very humanistic ways, you know.
And then he's gone, and now Leo's in, and I'm like,
there's some stuff there that is a bit encouraging. He's

(12:21):
pushing back, i know, against some of the inhumanity and cruelty.
Do you have an opinion on this guy.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
I'll tell you what I think any Catholic would tell you.
I can't believe we have an American pope. It just
absolutely I have to tell you something though. I'm a
baseball fan, and I was actually sitting at Fenway Park
and in between innings, I pulled out my cell phone

(12:49):
and I just punched the news button and then there
was a headline there that said American elected pope, and
I said, holy whatever out loud at a crowded ballpark.
Everybody around he said what happened because they wanted to
know if it was a disaster or something like that,

(13:10):
and I said, I can't believe this. There's an American
elected pub So, first of all, that's just incredulous. He
seems to be an extraordinary man who has an internationalist background.
I know that certainly people in South America don't automatically
think of him as being an American because during his

(13:30):
time there he's so blended with the culture. And I
think it's extremely important for the leader of the Catholic
Church to be an internationalist because the church is international,
and the greatest growth of the church is, i'm sure
you know, is in the developing world. I have high
hopes for him. He hasn't taken firm doct triantal positions

(13:51):
so far, but he speaks of humility, he speaks of service.
He does not seem to embrace a dogmatic and accusatory
version of the faith, but rather one that welcomes people
in as he should. So, you know, I think the

(14:11):
jury is still out. Ultimately, I absolutely loved Pope Francis,
and I really think that the fact that the cardinals
chose Leo to succeed Francis means that they want to
continue Francis's legacy, and I hope that's true.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
Is some of that, do you think evolving to stay
relevant in what might be considered a less and less
religious world. I mean, if he's going to expand that,
does that mean he's going to expand it so that
women can serve in the priesthood and there can be
gay clergy, etc. Do you see that coming?

Speaker 2 (14:46):
I would hope so, but I'm not sure. I'm not
sure that's going to happen. You know, I'd be simply
happy if priests were allowed to marry. My father probably
would have continued his own study for the priesthood if
marriage an option. And I've always thought that was one
of the problems with the church, which is the priests,
of course, take a vow of celibacy, and that doesn't

(15:11):
make them very good marriage counselors.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, I can imagine that.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
About other things. And you know that, you know, ministering,
ministering to families is really the business of the clergy
and the limited experience of people and the priests in
that respect, I think is a problem.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
So given that the National Catholic Register reported fifty six
percent of professing Catholics voted for Trump in the last election,
more than half. Yeah, this is the church representing I mean,
your faith, but they don't represent apparently your values at
least when it comes to Donald Trump. What's your take

(15:52):
on trumpers in the Catholic tribe.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Well, it's I think it's the same as a Trumper everywhere.
Believe me. I put I slathered my pickup truck with
an awful lot of Harris Waltz bumper stickers, making sure
that I parked it in a prominent place in the
church parking lot on Sunday. So I think you know, everybody,

(16:21):
everybody who saw them, and I'm not the only one
who were anti Trump stickers at the time of the election.
But I do think that Trump had, you know, has
made a number of explicit appeals to people of faith
and to Catholics, and many people took those at faith value,

(16:43):
face value, despite the fact that he has led a
life which is extraordinarily non Christian, you know. And I
can just rattle off the list of marriages, affairs, abuses,
his attitude towards the poor, his attitude towards immigrants, his
attitude towards social inequality, none of which are conversant with

(17:07):
anybody's idea of the teachings of Jesus. So I think,
you know, many people reflexively figure, Okay, he's a friend,
he's a friend of faithfulness, but he's a friend in
a very cynical way, simply because he wants their votes.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
If I can jump in quickly. Though, I know that
many in my fundamentalist circle here it became a one
issue vote for them because the church takes a very
hard line on reproductive choice or lack of right. It
was about abortion. So in the minds of many fundamentalists
in my culture, it was no matter what else goes down,
got to stop the murder of babies, and all thinking

(17:47):
shuts down after that. And I would think that would
be rampant in the Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
So well, I think it is certainly in the official church.
But I have to tell you, you know, one of the
interesting things to explain this to people. My wife and
I I've been blessed with a very happy marriage. We've
been married for fifty three years. And as I used
to tell people when we were younger and of a
certain age, that my wife and I love each other

(18:14):
very much. We continue to love each other very much,
but we only have two children. Figure that out. And
it turns out that confidential surveys show that Catholics actually
practice birth control at higher percentages than people in the
nation as a whole. So some of the churches teaching
on sexual practices and sexual morality so called, are really

(18:40):
honored only in the breach. And I do remember when
John Carey was running for president, our pastor gave a
sermon claiming that anyone who voted for Carrie was endorsing
murder and therefore was guilty of immortal sin. It was
one of the few times I made sure I was
the last one out of mass to speak to the pastor,

(19:01):
and I told him and I said, father, I will
come to you. You can confess many sins, but I
will not confess the sin of being a democrat. And
I resent you know what you said, because there are
a lot of issues on the ballot at that time
and now besides abortion, and I think, you know, I
think single issue voting on an issue like that is
a mistake.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
You're not exactly selling me on the church. I mean
it sounds to me. I'm just saying you stand in contrast.
You know, what's that line, if you have to distance
yourself from fundamentalism, is there a problem with your religion's fundamentals?
And I think that's a fair question. Yeah, you know,
do you fear the institution has simply misunderstood or occasionally misrepresented,

(19:42):
what your faith truly is, because that's a pretty big
miss for the largest church in the world.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Well, I think there are two issues here. One is
I really think the church completely missed the vote on
contraception and when the pill. And I'm old enough to
remember when the pill first became available and came into usage.

(20:08):
Paul the sixth was the pope at that time, and
many of his advisers said, you know, this is something
the church can it, it should endorse. He did not,
and I think that was a terrible mistake. And I,
for the life of me, cannot find anything in scripture,
anything in the teachings of Jesus, anything even in church

(20:30):
tradition that would condemn contraception. To me, it makes absolutely
no sense unless the idea is you know simply well,
we want to have as many little baby Catholics as possible,
so we're not going to endorse not to endorse contraception
on the issue. On the issue of abortion, abortion, I

(20:51):
certainly understand the Church's desire not to endorse slippery slope
where tinkering with life becomes the no. But my argument
as to why I disagree with the Church on this
is basically that having the Church dictate the secular laws

(21:13):
that would apply to everyone is overstepping the boundary. It's
one thing to teach that abortion is a sin, as
the Church does, and I should add that the Church
also teaches the divorce is a sin and a whole
host of other things. But that does not mean that
we should lobby civil authorities to basically enforce our notion

(21:33):
of sinfulness and write it into civil law. And that's
certainly the way I feel about the Church's attitude sort
of abortion.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Coming up next, I'm going to talk specifically to doctor
Miller about this war on vaccines, and I want to
get some education on the mRNA vaccine, which seems to
be kind of a flashpoint for controversy. We're going to
get into that and more next I am being given

(22:04):
the honor of joining a host of other speakers and presenters, entertainers,
et cetera on the weekend of October eleventh and twelfth
in Sacramento, California for California Free Thought Day. We're going
to all be out there that weekend at the State
Capitol Building, and you are invited, so anybody out there
on the West coast, it's going to be huge. That's

(22:25):
October eleventh and twelfth. I'm going to be in Albuquerque
speaking for the Humanist of New Mexico October twenty fifth,
and then Secular Hub has invited me out to Denver
on December the sixth. All the details are on my
website just click on the speaking tab at Seth Andrews
dot com. Continuing now my conversation with cell biologist and

(22:50):
educator doctor Kenneth Miller. You've been so patient with me.
This is the kind of thing you and I could
price it down in a living room and just by
the way, everybody, this is how discourse is done. You
and I have both seen the Internet where it immediately
we'd be labeling each other and going hard. And I'm
a fan. I literally follow your stuff. I think you're amazing,

(23:12):
and I want to talk about vaccines for a little while.
Can we do that?

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Absolutely so?

Speaker 3 (23:21):
RFK Junior just canceled what half a billion dollars in
vaccine related contracts. What does that even mean? What are
the implications on this?

Speaker 2 (23:33):
There also is a rumor, I don't know how much
credence to put on what I read in the Daily
Beast this morning, that he might be about he might
be about ready to remove authorization for all COVID mRNA vaccines,
which would be an absolute terrible tragedy.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Now, if I may, I need some definitions for me
and for the audience. What is an m RNA vaccine?
Lay it out in layperson's terms.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Well, mRNA stands for messenger RNA, and messenger RNAs are
small molecules that in general carry messages. That's why they
get the name. From the DNA sequence in the nucleus
of a cell into the rest of the cell, where
a protein synthesizing factory called the ribosome takes that message

(24:24):
and reads it out like a piece of tape and
assembles one amino acid after another into a long chain.
And that's how you build a protein. That's how you
build keratin that's in hair. That's how you build miasin
the muscle. Protein, that's how you build hemoglobin, the protein
that carries oxygen in the bloodstream. Well, what a messenger

(24:44):
RNA vaccine is is basically a way to trick our
own cells into producing material that will get the immune
system to respond. So specifically talking about the covid vaccine,
very early in the COVID pandemic, a Chinese scientist did

(25:04):
the complete sequence of the covid genome and published it,
very much against the wishes of the Chinese government, by
the way, and on this side of the pond, people
looked at that sequence and thought, ah, here's a particular
region in the viral genome that codes for a protein
on the surface of the virus. If we can coax

(25:27):
human cells to make a piece of that protein, which
is going to look foreign to our immune system, our
immune system will react to it and will make antibodies
against that protein. Then, if you're ever exposed to the virus,
at the instant that the virus enters your bloodstream, your
body will already have antibodies to neutralize them, and that

(25:50):
would produce vaccine induced immunity, and the messenger or any vaccines,
Almost all which most Americans have had at this point
basically consist of a little lipid fatty layer with a
little piece of messenger RNA inside it. Once they're injected
into the bloodstream, the lipid layer on the outside enables

(26:11):
them to fuse with the membranes of our cells, principally
muscle cells, as it turns out, and the cell can't
tell that messenger RNA from the one that it produces itself,
so it very simply follows instructions produces this fragment of
the viral protein. It has instructions on it that tell
the cell to release it into the bloodstream. So what

(26:34):
happens with a messenger RNA vaccine is our bodies get
a fragment of the virus in circulation. It doesn't do
anything bad, but it does prompt the immune system to
make those antibodies. It's a marvelous technology. The inventors of
this technique, not the vaccine percent, but the inventors of

(26:54):
this technique were awarded the Nobel Prize. And this technique
of using RNA to modify protein synthesis by our own
selves now shows promise in treating cancer. And a whole
host of other diseases as well as producing vaccines. It's
a fruitful area of scientific inquiry and to shut it down,

(27:15):
even partially, it is a crime. It's just terrible.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
So a couple of Devil's Advocate questions that have been
fox newsed at us for the past several years. Hey,
that COVID vaccine was developed awfully quickly, Like, come on,
they didn't have time to they didn't have time to
properly that this who knows what we're injecting into our bodies?
And then came the conversations about the alterations of DNA, which,

(27:40):
as I understand it is impossible. Correct.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, let's take those one at a time. First of all,
developed quickly. The messenger or in a platform has been
developed over a decade and a half, so this has
been studied for a long time. So basically, the technique
of using message to potentially make a vaccine was well
developed and was tested, and fortunately was on the shelf

(28:07):
and was ready to go. What did happen very quickly
was it scientists at Fiser and Maderna took that published sequence,
which fortunately came very quickly from a Chinese scientific lab
immediately realized here's a weak spot for the virus. They
very quickly. It took them about three weeks to actually

(28:28):
produce the very first COVID vaccine. But then in terms
of speed, as you might remember, it was well you
might remember if you were following vaccine development, which I was,
it was more than a year of clinical trials phase one,
phase two, phase three, first of all to make sure
it did no harm. Secondly to make sure that it

(28:48):
was not just safe but also affected, and then finally
to try it on people of different ages, backgrounds, health conditions,
and so forth. All of that was done in mass trials.
The vaccine proved to be incredibly safe and also incredibly effective.
The speed with which it was developed shows two things.

(29:11):
One is that the mRNA vaccine platform was ready to
go at the time COVID burst on the scene. And
then secondly that this was a time of great urgency,
and people who basically pooh pooh the contribution to the
vaccines they've forgotten. They've forgotten about those refrigerated morgue trucks
parked outside hospitals in New York and other major cities,

(29:34):
just waiting to store the bodies of the dead because
this disease was ravaging people, particularly older people and people
with compromise conditions. And what happened is the vaccine opened
the society, it opened our schools, it took our masks off,
and it was an extraordinary development that we should celebrate.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
And it's distorting our DNA and making mutant service not
at all.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
And here's the reason. Messenger RNAs talk to any molecular biologists,
Messenger RNAs have a half life in the cell of
just a couple of hours. So that means all messenger RNAs,
including the ones that we make normally, are degraded in
just a few hours. And that's the same for the
messenger RNA that goes in with the vaccine. It is

(30:21):
not it is not reverse transcribed and inserted in the nucleus.
It doesn't cause any genetic changes. And as one religious
group asked me, is this true? And I said no,
it will not change your soul. All it will do.
All it will do is to get your cells, very briefly,
for just a couple hours, to make these fragments of

(30:43):
a protein to stimulate your immune system.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
So there's a war on fauci of all people. Doctor
Anthony Fauci has become the villain in much of the
Magas story. I think I heard Mel Gibson on I
subjected myself to the Joe Rogan podcast on purpose Ken,
and I felt my own DNA being altered at the time.
It was just horrifying. But Mel was talking about Fauci

(31:09):
and gain of function and some of those protests. Are
you aware of those? Can you explain gain of function?

Speaker 2 (31:15):
It basically means studying a virus to see what genetic
changes might make it more infectious or less infectious and
so forth. When you look at a viral genome, and
the one for COVID nineteen is pretty simple if I
remember right, it's about twenty five thousand bases compared to
our own genome, which is about three billion, you don't

(31:39):
immediately know you can see the individual genes within it
by reading the genetic code, because you all, you don't
really know what small changes here or there, which ordinary
mutational mechanisms can affect. You don't know what effect they're
going to have. So one of the things that you're
always interested in when you see a virus, say in

(32:00):
the wild, in a population of bats, for example, or
rodents or something else is are there any mutations that
might crop up that may enable the virus to spread
to humans? And many of the gain of functions research
that virologists do is to try to pinpoint where these

(32:21):
changes might take place. Now you could there's a kind
of a theoretical danger there, which is, if you actually
carry out that mutation, you might be making a genome
which is more infectious for humans. And therefore, all such
research in this country, and from what I understand in China,
was carried out in containment facilities because you know, people

(32:43):
doing this work they don't want to make themselves sick,
and they certainly don't want to make anybody else sick.
But gain of function work is basically a way of
exploring the genome of a virus to understand what it
is capable of so that we are better able to
fight it if it causes a health emergency. So I think,
as you have to be careful with it, but this
is very important research. One other thing about Fauci, and

(33:05):
I wouldn't say that Tony Fauci and I are friends.
I did have lunch with him once when we hosted
him to speak at the Cell Biology meetings. That's my
scientific field. I cannot imagine a less political guy than Fauci.
This is a dedicated public servant who went into the
public health service to try to try to alleviate the

(33:27):
burden of disease and suffering. He's done a marvelous job,
or he did a marvelous job leading the institute that
he did. And he stood really almost painfully as a
corrective voice alongside Donald Trump during the early stages of
the COVID pandemic, so he was a voice for sanity.

(33:50):
He also helped to lead the effort that produced one
of the major COVID vaccines that basically damp down the pandemic.
I think the world of Tony Fauci, and I think
he deserves prizes and plaudits, not persecution.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
Well, you know, it's funny. The narrative has been he
made a squillion dollars and he, you know, is twirling
his mustache, which doesn't exist, by the way. But you know,
he had an ulterior motive during the COVID pandemic to
push the vaccine because he was getting kickbacks.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
You know, seth that over and over again that the
people approving or regulating vaccines have an interest and one
of the things that I saw on the internet this
morning was that the panel that approved the COVID vaccine,
individuals on that panel made one hundred and eighty six
million dollars in royalties from vaccine companies. Here's where that

(34:42):
number comes from. It comes from a reference to a
physician at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia named doctor Paul Offitt.
Doctor Ofitt led a research effort at Children's Hospital to
develop a vaccine against rotavirus. Not of a famous virus,
but one which actually hospitalizes and sometimes kills an awful

(35:05):
lot of kids in their first couple of years of life. Therefore,
a vaccine is very, very important. Well, when the vaccine
was developed, he didn't get a dime from it, but
he assigned the patent to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia,
which is where he did the research. Children's Hospital then
sold the patent rights to a company to manufacture the

(35:27):
vaccine for one hundred and eighty six million dollars. That
didn't go to poll off It, that didn't go to
anybody on the approval committee, and Fauci didn't get wealthy
from vaccines either. This is simply diversion and it's nonsense.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
No I saw the same thing with doctor Peter Hotez,
who is another scientific hero of mine. They're like, this
guy is you know, he's laughing all the way to
the bank, and he's like, well, where's my check man checking? Now?
I went to the mailbox. I don't see the kickback.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
There was a stand up for Science rally in Providence
last year and I was one of the speakers, and
I saw on the outer because we had a very
good turnout, we had almost a thousand people, and I
saw one of the comments saying all these people were
paid by Soros, and I immediately, I don't usually comment
on the comment section newspaper articles, and I said, please

(36:16):
get me my check because the notion of demonstrators or
people at rallies like is being paid, that's that's simply
a diversion to basically slander people who are doing what
they're doing for authentic reasons.

Speaker 3 (36:31):
Okay, well this isn't even in my prep, but I
got to say the words big pharma. One of the
other arguments about all medication, certainly vaccine, certainly codd vaccine,
is that well, it's in the interest of the big
power players Fizer, etc. To dole this stuff out for profit.
The books are being manipulated. I don't know how do

(36:52):
you deal with the big pharma charge.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Well, first of all, I find it truly ironic that
people who characterize them elves is anti socialists and our
enthusiastic supporters of capitalist free enterprise would attempt to slander
someone by saying that they were involved in capitalist free enterprise.
You know, this is extraordinary. You know, we live in

(37:16):
a country where and Donald Trump will tell you this,
if you're successful, you deserve to be rich. Then all
of a sudden, when somebody like a company is successful
because they have made a product, a drug or a
vaccine that basically saves lives or helps people with respect
to their health, is that so bad that they want

(37:36):
to recoup the research costs? The answer is, of course not.
Nobody likes big companies gouging the public, and neither do I.
But the fact of the matter is that the way
in which we do scientific research for products like drugs
and vaccines is through a capitalist free enterprise system. So,
for example, Maderna was a small startup in the Boston

(38:00):
area that immediately realized I shouldn't say immediately, about fifteen
years ago realized that messenger RNA, the messenger on a
platform would be very useful if a new virus or
other infection came along for which there was no vaccine,
precisely because it could be modified so quickly in order

(38:20):
to basically counteract that disease. When this happened, in coordination
with other scientists, they went ahead and did this, and
of course they make some money on it because they
put out a enormous amount of money basically to develop it.
There are a lot of abuses in the way in
which we produce and market drugs in this company, not
the least of which are the monopolies that many pharmaceutical

(38:44):
companies try to exercise on certain drugs. And that's apps.
I have a son in law who has Type one diabetes,
and it's it's shameful that insulin costs so much when
it's a product that basically has made very easily and
very cheaply through recombinant DNA techniques. So there are issues

(39:06):
with big pharma, but simply saying that the vaccines are
made by big companies, that's not a slander. That's simply
how we do things in this country.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Much more with doctor Ken Miller in just a second,
let's talk about brain drain. Scientists are looking around going a, oh,
it's a war on us and what we do? Let's
get out of dodge? Is that happening? And what kind
of price are we going to pay? I'm going to
ask the doctor coming up next. Thank you so much

(39:41):
for listening, and thanks for your supported Patreon that's patreon
dot com slash Seth Andrews. If you would like to
support the host and this show and the work that
is going on. Much appreciated. Doctor Kenneth Miller my guest today.
Do you have a few more I don't want ambolize
your time, but I have a few names I want

(40:02):
you to respond to. I'll RFK Junior. I just want
to talk about him. I'm just going to let you go.
I'm miss r f K Junior. What are your thoughts?
How broad can that umbrella question be? By the way,
how big can I make it?

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Okay? I voted for his father in a primary for president.
The very name Robert Kennedy gets to my heart right away.
And to see RFK Junior pedaling the absolute nonsense that
he has pedaled, not just now but before he came

(40:45):
into office, is absolutely extraordinary, and I would echo the
things that his own siblings, his own family has said,
what are you doing? This is absolutely ridiculous. And the
fact that he canceled five hundred million dollars in grants
for Messenger RNA research is everybody should realize something, and

(41:07):
that is that the projects that were being involved that
were involved in this included things like trying to make
a universal flu vaccine using that technology so we wouldn't
have to get yearly flu shots. I have asthma, and
therefore I really don't want to get the flu. I
don't really really don't want to get any respiratory infection,
so I get my flu shots every year, and I

(41:28):
would advise all your listeners to do exactly the same thing.
But the idea of a universal one that you wouldn't
have to get every year would be great. It would
save lives. He canceled that sort of project. Other people
are using Messenger RNA basically, and a small trial just
published in the last month has shown great promise in
fighting pancreatic cancer, which is just an absolutely terrible killer

(41:52):
that's going to be canceled as well. I don't understand
how anybody can be motivated in this way. I think
you know he has. I have a one of my
best all time PhD students is a laboratory chief at
the National Institutes of Health. Every couple of weeks I
call her up and ask her if she still got
a job, for the very simple reason that he is

(42:12):
the greatest threat to American dominance in biomedical research that
we have ever seen. He is a positive force for
the destruction of American scientific competitiveness and it's an absolute
shame that he is exercising the authority he is in
this administration.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
Have you gotten into the Andrew Wakefield thing with vaxed,
the pseudo documentary that came out a few years ago,
and the many lies that he was telling. I think
he was Wastn't he kicked out of the medical whatever
the establishment in Britain for the lies that he was telling.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Well, I do know that the papers that people cite
that he originally published have all been retracted by the
journals that publish them because it was very clear that
he had manipulated the data. There have been study after study,
many of them, most of them actually carry it in
this country looking for a statistical correlation between vaccination and autism,

(43:11):
and study after study after study have shown that there
is no correlation. So the claim that vaccines cause autism
or associated or aren't associated with it has been shown
to be false time and time again.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
And yeah, but if I know doctor Miller, the more
you say that as a scientist, the more that people
are going to say you should be distrusted, right, I mean,
the whistleblowers are saying the establishment is lying to us
about the link between vaccines and autism. And what do
you even do with that?

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Well, what I would do with that is say, what
is my motivation to lie? I have children, I have grandchildren.
My concern is for their health, and I have made
sure that you know, my my oldest grandson got all
his vaccines. If I thought there was even the slightest
link between autism and vaccination, would I have done it

(44:08):
for my children? Would I do it for my grandson?
The answer is, of course not. You know, in terms
of establishment, I'm sure somebody would say, well he gets
money from No, I don't get any money for this,
you know, I am I'm a retired cellular biologist. I'm
not getting paid for this at all. And the people
who work in public health in this country could make

(44:31):
a lot more money elsewhere, and they do it precisely
because they want to safeguard public health. I am old
enough to have been afraid of polio. When I was
a little kid, my mother would tell me and my
friends don't go down and play in that stream near
our house, which we did all the time, because you'll

(44:52):
get wet, you'll get a chill, and then you'll get polio,
and polio is terrifying. Two of my aunts were afflicted
by polio, and one of them was had a permanently
disfigured and withered leg because of polio is terrifies, terrifying.
The image of kids breathing and iron lungs was scary
when the first polio vaccine came out, and I didn't

(45:14):
like needles. When the first polio vaccine came out, I
think I was in third grade. I ran to the
elementary school where there was a vaccine clinic. I rolled
up my sleeve and I said, please give me this shot.
In part because I was afraid of polio, but the
other part was I no longer wanted my mother to
be able to tell me not to play in the
brook because they didn't have to worry about. You know,

(45:39):
it's it's not a plot. It's not big pharma, it's
not the scientific establishment. It's fact, its statistics, it's public
health data. Vaccines are some of the things that keep
us healthy, and we shouldn't have the added the conspiratorial
attitudes that are propagated by r RFK Junior and his friends.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
Ken Do you remember the chicken pox parties they used
to have, Like one kid would get it and they're like,
you know what, let's just get it over with.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
I didn't have to have one of those parties because
every year my brother got one of those diseases. He
got chicken pox, he got mumps, he got measles, and
of course we're sharing the same tiny room at our
tidy little house in Rallway, New Jersey. And what happened was, yes,
I caught it from ron every one of those times.

(46:28):
So I didn't need a party where all the mothers
got together to spread the infection. My brother did the
job himself. And here's the thing, Man Ronnie always seemed
to get sick about two weeks before spring break, so
that he missed school but had a wonderful healthy spring
break and could play outside and everything else. I came

(46:48):
down with those three infections during spring break, so rather
than have a vacation, I was sick three years in
a row with him.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
So the idea, though, is that you then developed the
immunity early because you were So if you put fifteen
kids in a room and you let them play, one
of them's got chicken pox, you just get it over
with and then they're set for life. Bad idea, Oh,
very bad.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Idea, because that's predicated on the idea that the disease,
the disease in question, is just like a cult. Yeah, sniffles,
you sleeze a little bit, and then you're fine. A
lot of those diseases have serious consequences. Mumps can have
reproductive consequences for young men. Measles has a mortality rate.
Chicken pox can cause serious problems, especially later in life,

(47:32):
because it can cause shingle and shingles infections. So what
those immunization parties actually involved was trivializing the serious effects
of each of those diseases. The fact that we have
vaccines against these diseases basically means that, again, the vaccines

(47:53):
have prevented death and suffering, and that's an important thing.
The other thing, you know, the other thing that I
should point out about about all of these things is
that you hear people say I'd like my son or
like my young daughter to get the disease and so
to develop natural immunity as opposed to vaccine induced immunity.

(48:16):
There isn't any difference. What vaccines do is to stimulate
the exact same immune response that is produced by the
infection itself, except they stimulate it before you're exposed to
the pathogen, and that protects you against the harmful effect
of the disease. Rather than have any of my kids

(48:37):
go to a party to get sick, for one of those,
I much rather have them go to the doctor, get
the shot, and not get the disease.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Before I finish with the evolution here. Do you worry
about brain drain in this country? The war on scientists?
They can feel safe or welcome. You think they're just
going to bold and go to I don't know, greener pastures.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
I was talking about this with my wife, and I
tried to remind her the sort of uncertainty and insecurity
I felt right after I earned my PhD and when
I was a very very junior faculty member where my
progress in the field. My position at the university I

(49:19):
was at, frankly depended on getting a research grant and
getting support from my research. So much has, you know,
so much has happened in the second Trump administration to
undercut that promise. And what I mean by that promise
is a promise to a young person that if they
go into science, they prove themselves as an investigator, they

(49:43):
have productive and promising ideas, there will be some level
of support for what they want to do. That sort
of promise has made this country the place to do
scientific research, and it's because of that that we have
attracted people from all over the world to come to
the US because this is where science is happening. What's

(50:05):
happened now is all of that has changed. And I
reminded my wife that very on the early part of
my career I had some very very influential research papers
that came out and I was offered a position at
Cambridge University in England, wonderful place. I would have loved
to have gone there, but the thought of uprooting my

(50:26):
family to go to another country, even one where they
speak English, was just too much, and I chose to
stay in the United States because, frankly, the research environment
here was good. I was on campus literally yesterday. I
talked to a young scientist who had just gotten tenure
in my department. I congratulated him, and then I asked him,

(50:47):
because he's chairing the graduate admissions committee, what's our new
crop of grad students look like? And he said, well,
they looked great, but we've now lost four of them
who are going to continue their scientific work their graduate
careers in other countries because of the cutback in fellowship
support in the United States. He also mentioned that there

(51:09):
are at least two of our newly minted PhDs who
were primed to accept postdoctoral fellowships to continue their work
in the United States, and they're both going to foreign
countries where the research support is more consistent. We are
killing We are savaging. Killing is the wrong word. We

(51:30):
are savaging an entire We're sacrificing an entire generation of
young scientists. And even if we can correct this when
there's a new administration in place in maybe three years,
it's not going to be correctable within a year. Within
five years or even ten, we're going to lose a
whole generation of creative scientists, and you know what, China

(51:54):
is going to host them, Europe will host them. We
will seed scientific leadership in the biomedical sciences and other
areas of science to other countries. That's a tragedy because
the scientific climate in the United States has been so
welcoming and it's one of the reasons we have dominated
the Nobel prizes in science five or ten years. That's

(52:17):
not going to be true and we are going to
be the poorer for it. People who say America first,
I don't understand why they have decided Nope, not in science.
We're not really interested in being first in science. And
that's a damn shame.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
With Harvard, etc. In the news. Are the universities just
rolling over under pressure?

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Well, it depends. It says a lot about this administration
that the way in which they have attacked American higher education,
which they despise on many levels, mostly because of what
they regard as dei political left wing politics and so forth,
the way they have attacked them is by going after science.

(53:03):
And that tells you how little regard they have for
science in the first place. That they regard science as
a vulnerability of these universities, and science itself is expendable.
That's a terrible shame. I would not want to be
the president of a university. I am pleased with what
my own university, Brown University, has done, although many people

(53:26):
on our campus are very critical of the deal that
they made. The first thing that Brown insisted on was
they weren't going to pay a dime to the federal government.
They didn't. They did commit to spend fifty million dollars
over ten years in workforce development in the immediate area
in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I'm pleased with that because

(53:46):
I think universities have an obligation to help develop technical
and scientific workforces where they are, so that's not a
bad thing. They basically Brown had to promise basically to
provide a supportive environment for Jewish students, which it already does,
As many on campus have said, they also had to

(54:09):
follow the administration's dictum on transgender athletes in intercollegiate sports.
I think that's a terrible shame. But on the other hand,
we're part of the NC double A and that's already
NC double A policy, so the university did not have
an option. The university did extract from the federal government

(54:30):
an absolute promise that Brown will continue to control its hiring,
its promotion, and every aspect of its curriculum, which I
think is important. So I give Christina Packson, who's the
president of our university, kudos for that. I think she's
done the best she could. She has a university to run,
and we need to have that continuing committed research support

(54:52):
provided Columbia got taken to the cleaners, and I think
people on campus would do that. I'm not sure what's
going to happen at Harvard, except when I read quotes
from my colleagues at Harvard in The Boston Globe and
other publications, some of them wonder why can't we get
as good a deal as Brown did. But the very fact, look,
the American university system, regardless of what the people in

(55:15):
Washington these days say, the American university system is the
envy of the world. That's why we attract so many
foreign students. That's why we train so many foreign students
in the sciences, and that's why so many of them
stay here for their careers and add to our scientific
and technical workforce. That's a wonderful trick we play on
the rest of the world to take their best and brightest.

(55:37):
Bring them here, train them. They love it here, they
stay here. They add to the American scientific capability. This
administration is destroying that, and every American should know that.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
This year marks the one hundred anniversary of the Scopes Trial,
also known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. For those who
aren't familiar with Scopes, can you just lay it out
and why it is important today?

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Well, you can watch the movie Inherit the Wind to
get a dramatic version of the Scopes trial, but it's
not historically accurate. What had happened in the early nineteen
twenties is that a number of states, mostly in the South,
passed laws against the teaching of evolution, which at that
point had begun to seep into school textbooks, including a

(56:25):
book called Civic Biology by Hunter. Tennessee was one of
those states, and the law that forbid the teaching of
evolution was called the Butler Act. Well, the American Civil
Liberties Union thought that that act was unconstitutional, which I
think it was, and they looked for a test case,
and people in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, managed

(56:49):
to conjure up a test case by persuading a part
time biology teacher named John Scopes, who I think also
was the football coach, to agree that he had taught evolution,
and therefore the district attorney agreed to indict him, and
they agreed to have a trial. They actually made a deal.

(57:09):
There's a picture of John Scopes signing the agreement to
say that he would stand trial for this. In part
because the city fathers thought it'd be really good for business.
It would attract a lot of reporters, a lot of media,
hotel business, restaurants, stuff like that, and that's exactly what
it did. The interesting thing about the actual Scopes monkey

(57:30):
trial is that the defense attorneys, well, one of the
reasons it's remembered is because of the antagonists. The most
famous defense attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow, showed up
and said that he would defend Scopes, and then the
formidable William Jennings Bryan several times a candidate for president

(57:50):
and a great orator, said that he would lead the prosecution.
So that alone made it a spectacle. One of the
things that people don't realize is there was a whole
a roster of scientists, distinguished scientists who showed up in
Tennessee to testify on behalf of Scopes. The judge, sort
of a no nonsense guy, said, we're not going to

(58:11):
hear any of that because the argument is not about
whether evolution is scientific or not scientific. The argument is
did John Scopes violate the law by teaching evolution? Scope said, yes,
he did. The jury convicted him. The judge assigned a
fine of one hundred dollars. Doesn't sound like a big deal.
The fine, by the way, was later set aside because

(58:33):
the jury didn't assign the fine and Tennessee law required
the jury to assign it. But the effect of the
Scopes trial was to chill the teaching of evolution. He was,
after all, found guilty. Chill the teaching of evolution in
this country for decades. And the textbook that I used
in high school in nineteen sixty three when I took

(58:54):
my first biology course basically did not have the word
evolution in it. It used a euphemism. It tried to
avoid the whole subject. All of that changed in the
late nineteen sixties and early seventies when evolution sort of
came back into the textbooks, and fortunately there was a

(59:16):
real revolution in the teaching of science when we realized
we were behind the Soviets. For example, the Sputnik shot
a shock led to an enormous increase in support for
teaching science and the schools, and I benefited from that.
But the key thing about the Scopes trial is that
it really chilled the teaching of evolution for more than
a half a century in this country.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
Isn't evolution the foundation for all of biology?

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,
and I think that's absolutely true. A number of years ago,
a former student of mine named Joe Levine called me
up and persuaded me how he did it as a
very long story. Persuaded me to agree to go into
writing a high school textbook on biology because we thought

(01:00:03):
the ones out there were not adequate. And we both
agreed that the central organizing principle of biology is in
fact evolution, and we were going to write our book
centering around evolution. And in fact, one of the most
profound compliments that was ever paid to our book was
ironically voiced by a member of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania,

(01:00:29):
the scene of another famous trial called the Kissmuller Trial,
and the school board member complained about our book by saying,
from cover to cover, this book is laced with Darwinism.
And you know how authors sometimes like to put favorable
quotes on the back of their books to sell them.
Joe and I have joked about putting that quote on

(01:00:50):
the back of our textbook because the school board member
had discovered we didn't have a chapter on evolution. We
didn't just have a section on evolution. It was mentioned
everywhere in the textbook, as it should be.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
Have you noticed how many critics of dogmund have never
read on the origin of species? Like, which part did
you take issue with? And they're just like they, I
think they. I was taught when I was a funding
evangelical to just make fun of it, to dismiss it. Right,
my grandfather wasn't a monkey kind of thing. And then
I at this moment going to come full circle back
to your Catholic faith and ask, how do you approach

(01:01:26):
then the Genesis creation story Humankind, Adam Eve, we were
created in our present form according to Genesis chapters one
and two. How does that jib? How does your faith
jive with evolutionary science?

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Well, you might say that one advantage I have of
being a Catholic is that Catholics basically realize that many
parts and this is official Church teaching, many parts of
the Bible are allegorical in many respects. And I'm always
fond of telling everyone. There is one of the Psalms said,

(01:02:01):
O Lord, thou art my rock and my strength. Do
you take that literally? What kind of a rock is God?
Is he sedimentary, igneous or metamorphic? And of course, if
I tell that to someone one of my fundamentalist brothers
or sisters, let's say, oh, come on, you know the

(01:02:22):
poet who wrote that psalm as being allegoricon said exactly right.
So what you're telling me is that it's not actually literal.
And the fact of the matter is, let's be very clear.
Genesis was written not at the not at the moment
of the creation of the world. But it was written
during the Babylonian captivity, most Bible scholars say, and it

(01:02:45):
was written in a way that enabled the Hebrew people
in captivity to distinguish their own understanding of their God
from the gods of the Babylonians. That there was a
single God, that creation is all good. In the Babylonian mythology,
there were good, good gods and then there were evil gods,

(01:03:07):
and what we see today is a clash between those
two values of evil spirits and good spirits. The Hebrew
conception was no creation is good, God is good. Sin
comes about due to man's rejection of God's law. That's
really the purpose of Genesis. And I'm often fond of

(01:03:28):
telling people who insist it's literally true or historically true,
do the following. Take a pad of paper, draw a
line down the middle. Chapter one on the left side
of the line, Chapter two on the right side. Write
down what happens on day one, day two, day three,
all the way down to day seven. Then go to
chapter two and do exactly the same thing, and you'll
see they don't match. The events are not the same.

(01:03:51):
And that's because you had two separate accounts being merged
by the editors, I would say, of Genesis and the
other thing, I can tell you I was kind of
prepared for this question, Seth. If you don't mind, I
want to read you part of a quotation. Hopefully I
can find it here.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
I'll take your time.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
I'm good From Saint Augustine, and for those people who
are really not familiar with him, he was a bishop
in North Africa. He wrote a couple of marvelous books.
I think they're marvelous, one called The City of God
and the other one called Confessions and Confessions Confessions of
Saint Augustine that had an enormous effect on me as

(01:04:34):
a young man when I first read it. But he
also wrote another book called on the Literal Meaning of Genesis.
And I want to read you a very quick quote
from this out to put my glasses on, because I
don't want to read the whole thing. But here it is.
Here's what he wrote. Even a non Christian knows something

(01:04:56):
about the earth, the heavens, and other elements of the world.
Now I'm going to translate that into twenty first century language.
Even a non Christian knows something about geology, astronomy and biology.
And then here we go. And this knowledge he holds
to as being certain from reason and experience. And what

(01:05:20):
that means is even a non Christian can do empirical science.
Then he says, Now it is a dangerous and disgraceful
thing for an infidel, for a non believer to hear
a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking
nonsense on these topics. In other words, it's disgraceful to

(01:05:42):
hear a Christian, presumably saying what the Bible means, talking
scientific nonsense, and we should take all means to prevent
such an embarrassing situation in which people show up vast
ignorance in a Christian and laugh at to scorn. So
what Augustine is saying is if you take scripture and

(01:06:03):
presumed to gain from that to scientific knowledge about biology, geology,
or astronomy, and a non Christian can look at that
and say, wait a minute, man, that's scientifically wrong. You're
doing damage to the faith. And that was Augustine's point.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
I used to be threatened by the idea of being
evolved just an animal. I think one of my favorites is, well,
we're not animals, were mammals. I remember hearing that one.
I was like, what that's true.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
I once had a member of the Texas Board of Education,
during a break in a hearing there, pointing out a
picture in one of my textbooks in which we show kingdoms, plants, plants, animals,
and so forth. And among the animals, we had a
few animals in the animal kingdom, and one of which
was a drawing of a human being and He told

(01:06:52):
me he was offended by seeing the human figure among
the animals, And I said, what do you want me
to do? I can move you into the fungi if
you want. That'd be preferable.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
But I used to think, how dare you reduce me?
And it's funny on the other side of the looking glass,
it's almost like a wonder I am connected to the
entire living world. It sounds like a freaking Hallmark movie.
But do you feel that? I mean, I guess this
is a Barbara Walters question, Ken, But I mean, you
are evolutionarily connected to all living things.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
I think that is a grand and glorious view, that
we are part of the fabric of life that covers
this planet. I think that's absolutely amazing. I mean, right now,
my wife and I have a small farm in Massachusetts,
and I can look out and I can see our animals,

(01:07:47):
a couple of horses, and a couple of horses that
we take care for our friends. I got one of
my dogs lying here at my feet. The biology of
those animals, the biology of the plants that I see
looking right at my window, All of life, all of
life is one. In biology, we talk about the unity
and the diversity of life, and I think that fits

(01:08:10):
very well with evolution, but it also fits very well
with the spiritual idea of human beings being part of creation.
And for me, that doesn't cause religious conflict. For me,
that sort of confirms what a beautiful and privileged world
we live.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
In, doctor ken Miller. Maybe one day we can sit
down in a living room and talk more theology. I
have a feeling the clock would just fly.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
I'd much rather I'd much rather talk about scopes too,
which is the kits Miller trial, which is the twentieth
anniversary this year, And if you want to make a
date for that, happy to do it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
Thanks so whatever. You are a great storyteller of science.
I can see why my friend Abby was a big fan.
And I'm honored that you would take the time. I mean,
I went a little over with you. Hope that's okay,
but I was just like, oh my god, he's so free,
looking good. And I appreciate you being on the front lines.
I know you are taking a frontline stand against the
anti science in this country. It's, for lack of a

(01:09:10):
better word, of plague right. It is going. It is
getting people killed. And to see the scientists who are
out there banging the drum, you know, speaking in terms
of evidence and trying to quell the fears and ignorance.
You are greatly appreciated, sir, and I well, that's for
share to be in here.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
That's very kind of you to say, But I think
it's a job for all of us.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
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