Kenneth R. Miller is Professor of Biology at Brown University. He did his undergraduate work at Brown, graduating in 1970. He earned his Ph.D. in 1974 at the University of Colorado, and spent six years teaching at Harvard University before returning to Brown. He is a cell biologist, and chairs the Education Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology. He serves as an advisor on life sciences to the News Hour, a daily PBS television program on news and public affairs, and in 2006 was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005 he was presented with the Presidential Citation of the American Institute for Biological Sciences for distinguished contributions to the biological sciences. In December of 2006 he received the Public Service Award from the American Society for Cell Biology.
Miller’s research work on cell membrane structure and function has produced more than 60 scientific papers and reviews in leading journals, including CELL and Nature, as well as leading popular sources such as Natural History and Scientific American. Miller is coauthor, with Joseph S. Levine, of three different high school and college biology textbooks used by millions of students throughout the United States and other countries.
One of Miller’s principal interests is the public understanding of evolution. He has written a number of articles defending the scientific integrity of evolution, answering challenges such as “intelligent design”, and he served as lead witness in the 2005 trial on evolution and intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania. His popular book, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution, addresses the scientific status of evolutionary theory and its relationship to religious views of nature.
Recent Selected Publications in Science and Religion
- Miller, K. R. (1999) Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution, New York: HarperCollins.
- Miller, K. R. (2002) The Flaw in the Mousetrap. Natural History (April), p. 75.
- Miller, K. R. (2003) Answering the Biochemical Argument from Design, pp. 292-307, in God & Design, Neil Manson, ed. Routeledge, New York.
- Miller, K. R. (2004) The Flagelum Unspun: The collapse of “irreducible complexity,” in Debating Design, pp. 81-97. W. Dembski and M. Ruse, eds. Cambridge University Press, New York.
- Miller, K. R. (2005) Looking for God in all the Wrong Places: Answering the Religious Challenge to Evolution, in Evolutionary Science and Society: Educating a New Generation, pp. 13-21. J. Cracraft and R. W. Bybee, eds. Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, Colorado Springs, CO.
- Miller, K. R. (2005) Darwin’s Pope? Harvard Divinity Bulletin 33: 12-14. .
Recent Selected Science Publications
- Miller, K. R. (1994) The Big Green Machine. Nature Structural Biology 1: 204-206.
- Hanein, D., Matlack, K. E. S., Jungnickel, B., Plath, K., Kalies, K., Miller, K. R., Rapoport, T. A., and C. W. Akey (1996) Oligomeric Rings of the Sec6lp Complex Induced by Ligands Required for Protein Translocation, Cell 87 721-732.
- Meyer, T. H., Ménétret, J. F. , Breitling, R. , Miller, K. R., Akey, C. W., and Rapaport, T. A. (1999) The bacterial Sec Y/E translocation complex forms channel-like structures similar to those of the eukaryotic Sec6lp complex. Journal of Molecular Biology 285: 1789-1800.
