23. Dr. Kenneth R. Miller — The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2018

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ken Miller is well known for his work in debunking Intelligent Design Creationism, most notably for his testimony in the Dover Pennsylvania trial that demolished the legal strategies of the movement to have creationism taught in public school science classes. His book, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul recounts his experiences and argues why evolution is true.

Now, in his new book, Dr. Miller presents a radical, optimistic exploration of how humans evolved to develop reason, consciousness, and free will, contra scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who tell us that our most intimate actions, thoughts, and values are mere byproducts of thousands of generations of mindless adaptation. We are just one species among multitudes, and therefore no more significant than any other living creature.

Brown University biology professor Miller contends that this view betrays a gross misunderstanding of evolution. Natural selection surely explains how our bodies and brains were shaped, but Miller argues that it’s not a social or cultural theory of everything. In The Human Instinct, he rejects the idea that our biological heritage means that human thought, action, and imagination are pre-determined, describing instead the trajectory that ultimately gave us reason, consciousness and free will. A proper understanding of evolution, he says, reveals humankind in its glorious uniqueness—one foot planted firmly among all of the creatures we’ve evolved alongside, and the other in the special place of self-awareness and understanding that we alone occupy in the universe.

Transcript

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0:39.2	to promote science and critical thinking.
0:42.4	We will be dealing with some of the biggest topics there are because you deal with those.
0:47.0	And so the subtitle of the book kind of explains at least to which direction we can take,
0:51.0	how we evolved to have reason, consciousness and free will.
0:55.2	Before we get into this though, since you testified in the Dover trial, the very famous Dover trial
0:59.6	in 2005, what's happened since then, how do you feel with 13 years of perspective about the
1:05.3	intelligent design movement where it's gone, what your role was in killing it or we're not?
1:09.8	Okay, well, the, uh, I like to tell people that the, uh, the I like to tell people that the whole kids' Miller trial was my fault.
1:17.2	And the reason for that is my co-author and I, Joe Levine,
1:21.2	had just come out with a brand new high school biology textbook. It's known by everyone
1:27.0	who uses it as the dragonfly book because it has a beautiful image of a dragonfly on the cover. And in the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania,
1:37.0	Dover Area High School, the science department, which consists by the way of four people, that's
1:42.0	how small the high school is,
1:43.5	was told that the board finally had enough money
1:46.0	to purchase new biology textbooks.
	...

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