Kenneth R. Miller Quotes

My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

I have had the good fortune to live - as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant - at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call 'life' has made its most revolutionary advances.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

The nucleic acids have considerable biological importance because of their role in cell growth and in the transmission of hereditary characters.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

From the beginning, each human embryo has its own unique genetic identity.

In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.