If you read Spanish and are bored, here’s my interview with the Guatemalan newspaper el Periódico, which, I’m told, is an independent and influential periodical. If you aren’t fluent, here’s the Google translator version converted by someone into (broken) English, with the endearing title, “There is no missing links because they have been found.” And I can’t vouch for the veracity of the Spanish translation since I gave the interview in English!
h/t: Giancarlo Ibarguen
Cogent as always.
I hate that I’m gonna miss the Darwin conference this weekend.
Cogent sans translator. I think there was a conservapedia default setting on some of the verbs. This will come back to haunt you via quote miner trolls.
I love the Google translation: “God is not a good scenario to use, because it explains a lot.” I’m sure the original statement sounded better 🙂
That was fun to read.
Rather bad on number, but I like the message.
Actually, as translated it’s not the complete story, since there are many “missing links” as yet. But seriously, what of them? Paleontologists only look for them to refine evolutionary scenarios, not because they want any more evidence for evolution, which was solid prior to the first found “missing link,” while only evolution explains something like Archaeopteryx.
I did notice that the appalling Casey Luskin was trying to make something of the fact that Archaeopteryx may have been even more primitive than we thought, and gee, it’s not the actual ancestor of modern birds. Well, scientists never thought it was the ancestor of modern birds, and Archaeopteryx is full of the incomplete adaptation to flight that design can never explain (why is the “poor design” apparently due to reptilian ancestry?), and that evolution predicts.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
“No hay” can mean either “there is not” or “there are not”, so it’s just a difference in grammar between the languages that Google doesn’t pick up.
There are a few bloopers in the translation that even my rusty Spanish picks up. The Spanish reads nicely, though.
Good interview, Jerry!
Sort of off-topic, but having worked on machine translation software back in college, I’m really impressed by how well the auto-translated interview read. Nothing sounded much worse than anything a non-native English speaker might be expected to produce.
Brings back memories of trying to automatically translate the Bible back and forth between English and Japanese using some statistical methods (the Bible is a common one to use since it’s public and has been translated into so many languages). The translator got confused from the vastly different meanings of words in the New Testament, and Jesus started showing up in Genesis.
Good interview too, by the way. 🙂
I just read the full text in Spanish: it reads very well and the ideas come out clearly.
I didn’t know this paper and I am very (well) surprised by the interview. I’m embarrass to say I haven’t read something similar from Mexican newspapers.
Found your blog because of this post, so expect lurking from a theist…
Ditto on the spanish version – good stuff 🙂
There is one bit of information that is kind of important that got screwed by the translation. In Spanish, “billón” means what in American English is “trillion”. “Four billion years” should have been “cuatro mil millones de años” (“four thousand million years”).
That sort of confusion is why Hawking uses “million million” instead of billion, and so on, in A Brief History of Time, by the way. The difference multiplies by a thousand every time you go from “bi-” to “tri-“, etc. American English advances in thousands, while other English traditions, and Spanish advances every million.
To make it more confusing, British English has partly switched to the US-English convention on “billions”.
And sometimes they say “thousand millions” instead.
Here is my translation of Jerry’s interview. There might be typos (I did it in a hurry).
“There are no missin links, because they have already been found”
Jerry Coyne, an American professor of biology at the University of Chicago, i world-renowned for his criticism of intelligent design. This year he published “Why Evolution is True”. In his recent tour of Guatemala he talks to El PEriódico.
By Gabriela Lehnhoff
Why did you write this book?
I’ve found that several of my students come to college with an insufficient education in biology. They accept the theory of evolution, but they don’t know why. I decided to give them an update them on the various open lines of evidence, since they involve more than mere fossils.
Also, there is a very strong movement against evolution, mainly supported by creationists, who are all over the place in the USA. They’ve attempted to teach creationism instead of evolution at school, and I wanted to give my students, and the public in general, tools with which to fight this tendency.
You’ve said that you don’t write for those who don’t accept evolution, but for those who do.
Yes, or for the undecided. Those who don’t believe in evolution, though they know it exists, are almost always – at least in the USA – religious fundamentalists who interpret literally the writings of the Bible. They don’t want to know that the Earth is 4 billion years old, because they believe it’s only 6 or 10 thousand years old.
There is no way you can approach people whose minds are closed. The book is for those who accept evolution but want to know the evidence, and for those who are curious about why we are here.
Is evolution a matter of belief?
I don’t like the word “belief” because it has many connotations, particularly religious ones. I’d rather use the word “accept”, because there’s so much evidence that evolution is a fact; that’s what makes it different from religious beliefs, dogma, spirituality and personal revelation.
There are those who do not accept the fossil evidence. How do you deal with that posture?
There are those who believe that fossils were planted by God to test their faith. There is no way you can refute that. If someone looks at the fossil evidence and won’t accept it, there is no point in arguing further. In order to attempt to convince someone of a scientific fact, you have to assume that they are rational and willing to accept the evidence. Otherwise, it’s pointless.
Not all organisms follow the same evolutionary path. Each species evolves to fit into its environment.
It is a common error to think that evolution follows a certain direction, that organisms evolve in order to attain human traits and the ability to think. Parasites such as tapeworms have lost their nervous and reproductive systems. Sloths become slower, jaguars become faster… whatever it takes to survice in their environment. There is no force pushing everyone in the same direction. Humans simply exist in an environment that favours big brains.
Which is the missing link between apes and humans?
There are no missing links, because they have already been found. It is almost impossible to find a specific species in the fossil record, because 99.99% of all species that ever existed have become extint and left no trace; but we can find species in their way to becoming human: transitional forms. There are definitely enough of these to allow us to affirm that humans evolved form an ape-like creature, and that we are apes.
Many people would object to that and reply that “my grandfather was not a monkey”.
We did not descend from modern monkeys. They are just as evolved as we are, in their own way. But if someone denies having descended from an ape-like creature, then that someone is wrong.
Do you hold any religious beliefs?
I am not religious in the sense of believing in a celestial deity. I am religious in the same way that Albert Einstein was religious, in that I marvel at the wonders of the Universe. I could not be regarded as religious in conventional terms because I don’t believe in supernatural entities, but I do believe in the spiritual effect of knowing where we come from.
Can religion and science coexist?
They can, and several people exemplify this. Many Catholics, for example, can find compatibility between the two.
Speaking of religion, is there a fundamental flaw in the theory of intelligent design?
The fatal flaw of intelligent design is to claim that if we don’t understand how a given trait arose, then God must have done it. There are many examples throughout the history of science. Take the orbits of the planets: people thought that God pushed them along. Then Galileo and Kepler discovered that it was gravity, and erased God from the picture. That’s dangerous, theologically speaking.
Maybe we shoud leave God out of the picture.
If we are trying to understand how things work in the natural world, the God is not a good hypothesis, because it does not explain much. It’s a way of forestalling knowledge.
Is the existence of human beings inevitable?
There are scientists who claim that if evolution were to start anew, human beings would appear again. They look upon human beings as the product of God’s special plan, as made in his image. My training as an evolutionary biologist leads me to believe that this is not true, that our existence depends on random factors, and that we are a mistake – a fortunate mistake. I don’t think that if evolution started again human beings would appear. Maybe octopuses would become dominant, or even dinosaurs.
Why is it so hard for so many people to believe that we are just another animal, another part of Nature?
As individuals, we like to think we are special. And we also like to think our species is special, as religion teaches us. In very religion, human beings are at the centre. If you remove them from that privileged position, as Darwin did in 1869, what remains is a sense of emptiness. The same thing happened when Galileo removed the Earth from the centre of the universe.
Can evolution explain morality and altruism in human beings?
True selflessness, where an individual sacrifices himself or herself without receivig anything in return, is unique to humans. We live in small social groups. We are rational, we can think, and we realize that we won’t get along with our neighbours if we don’t help them, because we know they might in turn help us. We can set up reciprocity networks, and this explains human morality. Groups that abide by those rules tend to do better that groups that are not so altruistic. Morality is not genetic; it is rather the outcome of our reasoning and our fight for survival in stable societies.
Sociobiology, now called evolutionary psychology, is based on the genes that evolved from our African ancestors. Eating, sleeping and copulating are genetically-determined behaviours . Things such as art, music and religion, however, might not be evolutionary behaviours.
Art, then, does not help us lure a mate.
Some people think so, but I say “Show me the evidence”. Otherwise, it’s just a tall tale. That’s what evolutionary psychology is about: making up stories to explain why we do what we do. That’s not science.
Is evolutionary psychology confounding things?
Evolutionary psychologists are making us evolutionary biologists look bad. It is not right for people to think that we are all in the business of making up stories about why we behave as we do. These subjects require scientific rigour, particularly with respect to human behaviour.
The fact is evolution is true. If a fossilized mammal was ever found in 400-million-years-old sediments, then they could claim that evolution is not true.
Is there any evidence that could refute evolution?
No. So far, every scientific test has confirmed evolution. There is no evidence to refute it, and that gives the theory a status as strong as that of atomic theory or the germ theory of disease.
There is some confusion concerning the word “theory”. Many people think that because it is a theory, then it is not true.
Colloquially, theory is a useless conjecture or speculation. In science, it refers to a set of statements that explain real-world observations. We have the atomic theory, constructed to expalin why matter behaves as it does. The germ theory of disease, which explains how infections and illnesses are cause by tiny organisms. Both are based on a large body of supporting evidence.
Only a fool would say that atoms don’t exist, only a fool would say that disease is not caused my microorganisms, and only a fool would say that evolution is not true.