Before people who like this site worry that I’m retiring from writing here, let me clarify. That is not what I mean by “retiring.” Posting here will continue as usual, though there will be only two posts today. As of 4:30 p.m. Chicago time, I’m retiring in the conventional sense—from my job at the University of Chicago. As I sleep tonight in Poland, seven hours ahead of Chicago, I will be transformed from Professor to Professor Emeritus (or, on this site, to Professor Ceiling Cat, Emeritus).
This has been in the offing for two years, but I don’t often post here about personal issues, and wanted to delay this news until retirement was a fait accompli. And, as today’s Hili dialogue suggests, not that much will change for me, save that I will no longer do research with my own hands or teach students (emeritus faculty aren’t allowed to teach at Chicago). I get to keep my office, and will still work hard, but the nature of that work will change a bit.
Several years ago, I began to realize that my job as a scientist and academic was not as challenging as it had been for the previous 35 years. I had mastered the requisites of such a job: doing research, writing papers, mentoring and teaching students, getting grants, and so on. The one challenge left was discovering new things about evolution, which was the really exciting thing about science. I’ve always said that there is nothing comparable to being the first person to see something that nobody’s seen before. Artists must derive some of the same satisfaction when creating new fictional worlds, or finding new ways to see the existing world, but it is only those who do science—and I mean “science” in the broad sense—who are privileged to find and verify new truths about our cosmos.
But finding truly new things—things that surprise and delight other scientists—is very rare, for science, like Steve Gould’s fossil record, is largely tedium punctuated by sudden change. And so, as I began to look for more sustaining challenges; I slowly ratcheted down my research, deciding that I’d retire after my one remaining student graduated. That decision was made two years ago, but the mechanics of retirement—and, in truth, my own ambivalence—have led to a slight delay. Today, though, is the day.
What am I going to do now? Well, I’m not going to take up golf, which I always found a bit silly. I won’t do any more “bench work”—research with my own hands—but I’m not going to abandon science. I will still write about it, both on this website and in venues like magazines and their e-sites, and I’m planning a popular book on speciation. Writing, for me, is the New Big Challenge, and one that can never be mastered. My aspiration is to write about science in beautiful and engaging words, and to find my own voice so that I’m not simply aping the popular science writers I admire so much. That is a challenge that will last a lifetime, for there is never an end to improving one’s writing.
And I do plan to travel more, visiting those places I’ve longed to see but haven’t had time: Antarctica, Australia, Southeast Asia, Bali, the wildlife refuges of Africa, Patagonia, and so on.
But let me look back now, for I feel the urge to close my academic career by summarizing it.
When I was applying for jobs, my advisor, Dick Lewontin, used to write in his recommendation letters something like this: “If Jerry has one fault, he’s too self-deprecating and tends to sell himself short.” He was right, for I never wanted to succumb to the arrogance of those who internalize the admiration they receive. But today I’ll try to be honest without being too self-deprecating.
So what have I accomplished? First, it’s been a good career. Scientifically, I’ve accomplished far more than I ever imagined. In truth, had I known as a graduate student the hurdles I’d have to surmount to become a professor at a great university and accomplish a goodly amount of widely cited research, I probably would have given up. But I didn’t look at the whole track: I took things one hurdle at a time. Now I’m at the end of the race, and though can’t say I’ve won, I’m happy with my finish.
What am I proudest of? My research, of course, for the desire to find out things was what made me a scientist. The pivotal moment was when, as an undergraduate in genetics class, we were given two tubes of fruit flies, one with white eyes, the other with the normal reddish-brown eyes. We were assigned the job of finding out what mutation caused the eyes to lose pigment. When I crossed the flies from the two tubes, the offspring had normal-colored eyes, but when those “F1 progeny” were crossed among themselves, one got four colors in the offspring: normal, white, and two new colors: dark brown and bright orange. How could that be? I remember puzzling this out, and then the solution came to me in a flash while sitting on the bleachers in swimming class. The white-eyed flies must have two mutant genes, one that blocked the production of red pigment (producing brown eyes), and one blocking the brown pigment (orange eyes). When both mutations were present, no pigment was produced, ergo white eyes. I went back to the lab, tested that theory, and found not only that I was right, but that the two genes resided on the same chromosome (the second), though they were far apart. I gave them cumbersome names, but they were in fact the classic mutations cinnabar and brown.
The excitement of that moment, and the clean results I got when testing my hypothesis, is what made me an evolutionary geneticist. Since then, I’ve always tried to do experiments in which the result are clean: experiments in which there are two possible outcomes that are easily distinguishable. While the study of evolution is often messy, evolutionary genetics is neater, and both my students and I have concentrated on studies in which the results unequivocally favor one hypothesis rather than another. It all goes back to that moment in gym class.
I am proud of my work on speciation, and I will try not to be overly modest when claiming that I think I helped revive the study of how species form, at least in a genetic sense—a research area that had lain moribund for many years. There is now a cottage industry of work on speciation, much of it inspired by the work my students and I did at The University of Maryland (my first job) and then at The University of Chicago. The specific things we found, and what they meant, will of course be immersed in and then covered by the stream of science, and our names will be forgotten. But that is the fate of most of us, and it is enough for me to have shunted the evolutionary-biology stream towards one of its more important questions: why is nature divided up into lumps (species) instead of forming a complete organic continuum? And how do those lumps form? I was privileged to have made a few discoveries that helped answer these questions, and to have inspired others to make even more discoveries.
What I’m proudest of, I suppose, is the book I wrote with my ex-student Allen Orr, Speciation, published in 2004. It took each of us six years to write, was widely acclaimed and, more important, was influential. I still see that book as my true legacy, for it not only summed up where the field had gone, but also highlighted its important but unsolved questions, serving as a guide for future research.
I’m also very proud of my graduate students, which are one’s human legacy: the academic sons and daughters whose work will change the course of science long after I’m gone. I have had a very small output of students: only four, with one of them opting for a career in science writing. The other three are well-known academics, and I’m immensely proud that they’re all seen as “stars.” I can’t really claim credit for their accomplishments, as they were all self-starters, nor can I say that I had an eye for talent. All I can say is that I sat in the lab with them, engaged in nonstop conversation about science as we “pushed flies” together (counted and manipulated flies under the microscope with ermine-fur paintbrushes); and I think that conversation helped motivate and guide them.
And I’m proud that up to the very end I did my own research with my own hands. I don’t fault those senior scientists who tell others what to do and sit in their offices writing up the results of that guided research, but being a lab manager was never my forte. In fact, given that I loved to work at the bench, I didn’t have time to manage others, and this also constrained me to have only one student at a time. (I’ve also had only one postdoc, and I am proud of her accomplishments as a molecular evolutionary geneticist.)
On a more mundane level, I’m proud of having never gone without grant support for my entire career, something that’s a rarity in these days of tight funding. I had the same grant, renewed every three years, for over three decades: “The genetics of speciation.” I am immensely grateful to the National Institutes of Health for providing the largesse for all my research.
What could I have done better? To a determinist like me, regrets are unproductive (though perhaps useful to others), as I couldn’t have done other than what I did. But I wish I had been a better teacher, especially of undergraduates. Given that my true love was research, and that one is evaluated at a place like the University of Chicago largely on research rather than teaching, I probably put too little effort into teaching. I wish I had had interacted more with my undergraduate students, for at the University of Chicago they are a bright and curious bunch. My teaching ratings always came in about average, and I always wished they were higher. On the other hand, a lot of my research was done in collaboration with undergraduates who asked to work in my lab after taking my evolution course, and several of these have gone on to careers in either science or medicine.
The University of Chicago is a diverse and stimulating place: we have great professors and courses in every area of the liberal arts and sciences. I wish I had interacted more with my diverse colleagues over my career. The University is a bit Balkanized, though, so such opportunities are rare, and there’s precious little time. But I love the humanities, and wish I had sat in on courses in English, philosophy, history, and the sciences of physical anthropology, paleontology, and so on. Perhaps I’ll have more time to do that now. But at least I fulfilled the two vows I made as an aspiring academic: I would never leave college, and I would always have a job in which I could wear jeans to work.
Academics who retire are often asked what advice they have for younger folks. (I have in fact been asked that question repeatedly throughout my career.) And of course we all tend to advise people to do exactly what we did! For that is really all we can say: do the things that, we think, helped make us personally successful. And here I’ll mention two things, both of which characterized my own career. Perhaps these can influence the neuronal wiring of younger researchers and affect their own lives.
First, there is no substitute for hard work. Brains are not enough, and, in truth, I’ve never seen myself as particularly smart. But I have worked very hard—often seven days a week—and it is to that hard work that I attribute what success I’ve had. Good ideas are few—I’ve had about three in my life—but everyone has the capacity (though not perhaps the inclination) to work hard. To all grad students, then: if you’re not in the lab on weekends, you’re not doing it right. That is not to say that you shouldn’t have a life outside the lab, for of course that’s vital, but if you’re passionate about your work, you’ll want to do it outside conventional work hours. Science is not a nine-to-five job.
The second bit of advice was imparted by my mentor Dick Lewontin at his “pre-retirement” party at Harvard, when he stood up in front of the coelacanth—the “living fossil” fish preserved in a tank of formalin, which Dick pointed out as an appropriate backdrop. He ended his brief remarks by emphasizing the one thing he wanted the younger generation to absorb. It was this: if you’re a professor, DO NOT slap your name as an author on the papers of your students—at least not unless you did substantial work on the project. Such gratuitous co-authorship inflates your curriculum vitae in a less-than-honest way, and also diminishes the accomplishments of your students.
It is a truth universally acknowledged in academics (and named the “Matthew Effect” after the appropriate Biblical verse) that the “senior author” of a research paper—the head of the lab where the work was done—gets the lion’s share of credit for that work. The unfortunate result is that the graduate students and postdocs are left picking up the crumbs, seen as mere functionaries. That is not the way it should be. Senior authors have already attained their status and security, while junior authors are merely aspiring to such a position. To me, the only justification for putting your name on a student’s paper is that you either did a large portion of the work with your own hands or contributed substantially to the analysis. Simply handing a student an idea, providing the funding or materials for the research, or helping the student/postdoc write the paper isn’t sufficient to warrant authorship. Those are our duties as professors, while our privilege is to do the science and find out new things.
One anecdote about this. My first well-known paper showed that, as revealed by gel electrophoresis, some genes had many more alleles (gene forms) than previously thought—up to twenty or thirty forms segregating in a population. I wrote up a paper for the journal Genetics, and at the top put the names of two authors: myself and Dick Lewontin. At the end of the day, I timidly placed the paper on his desk for his comments and emendations.
The next morning I found the paper on my desk, covered with red scrawls (Dick’s handwriting was atrocious), but with Lewontin’s name crossed out. He told me, “Don’t ever do that again.” Lewontin was part of a lineage of academics who abjured credit-mongering. His own advisor, Theodosius Dobzhansky, often published research that derived from his own ideas, for which he did much of the physical labor of reading chromosome slides, and for which he wrote the entire paper—and yet his name wasn’t under the title. Often his technicians were the sole authors: Boris Spassky and Olga Pavlovsky. And Dobzhansky came from the very first modern genetics lab—that of Thomas Hunt Morgan—whose members (save, perhaps, H. J. Muller) didn’t care very much about who got the credit. I am proud to be part of that lineage and of trying to sustain its traditions.
I’m often told that without putting your name on every paper coming from your lab, you won’t advance professionally. That is not true. For 30 years I submitted grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health listing all the papers published during my previous funding period. Many of these papers did not have my name on them. And the NIH didn’t care a bit: they cared about how much good research had been done on their dime, not whether my name was on the papers; and they continued to fund me.
So to the professors: try to not grab credit that you really don’t deserve. It is your job to help students write papers and find good ideas; it is your job to guide their research and suggest how to analyze that research. But that does not justify your taking credit for their work. To the students: do not assume automatically that your professor’s name should go on your paper. Perhaps that’s the lab “tradition”, and you must hew to it lest you offend your boss. But even if you must succumb to this form of coercion, try not to do it yourself when you become the boss.
And with that advice I will end this post. I have had a good run, I regret nothing, at least scientifically, and I’ve been given the greatest privilege a scientist can have: to be the first to discover some previously unknown things about our universe.
As we say in these parts, lang may yer lum reek Jerry. lang may yer lum reek.
congratulations and enjoy 🙂 Enjoy, especially, the writing! Look forward to you coming to this hemisphere & perhaps even the West!
Molotov!
I hope you mean “Mazel tov!”
He’s Scott Walker. He means Molotov!
No Kidding!
And congratulations!
“He’s Scott Walker. He means Molotov!”
Ha! Good one.
Jerry: Very best wishes for a long and happy retirement. I hope your travels will bring you to New Zealand one day.
I can only endorse this comment!
This all makes what I said in my e-mail to you yesterday about your day today seem rather prescient!
I’m pleased we’re not going to lose you here – I’m sure most of us, like me, learn a lot both from your knowledge and the way you impart it. I’m glad that will continue.
And again, we’re not far from Australia, and you have to come here to get to Antarctica, so I hope I can show you my corner of New Zealand one day.
All the best! 🙂
I ditto that Jerry
Take care and greatly look forward to the results of your writing
Ditto.
If you come to Auckland you can walk with and pet a cheetah at the zoo.
One of your achievements is WEIT. The book was a model of clarity for this non-scientist and the website remains a daily must-read.
A compulsive book-buyer in my youth, I now strictly limit myself; FvF was this year’s choice.
And you need to see the Kakapo! Plus many people regret not spending more time in NZ when they go on a “down under” trip.
I met a guy from Germany who had two months to see Aussie and NZ, and decided to do six weeks in Australia and two weeks here because of the size. When he got here, after his six weeks in Oz, he wished he’d done it the other way around (i.e. 2 weeks in Australia and 6 weeks in NZ) because there’s just so much more to see here.
Better still, six weeks in each!
I wondered when you would!
The encomiums will fill this page & many more, but WEIT readers are I am sure very grateful to you for sharing so much with us, both in biology, rationalism &, not least, food porn! 😉
You forgot to mention cowboy boot porn, Hawaiian shirt porn and of course CAT porn.
You said it! 🙂
Lovely text, Jerry. I’ve got inspired.
Perhaps you would like to come to Brazil to talk to us at the Uni. BTW, was WEIT (the book) translated into Portuguese?
Best of luck in your new career phase!
Jerry,
Welcome to the club. All my best wishes for a long and happy retirement.
Congratulations, Jerry! It is an awe inspiring moment in a person’s life when he/she can sit back for a bit, review the life led, and be happy with the outcome! You should be proud!
I am sure that all of us who follow this post “religiously” are very happy for you. Enjoy the travel, and keep up the good writing.
My sentiments exactly. Congratulations!
Mine too. Congratulations PCC!
Congratulations! It’s not an ending, it is a change in direction. Enjoy your new work and career.
(I am investigating Medicare supplement plans over the next few months and will gladly share any knowledge I gain)
Coyne & Orr 2004 helped me a lot while getting a Ph.D (very recently). Before reading that book, I want to admit here, I did not have a clear understanding of the field I was working on, as a student! Only after reading your book I could give a really good graduation seminar with a healthy level of self-confidence.
And the book also helped me a lot to come up with novel hypothesis, I hope, would soon be tested during my first post-doc period.
So, I am more than grateful to you & to Orr for that!
P.S. An update of that book would be great since you have some more time from now on 🙂
That book was a gem! By 2004 I had already been giving multiple lectures on speciation in an evolution class for >15 years, but that book beautifully crystallized and summarized what was known about speciation (and what we didn’t know) and it cleared away some of the clutter (e.g., some of the exaggerated or poorly supported claims of sympatric speciation).
There is no question that it guided research on speciation in subsequent years and stands as one of those rare books that is frequently cited in empirical (data) papers. Given all of the speciation research these days that identifies specific candidate genes relevant to speciation, an update would indeed be great as well.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on your retirement. I hope your travel plans work out and look forward to reading about your adventures
I am a humanities prof based in Japan, but even so (?) I find what you have written here a wonderful inspiration. I have a few years before my own retirement, but now I have something clear to aim at and try to live up to. (Of course, rephrased in the rather different terms of my field.) Greatest thanks, and warm congratulations.
Congratulations, Jerry! Enjoy your retirement. I look forward to reading this site for a long time and all your future books.
Congratulations and good luck, Jerry. KBO, as Churchill would say.
Just by the way. Today two of my students submitted their PhD dissertations. A young woman from Uzbekistan (writing in English), and a young Japanese man (writing in Japanese). It has been a wonderful learning process to work with both of them, and the Japanese man will probably end up my successor, eventually. I feel proud to have contributed in this way to Japanese scholarship in a very Japanese field.
Nice!
Congratulations! May you find contentment and joy, not that you didn’t have any before. MOAR contentment and joy, is I guess what I mean.
Congratulations on your career & good luck with the further writing. I recommend WEIT to just about everyone as it was so well written & utterly comprehensive. Hope to see many wildlife photos from your travels!
Congratulations, Jerry
Good luck! Congratulations to you and to all your students (ok, actually I envy them).
Welcome to the club! Retirement IS a nice part of the life, whatever you choose to do for filling it. Enjoy!
I feel awe and gratitude to be able to see such dedication and passion.
Thank you for this tremendous effort and incredible gift to both the science and world-wide community. It’s astounding.
Congratulations on being able to retire with a sense of fulfilment from a successful career in science. As you indicate that the future will not involve settling back into an armchair with pipe and slippers, may I wish you every success in your new ventures and that they will prove to be as fulfilling as your career as a university professor.
I look forward to the book on speciation!
All the very best for the future. Here’s wishing you a long and happy retirement, which sounds well planned. Your teaching of evolution to the masses with WEIT is already a huge contribution to humanity, and I look forward to further popular writings.
A beautiful and sincere post Jerry, thank you for your service!
I’ll buy it! (Especially having enjoyed WEIT and FvF.)
Good luck with all your future endeavours, and i’m looking forward to many more interesting books from you.
Congratulations on your graduation from the official academy, to a continuation of your wonderful work with the broader community and writing. Just think – no more meetings, academic trivia and all the things you find irksome. Emeritus has a nice ring to it and my emeritus colleagues continue to be fulfilled without the administrivia. The life of the intelligent quest and sharing it goes on. J\I’m just delighted for you, and pleased that you will still be with us.
Gratulacje i dlugie zycie, for a career and life well and fully lived, with so much more to come. I retired from the classroom last year after 37 years, and though I miss the daily interaction with young people, my world has expanded in ways I could not have imagined a year ago. New and unexpected horizons await, Szanowny Panie.
May I add my congratulations and best wishes for a very long and happy and fulfilling retirement.
Like you, I was fortunate enough to have a Ph.D. supervisor who refused to put his name on the papers I wrote during my period as a research student. When I wrote his obituary for the Royal Astronomical Society, I made a point of noting that fact, because I felt that it reflected the essential integrity of the man.
I gladly join everyone else to congratulate you on your career, and the looming retirement from it. I look forward to reading your new species book.
But why are species generally isolated lumps and not graded along a continuum? I suppose the easier answer is that the intermediates are lesser competitors to an ecological niche and so leave fewer descendants. But there must be other reasons such as being less attractive to the whims of mate preference.
now, time for a kitten? 🙂
…or petting a lion cub!
Good idea! Why slow things down?
two kittens!
All Bengals!
I think one Bengal and, a bit later, one rescue would be nice. 🙂 But that depends on the sociability of the Bengal!
Congratulations and enjoy!
Bravo! Cross Australia off the travel list; replace with New Zealand.
Spoken like a true Kiwi!
Look forward to you coming to Australia (hopefully promoting your new book)!
Yasher koach! I look forward to hearing what you have to say in the future, because it is always interesting.
Jerry,
Congratulations on entering this new phase of your life. And best regards for a career of success and integrity.
Cheers,
Scott
Thanks so much for sharing all of that, very interesting. May I also add my sincere congratulations, and also ongoing thanks.
I will simply add my most sincere congratulations and best wishes. After three decades in the classroom I am happily looking forward to moving on to new ventures as well. All the best!
Jerry,
For some, retirement is not about leaving the work force but transitioning to new endeavors. Congratulations on a job well done and best of luck with the transition. I look forward to following your development as a writer.
Now, if you ever want to get involved with aviation security and want to help me think, let me know. You’ve been through it many times so I’d appreciate your input T.
Best wishes on your retirement. It is good to retire while one is still healthy, happy, and wise.
I retired about 10 years ago, and its been the best time of my life. I sincerely wish the same for you. You’re going to be the master of your destiny rather than a followers of someone else’s dictates.
Erhm. Pro tip: One can’t stress enough the usefulness of a strategically timed nap.
Mazel tov!
I’m just jealous.
If I may be so bold, I’d like to post my own thoughts on the retirement of Jerry “King” Coyne. Let me start by saying that, to my knowledge, everything Jerry posts above is very true and sincere. I was Jerry’s second PhD student, and indeed, even when I had a surprising result that culminated in a paper in one of the very top scientific journals, Jerry graciously let me publish the work without his name on the paper. Does that mean he didn’t do anything for the study? Absolutely not! He advised VERY heavily on the project, from conception to execution to write-up. He even did some of the hands-on pieces (e.g., anonymizing the flies before the experiments for me so I would be unbiased). Hence, his quote “It is your job to help students write papers and find good ideas; it is your job to guide their research and suggest how to analyze that research” is 100% sincere, and his graciousness facilitated my career advancement greatly, as well as surely the advancement of all of his other students. (One tiny amusing exception– a chemist dean at a school at which I interviewed for a job questioned why my adviser’s name wasn’t on the paper and asked, point-blank, if I had “stolen” the data and written the paper without my adviser’s knowledge…)
Second, Jerry says, “I’ve never seen myself as particularly smart.” He may not acknowledge it, but the man is brilliant. The number of seminal experiments he devised over this decades as a pre-emeritus faculty member would be difficult to count– experiments that did not rely on technological advances but sheer ingenuity of using genetics to get at a fundamental evolutionary question. Many of his papers from the 1980’s and 1990’s are VERY heavily cited still today because of their ingenuity (as well as more recent ones, of course), and many of them spawned other researchers to change the way they were doing experiments to mimic the approaches that Jerry came up with. If that ain’t smarts, then I don’t know what is. That moment in Jerry’s gym class not only inspired him but inspired the field of study.
Third, Jerry has lots more to be proud of than his book Speciation (which is outstanding). In 1989, Jerry and his student Allen Orr published a seminal paper on patterns of speciation in Drosophila. To my knowledge, for many years, and likely still today, that was the single most-highly cited paper in the journal (which was founded in ~1947). Indeed– the paper even appeared as a mention in a movie on a chalkboard behind star David Duchovny. One of my undergraduates spotted it, and I told Jerry, who was initially CONVINCED I was pranking him (which, I confess, I had done more than once– poor guy). But it was true– here’s a link:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-06-20/features/0106200039_1_blackboard-drosophila-product-placement
That said, while Jerry’s research is awesome and influential, it’s clear that he reached a broader group through the book that matches the title of this blog, as well as sustaining this blog. As scientists who receive funding from taxpayer dollars, we are beholden to NOT just share insights with the small group of specialists but with the world at large, and Jerry has been inspirational to so many people with Why Evolution Is True. My classes have used this book for years– to put numbers on it, I have 400-500 students each semester in my on-campus class and ~30,000 students per iteration of my online class. And I’m merely one of probably hundreds if not thousands of professors who use this book, so the impact Jerry is making on dissemination of science is so great that it’s hard to conceive!
Finally, on a more personal note, Jerry has always been an outstanding mentor. As he notes, he only had 4 students receive PhDs under him, and all were “high investment” for him (to use an ecological term, he applies K-selection). I came straight out of college fairly young, and was definitely petulant with Jerry on multiple occasions– times that I now regret having acquired more grey hair (well, higher proportion of grey– I lost a lot of hair on top). Still, Jerry pressed forward to be an outstanding adviser for me all the time nonetheless. Non-academics may not appreciate the bond that is created between PhD students and advisers (and to a lesser extent other lab members)– it’s very analogous to a family connection, to the extent that “family trees” are frequently constructed:
http://academictree.org/flytree/tree.php?pid=14950
Despite my petulance, Coyne was always gracious with this teenager-like “offspring”, and went FAR out of his way to foster my career, much like a caring parent would. “I owe Jerry” is such an understatement that it trivializes the words– we share a long-term connection spanning now 23 years that has positively influenced me and everyone else with whom I’ve interacted scientifically.
Jerry– enjoy your last pre-emeritus day. THANK YOU for all you’ve done for me, for your other students (undergrad, grad, and postdoc), for the University of Chicago, for the subfield of study of speciation, for the broader field of study of evolution, and for enhancing the understanding of science around the world. Your achievements will continue to yield dividends for centuries to come, and we look forward to many more upcoming writing achievements as Emeritus Prof. Coyne.
PS– Come visit!
Awww. . . Mohamed, you’re too kind, and of course I’m immensely proud of you. Many thanks!
I will come visit, but you owe me about three BBQ lunches at Allen & Sons (with banana pudding)!
As one who took Prof Noor’s fantastic online genetics course, I can attest that you taught him “real good”, Jerry: humor, pranks, and all:-)
I have to ask: what is involved in “anonymising flies”?
I’m thinking little fedoras and tiny Grocho Marx glasses.
And sandals.
And fake passports to travel to Mexico for spring break.
Or FBI shoes?
A house in a new subdivision where when you go to the local restaurant and order spaghetti with marinara sauce you get egg noodles and ketchup.
lol
Erasing all their online presence. 🙂
Are the flies small enough that you’d need quantum erasers?
b&
Yes, plank length erasers.
…and we’ll have them walk the Planck! Arrgh!
b&
Drosophila have to walk the plank?
Good one!!
Recent NYer cartoon had Wile E. coyote walking the plank and hovering in mid-air and the pirates on the ship yelling “Look down NOW!”
I think it’s where you write each one’s name on a slip of paper and put them into a hat.
Congratulations. The nice part about retiring from a career in science is that even though you don’t go into the lab each day, science itself is still there for you.
What I do miss are the people. Outside of the lab many of the minds that you meet are not quite the same. So nurture the ties with those folks as long as you can.
Congratulations Professor Ceiling Cat, Emeritus! Enjoy your retirement! A new phase of life is always exciting to contemplate. We, your readers, will look forward to your continued writing, plus more travelogues and snaps from exotic places!
Congratulations PCC. Time was when retirement was seen as the end of ones productive life, but thanks to science many of us are now living longer and healthier lives. So there’s no reason to believe that this ‘third act’ cannot be as fruitful and satisfying as your working life was. Enjoy…..
A gracious summary, Dr. Coyne. Thank you for your scientific contributions. Thank you for being a mensch. Thank you for waving the cudgel of truth against the mendacious spirit of our times.
Enjoy yourself. Really. I’ve enjoyed reading your writings and, perhaps the highest compliment one scientist can pay another, I’ve learned many things from your writings.
I know you won’t stop. And I look forward to reading your insights in the future. The best to you. Take care, my long distance friend.
Congratulation on your great career and happy retirement.
The German word for retirement is Ruhestand, which roughly translates to “state of rest”, in your case it’s Unruhestand -> “state of unrest”. 😉
Ruhestand is what my synapses do all the time. 🙂
Congratulations, Jerry!
Congratulations! Even in retirement, you will still enjoy the Botany Pond.
https://instagram.com/p/8BcBnJLCdV/
“It’s a dangerous business, [Prof. CC], going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Take the next adventure, and take us with you. Paz y luz.
With gratitude for your contributions, I wish you the best.
You should include in your accomplishments what you have given to us – US, your readers. You have widened my horizons and stimulated my curiosity about science, the world, the cosmos, both small and large. You get no credit for my atheism, that way preceded your words, but you do provide hope that it will prevail in greater numbers of future humans.(Cats – and dogs, Sir,- are way ahead of us in that).
I’m 87 and you have improved, made happier, more interesting, my walk into old age enormously. Thank you.
Congratulations on your retirement, enjoy every minute and don’t leave this life with regrets ,live life to the full thats all you can do.
Congratulations. The University of Chicago was always a powerhouse in evolutionary biology and you are a power in the house.
Your biggest accomplishment for public education was “Why Evolution is True”. That book did what reading multiple previous books could not. It was a clear, concise, well-ordered explanation. Before that book, many believed evolution was true, but could not articulate why that was so. Your book changed that. That book would not have been possible without your life in science.
This is my favorite website. When I press “w” in my browser, Google fills in your url.
Grattis på din pensioneringsdag. (Swedish: Congratulations on your retirement day.)
A truly remarkable career, and I look forward to what’s surely more to come. But, for the moment, there must be a pair of boots commemorating the occasion.
From the standpoint of one for whom work has more often than not merely been a means to an end, rather than an avocation, let me say ‘congratulations.’ I hope retirement is at least as fun and rewarding for you.
Congratulations and thank you.
Congratulations! And what a beautiful post-
Congratulations professor! As a student myself, I will take your advice to heart. I wish you the best of luck in whatever will come next.
Jerry,
Between your OP and Mohamed’s comment, I’ve got a tear in my eye. You have led a fascinating and fulfilling life to this point and it seems a sure bet that you will continue to do so. You have contributed greatly to your society in many ways, from advancing knowledge to providing an example of human decency, and I can’t really think of any better legacy than that.
Congratulations on your achievements to date and your retirement, sincere thanks for sharing and best wishes on your future challenges.
Sincerely,
Darrell Ernst
Of course, you are rightfully proud of your scientific and academic accomplishments. But. this website is also a big part of your legacy. It has provided a forum for those people who need a place to resist the flood tide of ignorance that is sweeping this country.
Congratulations and thanks!
Congratulations, Jerry.
As Mohamed N’s post above attests, your influence is exponential to your personal contact. As a role-model, you show others how to impact still more people. We often don’t realize how we affect others. It is great that some of us are able to tell you.
May your future exceed your past in accomplishment and joy.
Linda Grilli Calhoun
Best wishes to you, Professor.
I am not a scientist but your book WEIT is one of my all time favorites.
Enjoy your retirement!
Your aspirations to broaden your experiences should add much joy to your life. I retired at 45 from business and became a dilettante generalist. It is fun, although new ‘discoveries’ are rare. Clever phrases and syntheses of knowledge are about it. If in Five College area of Western MA., dinner is on me!
Congratulations! Thank you for sharing your views, knowledge, and life experiences.
A hearty congrats!
Congratulations on an inspiring career, and thanks for this very fine valedictory statement. It deserves to be printed in the alumni magazine, at least. I join all your other readers in being grateful for your posts and wishing you a delightful retirement and many interesting adventures!
The best part is:
And I’m proud that up to the very end I did my own research with my own hands.
At the age of 67 my wife and I published a chemistry paper with all the work including washing glassware was done by us.
Congratulations and thank you.
Congratulations Jerry Coyne. Your books and your blog have enlarged my life immensely. Keep on truckin’. Your site is part of my daily nourishment.
Moar congrats from me – glad you’re joining the club! Your students’ loss is our gain. Looking forward very much to your proposed book on speciation for non-specialists. And of course to many more articles – scientific as well as polemic – on this fantastic site.
I am a great admirer of your writing, and for purely selfish reasons I am delighted that no more of your prose will devoted to grant proposals (having written and reviewed countless proposals I know all too well how much effort is involved). As Professor Emeritus I hope you are able to write to your heart’s content about whatever interests you. Best wishes for a long writing career.
Doug
Congratulations, and I know we all will look forward to your continuing engagement with helping all of us know more and learn more. Here’s hoping that wisdom (in the world) will follow your efforts.
A hearty congratulations to you. And thanks for providing this forum which extends your community of friends and provides a great place for me to join the fun.
The following, statement, regarding “Speciation” is absolutely true:
“It…was widely acclaimed and, more important, was influential. I still see that book as my true legacy, for it not only summed up where the field had gone, but also highlighted its important but unsolved questions, serving as a guide for future research.”
During my time as a graduate student (2003-2008), this book was absolutely foundational, and it remains my primary authority on all things speciation. My copy is dog-eared as hell and much revered. Thanks for writing it, and enjoy “retirement”
Congratulations and well said! I hope the future is equally fulfilling and rewarding
Thank you for sharing your story. I especially appreciated your advice to professors to not grab the credit for another’s hard work…I saw this happen constantly at the institutions and labs where I worked. Your humility and “guy next door” approachability have been what sets you apart from many others. I will never be able to thank you enough for coming to Greenville, South Carolina to present your accomplishments. I am honored to have gotten to know you!
Congratulations. And condolences. I hope that you have found the way to retire from all the stuff you don’t like to do, while still working on the stuff you do like to do.
Speciation is a very important book, a worthy successor to (and improvement on) Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution. Your work on Drosophila speciation has been an essential part of a major development in evolutionary biology — the reunion between work on within-species variation and work on between-species differences. When I was a grad student, in the 1960s, these two lines of work were almost completely separate. Now the two are interacting in new and productive ways. You can take a good chunk of the credit.
I’ll look forward to your writings. I hope that they include occasional review articles.
A job well done — and beautifully written. Congratulations!
And now it’s time to go on an adventure …
Congratulations!
The Spanish for “retirement” is “jubilación” which does have a positive sound, doesn’t it?
I’ve found WEIT (book and website) extremely stimulating, and when in my dotage (I’m an emeritus business prof) signed up for Mohamed Noor’s on-line genetics course was delighted to learn that WEIT was one of the textbooks.
It was great meeting you at INR5. I look forward to reading you here an in your next book(s). And maybe hearing you live sometime.
Good travels!
Najlepsze życzenia!
An Oriental saying: real life starts at 70! Jerry, you are still -5. Enjoy Nature and enjoy real life (in Chinese, 欣賞自然享受人生)
You picked an appropriate day to retire – today, 30 September 2015, is the sixth annual International Blasphemy Day.
Congratulations on your retirement, Jerry, although it sounds from your post that you are hardly retiring at all. May you enjoy what you do in the future as much as you have enjoyed what you accomplished in your past.
I think “Professor Emeritus” sounds way cooler than just “Professor”, especially to people who don’t know what it means.
Congratulations! I hope this gives you time to find a big cat’s offspring to pet.
I first read WEIT back in 2009 by accident, checking it out at the library, but did not know you from Adam. Sorry for that line.
Later, I had to get the book for myself because just reading it once was not enough. What I learned specifically from this book was the less you know about something the more you can get out of a good book on the subject. I did not even look until later at the names of some of the people who wrote praise – Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I guess I know a good read when I accidentally pick it up.
Do not worry about retirement because you will be just as busy in that position as ever before and you won’t even know why.
Congratulations, PCC, E-to-be.
Your own voice is coming through as clear as bell in this piece, and I’m spellbound.
Much love and best wishes.
Well deserved, you did good!
Thank You
Now and in the future
Your influence on my life and thought is profound
Harbo
WELL DONE! And ENJOY THE HECK OUT OF YOUR TIME!
Carpe diem and memento mori!
I haven’t read the whole piece nor the comments… so I am going jump ahead of myself: As I read “I retire today” my heart started thumping faster to go back to normal again as I read the first sentence…
Thank you Jerry, now I need to go change underwear.
Almost forgot: and I BIG thanks! for your work and all the stuff that you have taught me (us).
Congratulations, Jerry. The world, especially the academic world, needs more people like you. I read your posts first thing every day. Thank you for your contributions to science and to humanity in general. May you enjoy a long and healthy retirement.
“My aspiration is to write about science in beautiful and engaging words”
Check, you’ve done that one!
Congratulations and all the best to you. As a lay person, WEIT is/was a real eye-opener for me, such that I have it several formats, most especially as an audiobook for my daily commute. I’d previously read a lot of Carl Sagan’s material, so WEIT and “Your Inner Fish” fleshed out the framework of knowledge provided by Dr. Sagan.
As for “grabbing credit”, that custom was the reason for Candace Pert’s falling out with her professor after Pert had isolated a brain neuro-receptor. She wouldn’t sit still for it.
Lastly, I wish that there were a site for discussion and Q&A of WEIT. There are so many questions and ideas…
Congratulations and best wishes, enjoyed reading your summary. Very glad that WEIT will continue, it is my favorite site thanks to PCC– and the excellent commenters, too. Thanks!
Congratulations on everything you’ve achieved, Jerry. WEIT was a seminal work which has surely brought to many an understanding of evolution that was previously lacking.
I hope you continue to run this website for many years to come though quite where you find the energy I’m really not sure!
Congratulations, Jerry. Godspeed – live long and prosper.