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.
Good decision about golf. It IS silly.
Quite right. Professor emeritus Coyne should pick up fencing. 😀
I’m thinking a motorcycle. Really seems to fit his character.
Hehe. I’m retired and am an avid motorcyclist AND I’m into fencing. Hate golf, mind you
Interesting combination! For riding do you prefer a bike that is light, quick and precise, like a sabre, or something that is less nimble but with more heft and brute strength, like a two handed Claymore?
I’d opt for a Nishiki International myself. But, it’s up to the individual.
I have never taken it up, but I can see how others enjoy it. Not strenuous, requires thinking.
My way of playing would involve beer and laughter and teasing, and only informal score keeping.
Bowling?
Aaargh:-). Perhaps in cowboy boots and Hawaiian shirt and John Goodman, John Turturro (Jesus) and Steve Buscemi as team-mates?
That was funny!
I grew up surrounded by course, I’ve been playing since I was 9. I don’t do it much anymore because it’s a very expensive sport to pursue and the environmental impact of golf courses is often terrible. I guess I ca just go fr a nice walk on Sunday morning now, without needing to lose 4 balls in a pond.
Congratulations, Jerry. Godspeed! Live long and prosper.
Congratulations on a long and accomplished career and I look forward to more of your written work in the future (especially on food!).
If you’ve been as influential to your students and co-workers as you have been to us laypeople, then you’ve surely done a marvelous job! Best of luck in your retirement! At least we’ll be able to find you here! Take good care of yourself.
Congratulations Professor from south korea.
Ever since i watched your video on youtube, i became your fan.
Not long after, your book ‘why evolution is true’ was translated into korean and it’s sitting in my bookshelf as one of my favorate collections along with Dawkins’ and Pinker’s.
Congratualtions again and i really look forward to reading your next book about speciation soon.
Herzlichen Glueckwunsch! This web site will become even more interesting I guess, thanks a lot!
Congratulations! Enjoy your retirement!
I can only dream about what it would have been like being an under grad in your class. I’m an undergrad reading this blog, although I don’t understand it all, but I do learn something every time I read it. Thank you!
Congratulations! Much to be proud of.
Congratulations on a life well lived, and while the second half of your life is before you, the half you’ve left behind is exemplary, to put it mildly. I am in awe.
Congratulations and may you get as much enjoyment out of this new chapter of life as you did the last! I look forward to the new books. 😉
Enjoy your newly re-focused life.
Congratulations Jerry Coyne: *Still* “the hardest working man in the evolution business.” Now, from more remote locations.
Popular book on speciation? Shut up and take my money!
Retirement is wonderful. Congrats.
Congratulations, PCC,E:-)
Bonne retraite Jerry !
What I’m proudest of, I suppose, is the book I wrote with my ex-student Allen Orr, Speciation, published in 2004.
I was going to say that if you didn’t. It’s a brilliant book, comprehensive yet easy to read. It influenced me a lot, and I try not to think about species at all other than as the conveniently packaged tips of trees.
Congratulations Jerry – this piece was warm-hearted, intelligent and restrained. I hope you enjoy life post-retirement just as much as you did before.
I don’t know much else to say, since all I know is what I read on this website, and the website has been pretty separate from your personal professional life, but I’m very glad you’ll still be posting at WEIT and writing books. WEIT is one of only two websites I visit daily as a routine – and if you started including football transfer gossip and Manchester United match reports I could reduce that number to one…
Best wishes
Thanks for sharing a bit of your personal life with us today – you have a life to be proud of! Congratulations on your retirement and never forget that YOU get to decide what’s next!
Congratulations and good luck with your next phase of life. I hope you get to pursue some of those humanities subjects.
Jerry, with the possible exception of all the science posts you’ve done, this is the best post I’ve read on your site. You did win the race — the only one that matters: you left your corner of the academic world a significantly better place than you found it. And, considering just how amazingly good it already was when you got there, that’s no small accomplishment.
Now, I’ve got to read the hundreds of posts of those who beat me….
b&
Jerry, this was an awesome read and I savored every paragraph. I have enjoyed reading your informative, educational posts, though I’ve rarely commented. After reading this post, I have the utmost respect for you. Congratulations on your accomplishments and retirement. I’m happy to read that you will continue to follow your bliss. All the best to you in this new chapter of your life.
You are an original and a breath of fresh air. Long may your good work and obvious enjoyment of life continue.
Many thanks.
Matthew Cobb here: I’d like to add my congratulations to Jerry. When he told me he was writing this piece I unwittingly put my finger on Lewontin’s character analysis, as I said ‘don’t be too self-deprecating!’. Jerry’s technical work on the genetic basis of Haldane’s Rule, and his work on the mating behaviour of Drosophila has been incredibly important. It inspired me, and it was a real privilege to be in the same lab as him during two of his sabbaticals in France – first at Gif in 1985, then at Orsay in 1992 (dates are approximate).
My only regret is that we only wrote two pieces together, with very different tones. One was a letter to Nature attacking their pandering to the Templeton Foundation, the other was an in memoriam piece in Evolution about our mutual friend and colleague, Daniel Lachaise, with whom Jerry did some great work on a new species of Drosophila on the island of Sao Tome in Africa.
You’ve stopped fly pushing and lecturing Jerry, but you won’t stop using that inquisitive mind and sharp logic that was such a vital part of your research career, and which we will still see on this site.
Congratulations on an academic life well lived, which has had a real impact on how we understand the world!
MC
Congratulations on your retirement. I’m so glad that you will still be posting.
Congratulations Professor Coyne! Like many, I have enjoyed your book and articles (not so much the cats…).
Thanks for the insights into your experience in academe.
I am still teaching and in fact use stuff from your website all the time, so keep it up!
Beautiful post. Congratulations.
From my selfish side: more posts and more books for me to read! Thanks.
Congratulations! You’ve gotten to live this long, in good health and in a job you like. This is not something many people get to do.
I’m glad you will still have your office because the squirrels need you – someone, please think of the squirrels!!
As for self-deprecation I was like that for years but I think mine could be more classified as self-loathing. Then I worked in the Corporate world and changed to promoting my accomplishments. It didn’t get me very far but at least I didn’t feel like as much of a loser (as I languish in a crappy job, relegated to doing stupid work all the while dealing with health issues, aware that I won’t make it to old age — maybe I should retire too damn it).
Hang in there Diana!! We need people like you!!
+1!
Indeed!
Congratulations. Now you have more time to do even more of what you do so well – write (and travel). No committee meetings (which were the bane of my existence). You will enjoy your time, even if it isn’t spent sitting on the veranda and spitting watermelon seeds over the rail.
Congratulations! What a beautiful essay you wrote. I will read it again and again.
Congratulation on a long and successful career both in and out of you field.
As you say little will change and we all look forward to future accomplishments from your hand
I look forward to the popular book on speciation. There is a real need for such a book. Well I certainly need it.
Forever in blue jeans!
Congratualions, Jerry. You are a true inspiration. Although, I have to admit all this pent up anxiety I had for you about your going back to school was for naught. Enjoy!! Can’t wait for your next book.
This is a momentous announcement, akin to Jon Stewart’s announcement about leaving The Daily Show. I wish you all the best in your “new career”.
Warm and heartfelt congratulations, Jerry! This is a lovely summary of your career, I wish you a full and happy retirement!
It’s been a pleasure to know you Jerry and to have had you visit our little meeting twice. I hope you will still be available for speaking engagements in the future and I sincerely wish you all the best in your retirement.
The nicest part about this is that you are happy with your career. It’s a feeling not everybody has (but I do). So happy “retirement”. You will certainly find what we all do, that there is no longer enough time to do everything you want. 😉
That was a heart-stopper when I saw the title in my feed reader!! I’m a very long time lurker here and never commented before: but let me just say this, I hold this website and your writings in a very dear place. I’m glad you will continue writing here and elsewhere and wish you a long, happy and productive retirement, Professor (now emeritus). All the best from across the pond. If perchance you ever happen to be in Yorkshire, England – look me up, and I’ll buy you a very well deserved pint.
It’s been a treat reading about the life you’ve led and you have the laurels to rest on.
I hope the travel posts increase as a consequence. And I hope the posts about academia don’t attenuate.
(And I appreciate the sentiment you enjoy wearing jeans to work- software engineers in CA have that same luxury. I was one for over 2 decades.)
The compulsive punster in me demands that I post this logo of a Canadian annuities company. (The punster in me also compels to note I look forward to finding out why speciation is not specious.)
http://born-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/evolution-retirement-logo.jpg
Congratulations and thank you, I can’t wait for more books!
Congratulations, Jerry! Welcome to the ranks. Your announcement was quite poignant and roughly paralleled the character of my own career in Architecture – quite different things, I know, but a lot of the same dynamics. So, thanks for the memories.
While your retirement future is determined, I think you may find as I have that what you imagine it will be may be delightfully inaccurate. But I am looking forward to all those books. There are never too many science writers for me.
Continue. Speak out. Write. Enjoy. Congratulations.
Jerry,
After 33 years in academic biological science I went part-time a few months ago. I’m not quite ready to contemplate full retirement but it doesn’t seem as far away as it once did, and I think I can relate to the mix of feelings you’ve described.
All I can say is to wish you a long, happy and fulfilling retirement, and long may you continue to inspire, educate and entertain us with your books and, of course, this indispensable website!
Continue. Enjoy. Write. Speak out. Congratulations.
Congratulations and happy retirement.
Keep up the good (writing) work.
To have made important contributions to one’s field is the goal of all research scientists; most fall far short of your accomplishments. Enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done!
Now you have more time to devote yourself to improving this world with your unique voice. I look forward to listening. 🙂
Congratulations and Happy Retirement!
May you find even more happiness in retirement; I’m so jealous..but only for 9 months.
I started as a chemistry major in 1960 but plenty of sex with a woman delayed my getting back to school for seven years and then a history major with emphasis in labor history and black history. I have followed science and evolution all my life and have read a great number of books and read WEIT as soon as it was out. Great book and I bought more copies and gave or sold to friends. Your WEIT site I have followed daily and have enjoyed immensely. Still reading Faith vs Fact. Congratulations for your accomplishments and what you will learn for us in the future! Thank you for all of us who you have influenced !
Congrats! Looking forward to your next book!
really enjoyed reading this. as a young graduate student in the life sciences, I would do well to “ape” many of Jerry’s habits as a scientist!
You may regret not putting more of your time into your teaching, Professor Coyne, but the Evolution class you taught with Brian Charlesworth was one of my favorite classes at the U of C (I TA’ed it the next year) and absolutely inspired me to pursue an academic career studying evolution. Ironically, I only came to love Drosophila well into graduate school and to study speciation genetics even later; I wish I had learned to push flies as an undergraduate in your lab. Congratulations and I hope you make the most of your retirement!
Ooh. I really liked the Macroevolution seminar he team taught with Paul Sereno. Much food for thought there, and good times were had by all.
I completely agree that you should not sell yourself short as a teacher of undergraduates. I took your evolution course as an undergrad at Chicago, and it was truly wonderful. Most of the classes I took were amazing, but your teaching stood out as particularly real and relevant. It was clear that you were personally passionate about everything you taught in that course. You also had a very serious-about-science while still being a bit goofy attitude that I found personally appealing. (You handcuffed a briefcase containing the final exams to your wrist and made a big production of bringing them in…) I remember clearly everything I learned from you, despite the fact that it was nearly 30 years ago. Since then, I have eagerly read and absorbed all of your books, and am so very grateful to have the opportunity to have continued learning so much from you. Thank you for your contributions to science, and to my own personal journey. You have truly earned your new position as Professor Emeri-cat in chief.
Professor, there is little I can add to the many eloquent comments above save to say thank you for the entertainment and education provided by your posts on this website and congratulations on a great career.
In honor of your host country, let me add: gratulacje i powodzenia.
I’ve been sitting in a waiting room while my car gets a tune-up and have had to blow my nose and wipe my eyes a couple times…luckily most people are buried in their phones like me. This is a beautiful post and inspirational is an understatement. Reading what others have to say about how you’ve affected their lives is wonderful. I am in agreement and want to say WEIT is the first thing I read every morning. It’s really become a part of my daily routine and it has deeply enriched my life. It is remarkable to me how many brilliant readers comment on WEIT, and this gathering of great minds is an accomplishment in its own right.
So with that I want to add another Congratulations on your retirement! You deserve the best life has to offer.
Sincerely,
Mark Richardson
Congratulations on making it to this milestone in life! 🙂
Will your university email still work for sending you wildlife photography or will you have a new address to send things to?
The University is letting Jerry keep his office (and sqrlz!), so I’m sure they’ll let him keep his email, too. In fact, I’m sure he’ll have his email even after he gives up his office (if he ever does).
b&
My son got his PhD from Princeton three years ago and he still has his email address. I think that is typical of grad school and higher. It doesn’t cost them anything.
I am an alumnus and still have my UofC email address. And they did not even have email when I was a student.
🙂
Yes, same email address, and thanks to all who have posted in this thread for their wonderful and encouraging comments. This has helped brighten Retirement Day considerably!!!
But, most importantly, is Hili sleeping with you🐯
Much, much better to sleep with the cats than the fishes. Though, I suppose, to be fair, we and the cats are fishes…and now my head hurts…I should go find Baihu and sneak a cat nap with him….
b&
Congratulations, Prof. CC, on a stellar career, and for sharing some of what you’ve learned with us. Now the fun begins!
Na dzrowie, Jerry! I’m due to hang up my stethoscope in two months, after which I hope to have a life spent mostly in the darkroom with interesting chemicals (but will probably be largely devoted to cleaning up cat sick!) I look forward to your future writings, long may they continue.
It’s a lovely, gracious retirement note, but I rather don’t believe it very much. You’ve always seemed to me to be a polymath who’s got more done before breakfast than anyone I’ve ever observed. You’re like the poster child for “be all that you can be”.
So if, as you say, you’re retiring, it can only mean that what you’ll be up to now would send the rest of us to the hospital. Or bed, at the very least.
Well, that’s lovely – thank you for the thoughts.
I have to say your writing voice is already distinctive – the combination of simple honesty and trenchancy with your handful of signature synonyms is both agreeable and hard to mistake.
Congratulations (now-kinda-ex) Prof CC!
Congrats! And well said. Your saying that Speciation is the work you’re most proud of reminds me of Dawkins saying that The Extended Phenotype is the work he’s most proud of. In both cases, it’s not your more accessible, popular work, but the more hardcore science. I’d bet many artists, musicians, etc. would also say they are most proud of works that are not their most popular. And of course, good science is very artistic.
A wonderful summing up to an obviously wonderful career. I am Polish but know only a few phrases often repeated in our grandparents’ house. My grampa would always greet us with a shot glass of homemade honey whiskey, a delicious tradition I keep up. It may not be the tradition where you are now, but close enough. I raise a shot glass of honey whisky to you Jerry with the refrain we always say: Nasz Zdrowie!
Cheers!
Congratulations Jerry. Hope you make Vancouver again next June.
Thank you for all of the hard work you have done over the years. You and many others like you are inspirations to the next generation of scientists.
I hope to live up to the ideals that you outlined in your last few paragraphs.
How exciting for you. I guess you’ll have to buy more boots to replace the ones you are gonna wear out in your travels.
Congratz Jerry! There is something melancholic when people write about their journey, but luckily you have much more to do and places to see. Thank you for this wonderful and inspiring write-up and the work you put into writing. Doing more of it is a great task — say the readers — but here you do it again, you’re selling yourself short!
I usually don’t comment on this website (I am one of the silent observers of the posts here), but I wish to say congratulations and enjoy your well earned retirement Jerry!
I turned 40 this year and have noticed the passage of time more than in recent years. I already miss you, even though I only know you by reading this website!
You’ll still write here until you stop writing here. I hope you have the drive to continue for many years to come.
Thank you for the information you’ve imparted over the years, and I look forward to more of it!
That’s a beautiful essay, Jerry! I wish you all success in your new journey.
That’s a beautiful text about a really good life. Princess Hili must be so very proud. I am too, of being one of your readers. Cheers!
Congratulations Jerry – your writing and accomplishments are things to be truly proud of. I certainly enjoy reading your _website_ and look forward to coming here every day (several times per day actually… come to think of it, most of those website hits from Australia are probably mine)
I know you will have fun, and if you do come to Australia it would be great to see you. Do get onto the ABC’s Q and A as Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss have done.
Cheers Mate!
“Congratulations” is, of course, inadequate. But you understand. I “retired” at the turn of the millennium, and found myself busier than before. I really don’t know how I got any work done (some would say, “Not enough,” and I would not disagree. You will like it. I found it so much fun to be “demoted” and to labor in the field with someone else doing all the paperwork and other bullshit.
What IS “a species?” (The question my friend Karen Sausman used to ask her students, and asked me in about 1965. I still don’t know the answer.)
What a great summary of your career as a hands-on scientist. Thanks so much for sharing! I’m glad you’re keeping your office. As a graduate of Chicago, it continues to be a major anchor of my world. So glad you’ll still be there–still feeding the squirrels and monitoring the ducklings in Botany Pond. Cheers and Congratulations! Can’t wait to see what you do next!
My best wishes in your new “job” as retiree. I hope I will enjoy your homepage for a much, much longer time.
Well done , Jerry! Retiring from the university isn’t retiring from intellectual and scientific life. So much more to do and more time to do it.
Congratulations on a fruitful and truly inspirational career.
So long, and thanks for all the cats.
Congratulations on your retirement, Jerry, and happy trails for all the travels you have planned. Doing one’s own research with one’s own hands is the cat’s PJs, and I’ve never regretted my decision to be much more a bench researcher and much less (or not at all) a lab manager. I’ve had nowhere near as illustrious a career as you, and I’m primarily a lowly anatomy and neuroscience instructor, but I’ve been productive on my own terms without (I think) exploiting others.
Now I just have to manage to live and stay healthy until age 70 or so, which is when my financial manager says I can afford to retire comfortably. I’m investing in support socks for all those long hours standing in gross anatomy lab … maybe a back brace too.
Congrats! May you have a long and very happy retirement.
Dr. Coyne,
Today, we finished up our 5th year of using WEIT for the evolution portion of our Intro. Biology course at Hiram College. You may not have taught many undergrads at Univ. of Chicago, but you have touched lots of them through WEIT. Appropriately, we covered speciation today. Thank you for helping us all teach and learn about the beauty and power of evolution.
Jerry
Congratulations on your decision to slow down a little.
Take it from me, you never do really retire. Since making that same decision a few years ago I still don’t know what a Saturday or a Sunday even looks like, let alone experienced them.
This is a seminal phase in your life but there is much, so much more you have yet to share with us and inform us about.
For me, every day, the WEIT website is my Sydney Morning Herald for catching up with the news. There is always a bed in our house for you should you visit Australia, particularly Canberra and the Australian National University. Twenty minutes drive tops from a 14 acre property filled with kangaroos and wombats.
A great “final” pre-emeritus post Jerry. I’m sure all the academics reading this would wish to be able to write something of the same tenor when they retire. An academic job is really a privileged one and it is clearly one that you have embraced in all its facets.
The bad news is that every decent retired academic I know seems to be busier than before-although with much more choice.
Jerry…… you have greatly enriched my life with your writing. I am proud to call you my hero just like the late Christopher Hitchens. Congratulations on all your accomplishments.
Welcome to my side, me and Kink!
We have warm cookies because we bake them every day. Tuna and liver cookies – you don’t know what you’re missing!
Looking forward to the new blog – Why Evolution Is True, Ha Ha, Just Kidding!
Should be a laff riot.
Truly the best daily read on the Internet. I hope you continue with your incredible output, while at the same time developing and exploring new interests.
All the best to you Professor Coyne!! You have great influence on the world. Honestly. You really do!
As a teacher of high school students, you have influenced my understanding of evolution and how to teach it with passion and interesting examples. I use video and picture clips from your site often. You are very good at educating in an understandable way (and I’m sure you do great research too), so I look forward to many more posts and books !!
Thank you
Congratulations on closing one chapter and opening a new one in such style. Happy retirement!
It so happens that I’m beginning my sabbatical leave today, and it feels like being semi-retired.
Congratulations Jerry!
Congratulations on your retirement. The great thing about it is you’ll be so busy and engaged that pretty soon you’ll wonder how you ever found time to go to the office; and as Calvin’s dad pointed out – on their deathbed no-one wishes they’d spent more time at the office.
Keep us posted and many thanks..
Congratulations and Thank You. Thank you for your contribution to Science. Thank you for your authorship, helping ‘the public’ better understand Science. And personally thank you for your graciousness. An ‘out-of-the-blue’ on vacation phone call from a CA high school teacher was enough to allow a short meet-and-greet in your lab. Congratulations and Thank You!
Many congratulations on your retirement, and thank you for all the stimulation you provide, and for the many beautifully written pieces you write, including the very moving one above.
Hey Jerry!
Congratulations and best wishes for this new phase in your life! It’s going to be a ton of fun 🙂
Congrats and well done Prof Ceiling Cat!
You seem to have done this “life thing” very well: a satisfying, productive career, leading to a retirement enriched with passionate interests to pursue. It’s inspiring.
I’m glad you will still be writing for WEIT!
– Vaal
A wonderful and thoughtful post. Hooray for PCC, E! And hooray for us — more time to write to us on your webpage, and from more interesting and exotic places.
Ooo, the dots all connect now… The Dialogues, the trip abroad, the retirement – you’re coauthoring a book with Hili, aren’t you? That’s awesome, just don’t let fame go to her head. I don’t want the two of you to have a “It used to be about the music (science)” moment. Cats are notorious divas.
Seriously, though, I’m happy that you’re happy, so congratulations on the well-earned retirement. And at the risk of sounding overly sentimental (not to mention handing out advice that I’m not qualified to give, but whatever, I love doing that,) my writing advice to you would be to remember that there’s a lot of heart that goes into writing. Or if you would like that phrased in a more science-y and analytical way, let’s call it “recognition of complex context-specific emotional patterns and their invocation”. Even if it’s the form that you plug nonfiction into. I knew why I liked this site when I read your commentary on The Dead – why this wasn’t some blah, boring, or droning science lecture.
Hope you and Hili are celebrating with champagne and cherry pie and Fancy Feast somewhere!
Don’t go away,Jerry. What you do on your blog amazes me. I couldn’t write as much as you do in 100 lifetimes. Or think as much or understand as much. Always with terrific style and clarity. I hope your allegiance to determinism does not prevent you from feeling good about your career. The Peter Frampton song about liking your “way” comes to my mind in the present context And I am the enemy in that I think about the meaning of life and get off on trying to find weaknesses in Darwinism.
Congratulations. I have to say, I am jealous.
I am looking forward to the book about speciation. I will be first in line to buy it.
Dr. Coyne,
Thank you for all your contributions to biology. Your “Speciation” book was a huge influence on me (still have it on my shelf) and helped me get a couple of NSF grants!! Hope you have a long and wonderful retirement. You are one of the reasons why Chicago is so well known for evolutionary biology.
Your papers and your three books had a very big impact on me. Thanks for them all and please keep the books and the posts coming.
Congratulations Jerry. And please visit Australia!
You’re simply the best, Jerry. Many heartfelt congratulations!