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.
Congratulstions to a career well lived. And best wishes and hopes for an exciting and care-free (“sorgenfreies”) retirement.
It would be interesting if you could look back at a few of your (famous and/or infamous) articles, and sketch how they came about: initial idea, problem framing, formalizing the research question, and how the results fit in (or didn’t). A portayal of scientific work, so to speak, with an autobiographical touch.
Perhaps that’s not so appealing to you (also, a bit presumptuous to suggest to you what to do with your free time) but to people interested in science it might be a boon.
In any case: Happy Retirement!
Jerry,
Congratulations! Enjoy!
Hearty and heart-felt congratulations to you, PCCE.
I must add my congratulations too. I retired a couple of decades or so ago myself. Retirement is the best part of having to work for a living. Now you really get to do what you want to do rather than what others tell you to do.
When I left, I told my colleagues: You want to know where I am? Just check the fishing reports. Wherever the fish are biting is where I’ll be. That’s not entirely true but you’re not supposed to believe everything a fisherman tells you.
And, when the fish aren’t biting, there’s opera: The Metropolitan Opera movie theater telecasts and radio broadcasts (I apologize for that plug but it’s meant for Ben and Merilee who are also opera lovers plus anyone else).
This is my favorite web site and I try not to miss a single post. Best wishes, Jerry. I have both your recent books.
Yay, opera! Did you see Trovatore, Dale? We’re more or less on the road for a month so will see reruns of that and I think it’s Otello. Got tix for all the other “first nights/afternoons”. Yay Dmitri!!
Maybe Jerry will develop the taste in his retirement?? You can love both opera AND Neil ayoung:-)
Sorry for being a day late on this reply. I’ve seen all the recent movie theater telecasts of the Met. We have three new ones coming up this month. Even though you’re traveling, you may be able to catch a Met telecast at a “theater near you” by visiting their website. I saw two operas a year ago on my epic trip from CA to FL and back again in my motorhome.
Ben, if you see this, I think you would enjoy seeing these Met telecasts (I call them Theater Casts). Check out their website and look under Cinema.
Before I forget, check out this link I got by email yesterday.
http://www.staatsoperlive.com/de/live/
Apparently you can stream the Vienna Staatsoper. I will look into the details when I get home and see if I can “cast” it onto my TV. Even though it costs something, it may well be worth it. I’ll probably spring for one broadcast and see how it works out. I also need to get a better audio system for the TV.
I’ll wait for the Met reruns. We’re travelling with a pooch and wouldn’t want to leave her for hours in a motel room while passing through Seattle, for example. Everywhere we’re staying ( TRNP, Moab, Whistler) is not likely to have Met broadcasts.
No worries if it’s not on the radio. You can stream it from most any classical radio station.
…assuming you’ve got an Internet connection, of course….
b&
Of course, but I’ll be out hiking in redrock country on Sat and will watch the reruns at our hometown cinema in November:-). We’ve got Sirius opera radio in the car and can listen 24/7 driving across the country. We could even belt along, though I believe we’d kill each other ( J’s voice is even worse than mine, and that’s saying something.)
Merilee and Ben, thanks for replying to my belated opera posts. I’m off to catch Saturday’s season opener “Theatercast” from the Met. Eventually (probably months from now) many PBS stations will re-broadcast most or all Met “theatercasts” but you have to keep your eye on their schedules to see when. Last year I watched The Merry Widow both at the theater and a few months later on Public TV. Renee Fleming was marvelous as The Widow (I think she’s the goddess of opera singers).
I agree with you about Renée and it was a magnificent production of The Merry Widow! Nathan Gunn was terrific, too.
Merilee, you might not get this but didn’t see a reply link to your reply so I’ll try this link. Today (Sat 10-3) I saw Il Trovatore. A worthwhile production for you to catch on a rerun if you can. Plot is a little stupid for our day and age but that’s not unusual for opera. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was count di Luna. He gave a marvelous portrayal despite just recovering from a brain tumor (the audience gave him a standing ovation when he first stepped onstage and threw flowers at him on the opera’s conclusion). Hope you get to see many Met HD productions this season.
What is it with tenors and brain cancer?
b&
Dmitri’s a baritone.
Picky, picky!
b&
Piccolo, Pizzicato
🐸ribbit, ribbit
Thanks, Dale! I somehow got connected to a Facebook group called Met Opera Live in HD. Check it out if you’re on FB! People commenting on the production from all over the world. yes, apparently people threw white roses for Dmitri even in movie theaters! ( they had thrown a ton at his live performances). People said that the woman who played Azucena the gypsy was particularly good. I think I’ve seen her in that role before. I think that all opera plots are pretty cheesy, but the music of Trovatore is glorious!! I can’t wait to see the rerun!! I think we also have Otello coming up this fall which may be my very favorite opera.
Jerry does indeed have a long, successful, career as a scientist to look back on and be proud of. I’m a few years younger than he is, and I’ve been following him since I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While I was student there in the 1970s, Jerry interviewed for a position in Stony Brook’s department of ecology and evolution. Jerry was a young Turk, and back then he looked the part, with an unruly beard and shock of dark hair. He had done groundbreaking work in the measurement of genetic variation in natural populations using electrophoresis, and already published several important papers. Unfortunately, in properly measuring genetic variation and levels of genetic divergence, Jerry had shown that it was more difficult to do this than people had thought. Jerry’s work can be said to have culminated, and brought to an end, the era of “find ’em and grind ’em” electrophoretic surveys of genetic variation, and protein electrophoresis became a much less used method in evolutionary genetics and systematics. So Jerry had brought his own field of expertise to a conclusion. Jerry did not get the job, for reasons I don’t know, but it was Stony Brook’s loss. I can’t recall who was hired, and I mean no offense to whomever it was, but everyone now knows and recalls Jerry.
After Stony Brook, I did my graduate work at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where Jerry had been a student. Jerry was long gone, but he was a not infrequent visitor. My office mate was Jerry’s good friend Ken Miyata, and Dick Lewontin, Jerry’s advisor, was also my de jure advisor (because E.E. Williams, my de facto advisor had retired), so I got to know Jerry during his visits. Although only an occasional visitor, Jerry’s presence was felt in the Lewontin lab, not just by his intellectual contributions from when he had been a student there, but by a number of artifacts he had left behind. Most striking, because of the effort that had gone into it, was “The Jerry Coyne Drosophila pseudoobscura Esterase-5 Zoo”. This was a display case containing examples of flies (dead flies, actually– it was more properly a museum) of the many genotypes discovered by Jerry at the esterase-5 locus. The flies were, of course, externally identical: each labeled fly, with its esterase alleles identified, looking just like the fly next to it. Also in the lab, with a little more intellectual content than the Zoo, was a piece of paper with the question Jerry posed to Dick in response to Dick’s critiques of “adaptationism”: “Why are polar bears white?” It is a question that the two of them still ponder, and disagree about.
“The Jerry Coyne Drosophila psedoobscura Esterase-5 Zoo”; note the “Young Turk” Jerry at lower left and right.
Although speciation had figured in Jerry’s early electrophoretic work, it became the central focus of his later and continuing work. Jerry revived the dormant field of the genetic analysis of isolating barriers, a field created by Theodosius Dobzhansky Jerry’s academic grandfather. Jerry was well acquainted at the MCZ, both personally and intellectually, with Ernst Mayr, one of the giants of 20th century biology, who extensively documented and developed the concepts of biological species and geographic speciation. On one of Jerry’s visits to the MCZ, a delegation of population geneticists consisting of, as I recall, Jerry, Steve Orzack, and myself (I was an honorary geneticist), went to see Mayr (known affectionately, but not in his presence, as “Uncle Ernst”) in his cavernous, book-filled office up in the MCZ’s 5th floor bird department. Mayr had long maintained that his most original contribution to speciation theory was the concept of ‘genetic revolutions’. We went to ask him what a genetic revolution was. We discussed this with Mayr, but his ultimate response was “You’re the geneticists: you tell me.” And indeed, Jerry has devoted most of his career to elucidating the genetics of speciation, although finding less of a revolution than Mayr would have preferred. Jerry’s work led to the publication in 2004 of his magisterial monograph, Speciation, written with Allen Orr. At Mayr’s 100th birthday party in May, 2004, I conveyed to Mayr Jerry’s best wishes, and that Jerry would be sending him a copy of the soon to appear book. Mayr, still sharp mentally, recalled Jerry appreciatively. (Jerry could not attend due to illness.) When, after a long and wonderful life, Mayr died the next year, the editors of Science called upon Jerry to write his obituary, which might, I think, be rightly regarded as the canonical obituary; in it Jerry called Mayr “the Darwin of the 20th century”.
On another of Jerry’s visits, he left a note for a fellow Lewontin student on the occasion of the student’s graduation. It said, “Congratulations. Now get back to work.” On yet another visit, he left a similar note on my desk when he stopped by, and I wasn’t there: “Get to work.” Both Jerry and I wound up at midwestern universities, not too far apart from one another, and I got to see that Jerry’s enormous, almost frenetic, productivity was undergirded by the sentiment expressed in those notes. He admonishes not only others, but himself, to get to work. At almost any hour of the day, Jerry will respond to an email. I’m only sure that he actually sleeps because I’ve seen him sleeping. Now, with his retirement from formal duties at the University of Chicago, Jerry has more time to devote himself to writing and to running WEIT, expanding his role as a public intellectual, and planning further book projects. He still has a lot to get done.
Congratulations on your retirement, Jerry. Now get back to work!
The more mature Jerry, touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (drawn by Latha Menon).
Very nice to read that & a great picture.
PS polar bears are not white, so I understand! Their hair is hollow & pigment free…
That seems to be opening up a whole philosophical debate on what it means to be white!
Ah — actually, this one is easy.
The ideal white is a Lambertian (diffuse) reflector that re-radiates all incident electromagnetic radiation with perfect efficiency. Another way of putting this would be that white is the same color and brightness as the light source.
There are, of course, no actual real-world surfaces that are perfectly white. But there’re some things that, for all insensitive porpoises, are close enough as makes no difference. The best such example is a commercial product known as Spectralon. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen it; it’s insanely expensive and most commonly found on the inside of integrating spheres or on reflectance standards. But you have almost certainly seen a very close second: PTFE (Teflon) thread seal tape — that stretchy white tape that plumbers wrap around the ends of pipe fittings to keep them from leaking and to make sure they’ll come apart again. Refer to the unraveled roll; the tape is very thin and thus translucent. Another very common substance worth an honorable mention is plain ol’ styrofoam…its reflectivity (efficiency) is typically closer to 80% – 85% rather than the 99%+ of PTFE and Spectralon, but it’s also an equal-energy reflector: it’s a very light (essentially-)perfectly-neutral gray.
The hollow clear tube mechanism of Polar bear fur is actually an excellent way to achieve white, and many very white surfaces are structurally similar at a microscopic level.
A last note…many things we superficially think of as being white actually aren’t. Paper is the best example; it tends to absorb proportionately more shorter (bluer) wavelengths, giving it a yellow tint…which paper manufacturers compensate for by adding fluorescent blue dye. Compare some office paper with PTFE tape; the paper will look brighter and maybe whiter, but that’s because it’s absorbing UV light that you can’t see and re-emitting it as blue light that you can see. When you come to realize what you’re looking at, it starts to become the McDonald’s of paper….
Cheers,
b&
Reference: _Color Ontology and Color Science_, Matthen and Cohen eds.
….like spaghetti!
Beautiful ecomium, Greg!
I happen to know a Ken Miyata as well, a math teacher from the Toronto area, whom I met during several conferences at Phillips Exerer Academy in N.H. Ken taught at a very good public high school in Thornhill, north of Toronto, which was populated mainly by Jewish students and teachers. As a Japanese-Canadian, Ken was a bit of an anomaly, but well-liked by the students, who insisted on giving him a Jewush nickname. Thus was born Moishe Miyata
Moishe is now retired and doing field trials with his Border Collies.
Oh, great, I would end up following Greg Mayer!
Well, speaking of that, thank you Dr. Mayer for that most informative post! I particularly enjoyed the explanation of Jerry’s Young Turk days and conclusions about genetic variation, having been part of a find ’em & grind ’em lab myself during approximately the same era. (I think I could still pour a starch gel in my sleep.)
Loved the pictures you included as well. 🙂 Yours & Dr. Noor’s tributes were most serendipitous additions to this outpouring of love and respect for Jerry.
Jerry, that essay was just beautiful! I’m going to be thinking about it and smiling all week. And beyond. It’s been such a privilege to be part of the vast WEIT-ian community and to start each day looking forward to whatever diverse wonders would be posted here.
It’s always strange how those who would have the most to brag about so often tend to be self-deprecating. I’m glad you managed to set that aside in today’s post, though to me it still sounded overly modest.
What an accomplishment to arrive at this milestone and be able to look back on such a fulfilling and accomplished career. Very few of us–certainly not I–will be able to do similarly. Thank you for everything, and I eagerly await dispatches from your next chapter of life. (More of the same would be just dandy.) Skål!
I second these remarks. Lovely tribute to Jerry.
Thank you! Your description, of course, applies to this entire thread.
(When I started typing I was right after GM’s post; by the time I’d finished, I see a bunch of others had snuck in. 🙂 )
Good luck, and I don’t need to tell you, keep busy. I have enough of a problem keeping up with your daily output as it is, D*g knows how I’ll manage now that you have more free time!
Lovely essay by Jerry, and a nice counterpoint from Greg.
Best wishes for a happy retirement, Jerry!
To inspire and challenge others to think and grow is perhaps the noblest use of one’s time. You should be justifiably proud of your academic career.
You’ve inspired more people than you’ll ever know. And you did it wearing cowboy boots…which is pretty bad ass.
I am so glad I found your website some time ago. It has been a continual source of pleasure, in keeping abreast of a wide range of topics and interests.
It has been great to participate in your commentariat and see and hear such a diverse range of ideas and opinions.
I appreciate it that you even went to the trouble to send me a Massimo Pigliucci article on scientism when I was having trouble finding it.
I love cats and I love a true open minded scientific liberal sentiment, you and your web site have provided a wonderful place to come for those things.
I am glad it will be on going.
I am in the process of thinking of retirement too. Good luck in yours and, well done with your career. Very well done.
Don’t listen to the New Zealanders, it is nice there but Australia is a continent, with an unsurpassed range of features. We even have an Antarctic division.
All the best.
Late to the party, but I join everyone in wishing you a long and happy “retirement”.
I agree entirely with your sentiments about doing the work yourself, I hate the way that senior scientists often end up as just lab managers, yet still take credit for the work.
Not sure about other countries, but in UK this is made even worse by the fact that grant money is treated as an output, not an input, in the RAE/REF. In other words if you spend your time writing grant applications to pay for people to do your work for you, you get more credit than if you did the work yourself.
Wish you joy, sir!
Congratulations and all best wishes for the future. As another Canadian reader, your website is always on my must read first list and I have learned a huge amount about biology, evolution, music and literature from it. I really appreciate the high quality of your writing and on your insistence on good manners in your commenting policy. Long may it continue!
Cheers
Congratulations, Jerry, and best wishes for a well-earned retirement. I’ve always had the impression that you’re too modest about the quality of your work. Orwell, apparently, thought the same about ‘1984’. As the man said, “I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.” Your work will likewise live on. Bon voyage around the world. x
Congratulations on your career, and thank you for your outreach.
Congratulations Jerry! Good to hear you had a good academic life, and will continue to experience it.
¡Enhorabuena caballero!
Congratulations! And thank you for this site – so refreshing in a maze of advertising and pop ups elsewhere on the web. You have a great variety of subjects including cats, wonderful cats. Enjoy your ‘retirement’.
Congratulations, and happy first day of retirement! Thank you for continuing to share your thoughts and views with us. I wish you the best in your future adventures and look forward to many more posts about anything and everything. Cheers!
More time for anti-theism activism!
You set an example more academics should follow instead of retreating to their ivory towers while the fundamentalist Christians sabotage our civilization.
Thanks for all you do.
Jerry surely has a ton of great things to retire to. But just in case he’s looking for *one* more thing, how about learning to cook from scratch for that Bengal kitteh I see in his future?
You mean, like, cooking every time he gets scratched?
hee hee 🙂 I bet those Bengals are a handful too.
Best wishes into retirement, Prof CCE.
“A good walk, spoiled.” I forget who said it, but it’s a common enough comment, even in the home of golf, sub-tropical Scotland.
Usually attributed to Mark Twain, but I’m not aware that it’s been nailed down.
b&
love this post and your passion for knowledge, mr. coyne. thanks for sharing the news with us and thanks for all the great work you’ve done and will continue to do with your writing!
Congratulations – though future students will miss you – you obviously will have more time to do your writing and other things. I discovered your website a few months ago and love it. Australia has huge biological diversity – the Great Dividing Range that spans the entire south to north near the coast of the eastern part creates its own diversity. There are the tropics to the north, The Daintree rainforest, and the Great Barrier Reef, and the temperate south, and the massive Murray Darling river basin system. Then the arid interior, and more temperate areas (and wineries) around Adelaide, Perth and the south west around Margaret River.
Dear Jerry,
I choose a few extracts from your admirable and thoughtful Retirement Post:
“honest without being too self-deprecating – I couldn’t have done other than what I did – wish I had been a better teacher – I have worked very hard – I’ve been given the greatest privilege a scientist can have: to be the first to discover some previously unknown things about our universe.”
These I think sum you up in a nutshell. Prodigious in both talents and accomplishments yet modest: a truly rare person and personality. Congrats on your rewarding official career (vocation?) and also on your considerable extracurricular endeavours, in all of which you are entitled to feel justly proud and the latter of which I and a host of others worldwide hope will long continue unabated.
Most of us live achieving little else than survival to procreate but some “happy few”, individuals with outstanding abilities and industry, manage to enlarge the human store of useful knowledge and/or expertise. You are among that highly-valuable elite.
So you “could not have done otherwise”. Yes, Freewill is a spurious and unnecessary idea born of religion and old philosophy, but in no way can hard Determinism, the total absence of any so-called “Freewill”, detract from your achievements which demonstrate and give the measure of your worth as a human to your fellows and posterity. Now your retirement being a change of circumstances will set different/less constraints on your activities, effectively a different freedom. Still a valid term to use by Determinists but used in a different way from its usage by non-Determinists.
All the very best, Arthur Morris
(who retired 34yrs ago, aka mogguy -erstwhile occasional Commenter, aremo14@yahoo.co.uk)
I read Speciation several years ago. I liked it and learned things from it. Thanks. And of course I enjoy this blog.
Bravo, Jerry, on your science and the way you’ve approached it throughout your career. I look forward to working with you in your new phase.
If this collaboration involves introducing fish to Hili’s innards, that would be especially awesome!
b&
Better be sure the fish is REALLY fresh! Neil’s fish might be a tad crunchy…
Congratulations.
Congratulations, Jerry.
This site and two books (WET and FvsF) have been part of my education in a way. Thanks much as well for bringing together an ecclectic and interesting crowd on the site.
I hope you enjoy your retirement and keep up your writing. You have been a major inspiration for me, even though my own writing and even reading of science blogs and similar sites has dropped off recently due to time constraints. It’s also interesting to hear your thoughts on science and life, especially when comparing them to my own experiences and people I’ve met.
I do disagree with what you said about working all the time though. I’m not saying it doesn’t work in some cases but to the best of my knowledge the available evidence all points to shorter working weeks being better for health and productivity, that longer hours are not more productive (productivity increases stop after about 46 hours per week) and that shorter hours reduce the number of mistakes made. I’d actually say that there’s a problem with the way our society is run that our productivity has increased (due to mechanisation, computers and other technology)yet the hours we work have stayed constant or even increased.
I wish you a wonderful retirement, but must take issue with one thing you wrote: To the extent that a subjective-ish craft like writing CAN be mastered, you certainly HAVE mastered it. You are an excellent popular science communicator. I’m going now to write in “Coyne’s speciation book” in my Amazon wish list.
Congratulations on your retirement! I’ve been reading and enjoying your website since the beginning and feel like I know you like a friend now. If you want to improve your already brilliant writing then I can’t wait to read your future books.
Take the long way home Professor, I think you will find the lounge room still fully seated and eager for the next phase.
You sir are one of the good guys,
congratulation on your retirement, to tell you the truth, what that would mean to me is, perhaps and I hope, you get to do more of what you like to do and less of what ‘others’ want you to do.
Actually…I think one of the remarkable defining characteristics of Jerry’s career is that he mostly did do what he wanted. Though I know for a fact that he’s relieved and thrilled he’ll never again have to submit another grant application to keep his colleagues employed, I’m also pretty sure that the applications were for exactly the work he most wished to do.
b&
That did occur to me by what was said in the post and perhaps I’m thinking of myself as I’m not far off retiring but maybe his guitar might need a little attention, more engagement with friends, that sort of thing.
I am nowhere near the league of the Professor and his accomplishments I appreciate just being in the lounge.
Congratulations on a wonderful PCC!!
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been
Dear Professor Ceiling Cat, Emeritus, I will raise a glass to you. This was an especially enjoyable post and thread of comments. Congratulations and thank you. (I wish I could would make you some banana pudding!)
Congratulations, Jerry! I hope your days are filled with interesting things to do; I also hope that you will not quit this site any time soon! It’s a breath of fresh air, and gives me hope for humanity. Thanks for your contribution to science and secularism.
Late to the party as usual but, job done professor! Congratulations on a fruitful career and … enjoy yourself!
Fruitflyful career??
Congratulations on your retirement, Professor Coyne! Your work and writing have had a huge impact on my thinking and work as an evolutionary biologist. You have inspired both my research on speciation and my teaching of evolution to undergraduates. I look forward to reading your upcoming book!
I can’t tell you the mixture of pleasure and indignation that felt while reading “Faith vs. Fact”. I can also not imagine the amount of abuse that you are likely to be receiving because of this book. It’s all too clear that, as a species, we still have a long, long way to go before becoming civilized. My only fear is that the fanatic religious forces, still so prevalent worldwide, will abort that effort. My nightmare is that of ISIS with nuclear weapons facing a US president with the mindset of a Ted Cruz, or just about any GOP candidate.
congratulations in retirement, now it will get even more busy 😉