Category: Faith Versus Fact (a book)

Website upgrade and other matters

February 18, 2015 • 10:00 am

If you look to the right of this site’s main page, you’ll see that the links have been revamped, to reflect my new book. (The name of the website will, of course, stay the same.)  The margin now looks like this:

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(Thanks again to Kalliopi Monoyios for doing this update; I’m completely useless at website design.)

A tip: Readers are always worried about emailing me at my work address, but that’s the one I use nearly all the time, and the one you should use to reach me. You can find it at the “Research interests” link that you can see above. That’s also where to send your “readers’ wildlife photos” as well as other links you think I might find interesting. But please be judicious: I get elebenty gazillion emails a day and can’t even answer them all. Also, as I’ve requested before, please limit your emails to me to one per day at the most. Some readers send me multiple contributions, comments, or questions in a single day, and I find that overwhelming.

One other request: please read “Da Roolz“—the guidelines for commenting on this site. They are conveniently located on the left margin of the page, or at the link just given. I am having to deal with a lot of new commenters who haven’t seen these guidelines, and who wade in with a full load of vitriol and insults. Or, they’ll email me and tell me what I should post about.  If you’re new here, please go to the link and acquaint yourself with these Roolz.

 

Website tweaking

February 17, 2015 • 7:56 am

Or, as the signs say, “A temporary inconvenience—a permanent improvement.” Actually, I don’t think there will be any inconvenience, but I wanted to let people know that we (and by “we,” I mean Kalliopi “Kapi” Monoyios, the artist who designed this website, illustrated both WEIT and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, and co-runs Symbiartic,  a scientific-illustration website at Scientific American) are tweaking this site to reflect the availability of The Albatross. You’ll see some new links on the right, which may appear and disappear temporarily, but I’ll let Kapi describe the changes:

Readers will notice the menu on the WEIT website will be updated to reflect the addition of the new book and the reorganization of jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu. The old jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu site will be modified to include information about WEIT as well as the new book, Faith Versus Fact. In essence, we are leaving the blog as is (except for minor menu changes) and revamping jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu to serve as a more generalized author website where readers can find information and order copies of Jerry’s current and future books.

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A note on buying The Albatross outside of the U.S. and Canada

February 5, 2015 • 9:15 am

I’ve received both emails and comments about my post from two days ago flogging Faith Versus Fact and telling you how to order it. Readers in places like New Zealand, the UK, and Australia wanted to know how they could order the hardcover, which comes out May 19.

First, a correction: I gave a number of ordering links, one of which, it turned out, was an error, though not on my part. Although Amazon UK does list the book on its site, it is not allowed to do so, as English-language rights were sold for publication and distribution only in the U.S. and Canada. That meant that you could order it only from sites in those countries. The Amazon UK link will shortly be taken down (temporarily), so don’t pre-order from them—yet. If you have, check with them.

But, in view of what seems to be an appreciable number of non-U.S. and non-Canadian anglophone readers who would like the book, yesterday I transferred all English-language rights to Viking/Penguin Random House. That means that they can distribute it far more widely, and the book will, I hope, soon be available for order or pre-order in a lot more places outside north America. Here’s what I heard from the sales division of my publisher:

International readers will be able to buy the print book from all the major international online retailers (so all the international Amazon sites, plus online retailers in the UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa, India and Asia).

They will also be able to order the book from local booksellers.

The ebook will be available on all Amazon sites, Apple iTunes, Kobo, Google, as well as from smaller digital retailers (those that are serviced by the digital aggregators).

So, especially if you want an e-book, it will be dead easy to get. The deal with be implemented very soon, so be patient. You can check your local online retailer and see if and when when the book is listed.

As before, I’m asking readers to pre-order the book, for all advance sales count towards first-week sales, which are the most important ones. (If you haven’t done so already, and live in Canada or the U.S., go here for to preorder.) I’m told that Amazon doesn’t charge you until the book is shipped, so you’ve nothing to lose. I

‘ll also ask ask my local bookstore to stock signed copies, so you might be able to order autographed copies from them (no extra charge, but cat drawings will not available on those). More about that later.

Thanks for your indulgence.

Ordering Faith versus Fact (i.e., do it now, please)

February 3, 2015 • 11:45 am

A kindly reader emailed me some information that I decided to investigate, to wit:

It would be a good idea to encourage everybody who follows WEIT and who intends to make the purchase not to wait, but to pre-order.

Your readers will help the book gain the attention of many more readers by pre-ordering at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, or at an independent bookstore.  All pre-orders count as first-week sales, and the first week’s sales of any book affect its future by determining how many copies bookstores order, whether it appears on recommended lists, and so on.  So these are the best sales to have, because they can boost a book like yours into best-seller territory right away.

I checked with my publisher (Viking/Penguin/Random House) about this, and my editor and others told me not only that the information is correct, but also urged me (translation: demanded) that I put up pre-order information now and keep it on the site. (Pre-ordering links will be the same as ordering links, I suppose, and the book will be available May 19.)

Until I get my web designer to put in permanent links in the upper-right-hand corner, I’ll try to construct a “welcome” page that has the information below. I haven’t yet done this, and am not sure how it works, but it will probably be the page you see when you first click on this website. Do not be frightened when you see it!

As for now, and given the information above, I beseech readers to preorder Faith versus Fact rather than wait until it appears. Look at it this way: if you’ve read this site since the beginning, it’s an investment of less than $4 per year (1¢ per day), and you’ve never seen an ad except this one! Further, by May 19, you’ll have forgotten the expense. (And I’m told that Amazon, at least, doesn’t charge you until the book is shipped.)

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That would be a nice sale. . .

Here are three blurbs from those who have read the galleys:

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The truth is not always half way between two extremes: some propositions are flat wrong. In this timely and important book, Jerry Coyne expertly exposes the incoherence of the increasingly popular belief that you can have it both ways: that God (or something God-ish, God-like, or God-oid) sort-of exists; that miracles kind-of happen; and that the truthiness of dogma is somewhat-a-little-bit-more-or-less-who’s-to-say-it-isn’t like the truths of science and reason.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature


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Many people are confused about science—about what it is, how it is practiced, and why it is the most powerful method for understanding ourselves and the universe that our species has ever devised. In Faith Versus Fact, Coyne has written a wonderful primer on what it means to think scientifically, showing that the honest doubts of science are better—and more noble—than the false certainties of religion. This is a profound and lovely book. It should be required reading at every college on earth.

—Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, and Waking Up.

*******

The distinguished geneticist Jerry Coyne trains his formidable intellectual fire power on religious faith, and it’s hard to see how any reasonable person can resist the conclusions of his superbly argued book. Though religion will live on in the minds of the unlettered, in educated circles faith is entering its death throes. Symptomatic of its terminal desperation are the “apophatic” pretensions of “sophisticated theologians”, for whose empty obscurantism Coyne reserves his most devastating sallies. Read this book and recommend it to two friends.

—Richard Dawkins

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And here are the direct links for pre-ordering:
Finally—and I mention this in the book—let me thank the numerous readers who have weighed in on the science/religion conflict over the years. Without the ability to work out my ideas by writing on this site, and to get valuable feedback from you, I doubt that this book would have been written.
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