Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Just to keep the record complete, and at the risk of being self-aggrandizing, here’s an interview I did some time ago with writer and publisher Scott Jacobsen, an interview coming out in two parts. You can read it for free by clicking on the screenshot below, which goes to the Substack site A Further Inquiry. I haven’t yet read it, as I hate both hearing and reading my own interviews, but I’ll try to pick out a few quotes at lunch now.
Oh hell, here’s one exchange:
Jacobsen: Do you ever get pushback—not on the facts, evidence, or the validity of your arguments—but on your tone? People who position themselves as the “tone police,” saying that you come across too aggressively? H. L. Mencken might have faced this if he were writing today, perhaps to an even greater extent. People might say, “We appreciate the sophistication and flair of your language, but it’s too sharp, and you’re turning people off.” Do you get that kind of response?
Coyne: All the time, man. It’s because you cannot criticize religion, however indirectly, without it being perceived as an attack on religion itself. About 60 to 70 percent of Americans believe that God played a role in evolution, so if you make any statement about evolution, you inevitably have to touch on creationism. When I wrote my book Why Evolution Is True, I aimed for a mild tone; I didn’t want to offend religious people. But you can’t discuss the evidence for evolution without discussing the evidence against creationism.
It’s all interconnected. In the “one long argument” in On the Origin of Species, Darwin repeatedly addresses creationist ideas, acknowledging creationism as the alternative hypothesis to evolution. So, if you’re defending evolution, at some point, you have to critique creationism. When you do that, you’re challenging religious belief, and no matter how mild the critique, people will accuse you of using the wrong tone.
What they’re essentially saying is that you should shut up. One example is when I point out the existence of dead genes—we have, for example, three genes for making egg-yolk proteins in the human genome that are nonfunctional because we don’t make egg yolk anymore—so they’re remnants from our reptilian ancestors. Suppose you mention this to convince people that evolution is true. In that case, you must also ask why a creator would put nonfunctional genes in our genomes. Making this argument is thus a quasi-scientific discussion.
When arguing for evolution, you have to present your case while addressing the alternative, which means critiquing creation. That gets people defensive and makes them criticize the tone of the argument. Sometimes, for fun, I try to write like H. L. Mencken because creationism is fundamentally as baseless as flat-earth ideas. There’s so much evidence against creationism that it’s laughable to espouse it. Usually, I am not Mencken-esque when I give evidence for evolution. I choose to either wear my atheist, anti-religious hat or my scientific hat when lecturing, but not both at the same time.
I’ve always been convinced that when teaching the mandatory evolution segment required for biology majors, it was imperative for me to begin with a segment on “why scientists accept evolution”: several lectures on the evidence. I did that because I wanted the students to leave at least knowing that there’s copious and diverse evidence supporting evolution and natural selection. After graduation, they’ll enter a society in which 71% of Americans see the hand of God in human evolution, and I wanted them to know that the truth of evolution dispels the need for supernatural intervention.
Although people argue that you can’t bring creationists to accepting evolution simply by showing them thge facts, this Radiolab audio shows that that isn’t an inviolable truth. The podcast tells the story of a pious Muslim who studied evolution to try to debunk it, because she realized that evolution was undermining her faith, and if she could show that evolution was bogus, her faith would remain sound. Well, you know what happened next: she learned the irrefutable facts of evolution and gave up her faith, losing her “tribe” in the process.
This transformation is not unique. As I’ve said before, at one of James Randi’s “Amazing Meetings,” I met two Orthodox Jews, both of whom told me (independently) that they abandoned their faith because, after reading Why Evolution is True, gave up their pious Judaism (many Orthodox Jews reject evolution). Both were sad because, having embraced evolution, they were rejected by their family, but they stood firm in their acceptance of science. Such people are very brave, for the love of truth outweighs not only their love of superstition, but their need for a social network.
This 40-minute recording is the fascinating story of a well-known paleoanthropologist, fossil collector, evolutionist, and science popularizer, Ella al-Shamahi. A Muslim in full jilbāb and in an arranged marriage, al-Shamahi studied evolution at Imperial College London so she could understand why it was false. Instead, she became a convert.This is from is the Wikipedia page on al-Shamani:
As a child, Al-Shamahi was a devout Muslim who wore the hijab from the age of seven and began missionary work throughout Britain at the age of 13. Her biology studies at Imperial College London were undertaken with the eventual aim of disproving evolutionary theory, but she soon came to believe that the theory was correct and her later studies would further distance her from her faith. As of 2025, she was describing herself as a “non-practising Muslim”.
Al-Shamahi characterizes her political views as “wokey-progressive — definitely left-wing”, but she has also called for the scientific field to be more accommodating of those who are right-wing or devoutly religious and for discussions to be more nuanced.
In the podcast al-Shamahi describes two moments that were pivotal in getting her to embrace evolution:
A.. One was in Drosophila! She describes an experiment in fruit flies in which, she said, she saw the very beginning of speciation: two groups of the same species that began evolving reproductive barriers between each other. She doesn’t describe the experiment, but my best guess was the intriguing experiment of Bill Rice and George Salt, published in Evolution in 1990 (see also Rice 1995 ). In this experiment, flies were divided into groups by being running them through a complex maze that involved their having to make four “chocies”: light vs. dark (phototaxis), up versus down (geotaxis), faster versus slower development time, and whether they preferred the odor of acetaldehyde or ethanol. This produced eight groups of flies, of which Rice and Salt selected only from the two extremes. After 35 generations, they got nearly complete separation of the two groups with no intermediates, which is the beginning of the type of reproductive isolation called “habitat selection,” which of course impedes gene flow because the two groups don’t encounter each other. There was no mating discrimination shown when the flies were tested in the same chamber. Now this is a lab experiment, and the flies likely would merge if selection were stopped, but it shows nevertheless that a form of impeded gene flow could evolve in only 35 generations (a couple of years). This was convincing to al-Shamahi, though I’d argue that there are many other types of evidence that are more convincing (island biogeography, the fossil record [she does mention that under “stratigraphy“], and other stuff in my book.
B. The other bit of evidence, which I don’t discuss but Ken Miller has, is the finding that in “retrotransposons“—nonfunctional bits of DNA that move around in the genome—mutations in humans and chimps are in identical positions in the jumping DNA. That similarity implies a close relatedness of humans and chimps: they must have shared some of these “jumping genes” that were present in a common ancestor. Since the DNA is nonfunctional, there’s no adaptive explanation that a creationist could devise to explain for this identity.
Both cases led to al-Shamahi’s epiphany, and, accepting it, she says “I knew I was going to have to leave my whole world.” (20:40 on the podcast). Fortunately, her sisters supported her views, but she didn’t talk about her new feelings to her friends, for she “did not know how to exist in a secular world.” In the end, however, she found community among secularists and forged a career based on evolution. She still says that “gentle does it” with creationists, and she tries to bond with them rather than convince them. In the end, though, that is her aim, however she achieves it.
She hasn’t spoken in detail about her “conversion,” so the podcast at the bottom is fascinating, for al-Shamahi is eloquent and funny despite her travails. Here’s its introduction:
Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our species. Her recent hit BBC/PBS series Human follows her around the globe trying to piece together the unlikely story of how early humans conquered the world. But Ella’s own origins as an evolutionary biologist are equally unlikely. She sits down with us and tells us a story she has rarely shared publicly, about how she came to believe in evolution, and how much that belief cost her.
Special thanks to Misha Euceph and Hamza Syed.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by – Latif Nasser
Produced by – Jessica Yung and Pat Walters
with help from – Sarah Qari
Fact-checking by – Diane Kelly
and Edited by – Pat Walters
To hear the episode, and I recommend you do, click below and then click “listen” (there’s also a transcript). Note that there are several longish commercial interruptions.
I found a video of al-Shamahi recorded a month ago in which she also describes her conversion, and I’ve started it at that place. But the whole thing is worth watching,
Or go here to hear her dispelling some myths about human evolution in a 9-minute video. After watching it, I wish I were a Homo floresiensis.
Having read one of her books (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism), which I liked, and knowing how Kathleen Stock (OBE) was hounded out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views, but has stood her ground since, I’ve been an admirer, though I haven’t followed her doings much. I see this from Wikipedia:
On 9 March 2023, Stock, alongside tennis player Martina Navratilova and writer Julie Bindel, launched The Lesbian Project. The purpose of the Lesbian Project, according to Stock, is “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup and to give them a non-partisan political voice.”
Stock is a lesbian, and you see above, she doesn’t want gay women stirred into the “rainbow soup” with the “T”s Yet, at least from that book, I don’t see Stock as a transphobe, but rather as someone who thinks hard about the slippery concept of “gender” and who doesn’t see transwomen as fully equivalent to natal women.
But I have to ratchet back some of my admiration for Stock in view of what she has just published: a semi-laudatory review of a creationist/ID book, God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. The Sunday Times also extolled the book (which is a bestseller, by the way); I dissected some of its arguments here. As far as I can tell—and the book isn’t yet available to me—the authors give the standard creationist guff touting a “God of the Gaps”, arguing that things that science doesn’t yet understand, like how the Universe began or how life began, are prima facie arguments for God. Of course they were once prima facie arguments for God about things we now have a scientific explanation for, like lightning and plague, but the new book apparently sees the existence of a complicated god as more parsimonious than saying “we don’t yet know, but all the evidence given for God that science has investigated has proven to be purely materialistic.”
Sadly, Stock has somewhat fallen for the God of the Gaps, to the extent that the book has “undermined her faith in science”.
If you subscribe to UnHerd, you can read Stock’s hyperbolically-titled review by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can read it for free as it’s archived here.
The very beginning of the review, in which Stocks ‘the eternal truths of religion” gets the review off to a bad start. (Is she joking here? I don’t think so.) There’s the usual incorrect noting that religiosity is increasing in the West. Then she says the god-of-the-gaps arguments have weakened her faith in science. Bolding is mine, and excerpts from Stock’s review are indented”
The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.
God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.
Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a sceptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.
Now Stock isn’t completely laudatory about the book, especially its “Biblical” evidence for God (see below), but saying that her faith in science has been weakened by God-of-the-Gaps arguments means she thinks that their priors have increased to the point where scientific evidence for the Big Bang, the “fine-tuning” of the universe, the complexity of single-cell organisms, and “the stunning efficiency of the double helix”—all of this is weakened, strengthing the evidence for God or at least something divine. But even here she waffles, ultimately concluding that these arguments “empty nature of mystery”:
Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?
“Why did He not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show?”
Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God.
The problem is that although her points against fine-tuning are decent, and she raises several other arguments against a divine origin, she doesn’t like the creationist arguments not because there are materialist explanations for fine-tuning, but because she wants these things to remain a mystery. I suspect this because she says this at the end of her piece:
Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.
I prefer our flat-footed attempts to explain things materialistically instead of becoming “alert to immanence,” whatever that means. What we see throughout the review is Stock not just sitting on the fence, but pirouetting on it, going from one side to the other. I still don’t know why her faith in science has been undermined, as God-of-the-Gaps arguments have been around for decades, if not centuries. I would note that my faith in Stock has been undermined.
But in one area her review is good. As I said, it’s the “evidence” that Bolloré and Bonnassie adduce for God from the Bible. Here’s a bit:
Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?
By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.
If you have the patience, do read Scott Alexander’s very long piece on the Fatima “sun miracle,” (Spoiler: he suggests a naturalistic explanation.)
What I don’t understand about Stock and her review,then, are four things:
1.) If Stock, as a philosopher, can skillfully debunk Biblical miracles, why doesn’t she adduce the other naturalistic explanations for fine tuning, the origin of life, and the complexity of one-celled organisms.? Granted, she does raise questions about why God would make the universe as it is, but stops there.
2.) How did the book “undermine her faith in science”. She’s not clear about this. Does she find God-of-the-gaps arguments somewhat convincing?
3.) What does she mean in the title “Science can’t prove the ineffable”? “The ineffable” means “things that cannot be expressed in words.” But of course stuff we don’t yet understand can’t be expressed in words simply because we don’t understand them, not because there’s something “transcendent” about them. If the title and subtitle are the work of an editor, well, I’ve always had the right to okay titles.
4.) What is the “immanence” she speaks of? Is this the usual interpretation that God is to be found everywhere in the world instead of outside of it? That is, is she a pantheist?” If so, what evidence does she have for “immanence,” or is that just something she chooses to believe? And does she worry about where this “immanence” she accepts comes from?If the Universe is really a god in itself, why could it not be a NOT-GOD in itself—that is, something purely naturalistic?
This is a murky review, ending without the reader able to know what Stock really tbinks. That’s unseemly for a philosopher.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. (It lasted from July 10-21). John Scopes, a substitute teacher, was accused (with his cooperation) of teaching human evolution in high school, thus violating the state’s Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of human evolution (note: teaching nonhuman evolution was okay). He was convicted, as he surely had violated the law, but his conviction was overturned because the judge rather than the jury levied the $100 fine (judges couldn’t levy fines above $50). Scopes’s conviction was thus set aside, and the verdict could not then be appealed to a higher court.
The Butler act was repealed only in 1967: 42 years later! But nobody was convicted during that period, and today no court in the land dares convict anybody or any school board for teaching evolution, while it’s illegal almost everywhere to teach creationism or its gussied-up cousin Intelligent Design.
But I digress; I just discovered that there’s some video footage of the trial. It lacks sound, of course, since “talkies” didn’t arise until 1927, but it’s great to see the principals and the scene. So watch this 2½ minute video to see Dayton during the trial:
I had a couple hours to read last night, but didn’t want to start a fat novel as I’m leaving the country soon and wouldn’t want to schlep it. I thus picked up an old copy of God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which is a pretty quick read. After two nights I’m almost half done with it, but am a bit disappointed because a lot of the science is wrong or outmoded (the latter is, of course, not Hitchens’s fault), and the arguments seem pretty repetitive.
On the other hand, I realize that these arguments were badly needed at the time and made a big impact on nonbelievers and believers alike. It’s one of the books that kick-started the “New Atheism,” and the “New” bit, as I always say, was the use of scientific arguments to rebut religions faith claims. These arguments are amply in view in Hitchens’s book, and most of them are correct. And, of course, Hitch was a wonderful writer.
One of Hitchens’s arguments against creationism and its gussied-up cousin Intelligent Design is its invocation of vestigial organs like our vestigial tail, the appendix, wisdom teeth, and so on—all as evidence for evolution. There were also examples of features that were jury-rigged by evolution so that they’re not perfectly adapted to their function: things like the backwards placement of the retina in the human eye, our “blind spot” where the optic nerve comes in, and—my favorite—the placement of the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
When I pondered those examples, I realized that IDers and creationists argue that all of these features are really adaptive. The appendix, they say (correctly) contains a small number of cells that have immune functions, and the “backwards” retina of our camera eye is said by creationists to confer protection against an overload of short-wavelength light. But of course whether the immune function of the appendix outweighs the fact that it may become infected and kill you is pure speculation, as is the postulated “useful” function of the backwards retina.
And I haven’t yet heard of an adaptive explanation for nipples in human males, our wisdom teeth, the developmental sequence of our kidney, or our transitory coat of hair in utero (the “lanugo”), but I’m sure that if you look hard enough on the Internet, you’ll find IDers and creationists showing how these aren’t really “senseless signs of history”, but are actually adaptive. And if they’re adaptive, then they reflect God’s plan.
In the end, I realized that the true purveyors of the “adaptationist program” aren’t evolutionary psychologists, but creationists, who aren’t willing to admit that the vagaries of evolution has vouchsafed us with featurs that, if there was a god or a Designer, could have been designed better. Further, they don’t often realize that if a “vestigial” structure is useful in some way, that doesn’t disprove that it had an evolutionary origin. The “halteres”—balance organs of some insects—is one example. They are used for keeping a guided flight, but we know that they are the vestigial remnants of wings, derived from two of the four wings that flying insects used to have. And they’re useful!
I won’t dwell on this, as these things are discussed in detail in my book Why Evolution is True, and you can also see many examples of vestigial organs supporting evolution at Douglas Theobald’s great site, “29+ evidences for macroevolution” (there are multiple pages; vestigial organs, atavisms, and other features testifying to evolution are here).
Finally, I have never seen creationists even try to refute the biogeographical evidence for evolution, like the absence of endemic mammals, fish, and amphibians on oceanic islands (islands that rose, bereft of life, from the sea bed) as opposed to continental islands that were once connected to continents. Biogeography is the true Achilles Heel of both creationism and ID.
I’m often asked if I’ve though about rewriting or updating my first trade book, Why Evolution is True. My answer is always “no”—mainly because there’s enough evidence in that book to convince any rational person of its title’s assertion. But I suppose that if I did revise it, I would update it with more evidence for evolution, especially from fossils and molecular biology. I do present plenty of fossil evidence for evolution in the book, and also some molecular evidence. The latter includes the presence of “dead genes” (genes that were functional in our ancestors and in some of our relatives, but have been rendered nonfunctional in us by degrading mutations). Examples are our many dead “olfactory receptor genes, active in dogs but totally inactive in whales, or a dead gene that is key in synthesizizing Vitamin C in other mammals. That gene is defunct, an ex-gene that sings with the Choir Invisible, but its death doesn’t harm because we get the vitamin from our diet. I see no way that creationists or IDers can explain the fact that our DNA is largely junk, and much of that junk consists of dead genes. Loading our DNA with genes that don’t do anything, but still have to be copied during cell division and meiosis, is a lousy way to design a genome.
But now we have more such evidence, Here’s Ken Miller lecturing on some of the molecular/chromosomal evidence for evolution in humans and other primates from the structure of our chromosome 2.
I don’t mention this in my book, but it’s a convincing bit of evidence that we’re related to other primates.
There’s a lot of stuff like this, but I won’t belabor it now. The short take is that I don’t think WEIT (the book) needs to be revised because it would just pile additional evidence for evolution on the Everest of evidence that already exists. The fact is that evidence from a variety of different disciplines—paleontology, developmental biology, morphology (vestigial organs), biogeography, and molecular biology—all cohere to attest to the truth of evolution. IDers will admit of some microevolution, and even some macroevolution, but the more weaselly ones simply play a “god of the gaps” game, saying that there are adaptations that simply could not have evolved via a step-by-step Darwinian process of accumulating helpful mutations. (The bacterial flagellum used to be one, but has fallen in light of later research.)
Asserting that our ignorance proves the existence of a Designer has never been a good strategy for researchers. It is simply a “science stopper”, implicitly saying, “You don’t need to do any more research; I already know that this phenomenon is inexplicable by materialistic processes and therefore is evidence for supernatural design.” How many assertions like that have been debunked by later evidence? The answer is TONS OF THEM.
And I need hardly add that unless we have independent evidence for such a designer, we can simply ignore arguments that depend on its existence.
I’m tired of Bret Weinstein pushing conspiracy theories, and just as tired of him making proclamations about evolutionary biology that are misleading or flat wrong. I’m especially peeved today because, in the video below, he claims that both Richard Dawkins and I have said that “evolution biology is settled” because I, at least, claimed that the big advances at the beginning of the field, involving people like Darwin, Fisher, Haldane, Sewall Wright, and Ernst Mayr, established the foundations of the field, and we don’t see such big advances any more. Where are today’s Darwins? (This was a question posed to me by Dick Lewontin when I interviewed him some years ago.) And yes, I probably said that and do believe it. But that doesn’t mean that evolutionary biology is “settled”. It’s that our approach to understanding evolution in nature has been somewhat asymptotic, with a big leap at the beginning and then incremental progress since the 1940s. Indeed, I think that advances such as the “modern synthesis” of the 1930s and 1940s, showing that Darwinian natural selection was compatible with modern genetics, was a huge synthesis that hasn’t been equaled. And, of course, science of any sort never reaches an asymptote, for that would be “complete understanding: the ultimate truth,” which is unattainable.
In the video below, Weinstein and Heying argue that Dawkins and I think that evolutionary biology is “settled,” and that our view impedes progress in the field, allows evolutionary biology to stagnate, and, most important, impedes people’s failure to take Intelligent Design theory seriously for raising serious problems with neo-Darwinism. Further, he says that we’ve discouraged graduate students from entering the field and have not produced, as mentors, our “replacements.” He’s dead wrong here, at least for me: I’d put my graduate students (and their graduate students) up against anybody’s as having made substantial progress in evolutionary genetics.
Yes, we have nobody around today who’s made advances as big as those of Darwin or Fisher. But that doesn’t mean at all, as Weinstein and Heather Heying assert in the video below, that we think evolutionary biology is “settled.” Far from it! First of all, neutral theory was a big step forward in evolutionary genetics, and that was introduced in 1968 and is still being developed. We still don’t understand exactly why organisms reproduce sexually; we don’t understand how often speciation occurs without geographic isolation; we don’t understand what females, during sexual selection, are looking for when they choose a mate. I could list tons of other questions, but these are three that I’ve written about and are mentioned by Weinstein.
Weinstein and Heying’s claim in the video is that there are huge advances, on the scale of Darwin’s and Fisher’s, to be made, perhaps by people who are working in intelligent design. (Weinstein implies that he has a theory that may be on this scale as well.) To be sure, they note that the IDers like Stephen Meyer and his “high-quality colleagues”, are motivated by religion, but Weinstein sees them still asking important and serious questions that evolutionists haven’t answered, thus motivating evolutionists to better understand nature. Nope. ID adocates have wasted the time of evolutionists in refuting IDer’s specious arguments. Why do they do this? To let the credulous public, much of which buys ID, know that science can answer those criticisms. That’s why there were so many critiques of Michael Behe’s books by reputable scientists.
Three questions that evolutionists have supposedly set aside and neglected are these: “What caused the Cambrian explosion?”, “Why are there gaps in the fossil record?” and “How can we get complex working proteins when their existence is so improbable?”
The answer to the first question is “We don’t know, but there are theories and some of them are being tested.”
The second question has a spate of possible answers (lack of sediment deposition, rapid evolution in relatively short evolutionary times, and so on). But one thing we know is that Gould’s explanation—the theory of punctuated equilibrium—is not likely to be the answer, as the theory doesn’t work. (People don’t often realize that punctuated equilibrium, as advanced by Gould and Eldredge, is more than just a jerky pattern in the fossil record: it’s also a theory about why the pattern is supposedly ubiquitous. The ubiquity of the pattern in fact is still being argued, but we know that it’s not ubiquitous.) But in the end, Gould’s explanation—the really novel and non-Darwinian part punctuated equilibrium—was simply wrong.
As for the third question, the claim that the origin of complex proteins is improbable is not one taken seriously by molecular evolutionists, simply because we have no indication that it really is a problem. The idea that it is a problem comes from specious claims of IDers that such proteins assemble themselves randomly rather than by selection, or that mutation is too unlikely to fuel the process (there are other fuels, of course, like gene duplication and insertions of DNA).
At 2:56, in the video below, Weinstein asserts that evolutionary biologists have simply left the Big Questions “on the table”, questions like “where did all the species come from?” and “why do females put males in so many species to challenges that then cause them to burden their male offspring with elaborate displays that are not helpful?”
Weinstein is apparently unaware that I wrote a comprehensive and scholarly book on speciation in 2004 and outlined a lot of unanswered questions, so no, Dr. Weinstein, I did NOT think that the question “wasn’t worthy of my time”. And yes, we do have considerably more understanding these days about how species form. That’s also described in the book.
He’s also apparently unaware that many biologists have been working on sexual selection, which is simply a hard problem to test in nature. And he doesn’t understand that elaborate displays by males are helpful: they help males get mates. Peacocks with more “eyes” in their tails, for example, get more offspring. Widowbirds whose tails are artificially elongated by gluing on extra feather get more mates, too. Weinstein is ignorant about how sexual selection works, and how theories about it have been tested.
In his Substack column below, Jesse Singal shows other conspiracy theories/dubious theories that Weinstein and Heying have advanced (Weinstein is more vociferous than Heying, so I give him most of the opprobrium). Click to read:
Here you can see Weinstein going after Dawkins and me by misrepresenting our views. Yes, I do think that understanding of evolution has slowed down since Darwin and since the 1940s, since most of these “founders” seem to have gotten the major parts of the modern synthesis right—except for neutral theory, which was a huge advance. But I surely do not believe (nor do I think that Dawkins believes) that we have pretty much completed our understanding of evolution. But I’ll let Dawkins speak for himself.
And of course the IDers love Weinstein and Heyer’s podcast, because they give so much credit to Intelligent Design in pinpointing the “neglected” Big Questions about evolution.It’s thus a pity that IDers, like Weinstein himself, hardly have any peer-reviewed papers in real scientific journals advancing their theories! Read below to see how much IDers love Weinstein.
Now I surely don’t think that Weinstein is stupid at all; he’s really quite smart. But I think that, in his desire to find a niche for himself, and garner a measure of public approbation, he’s deliberately embraced conspiracy theories, highly praised the gussied-up creationism of Intelligent Design, and, most annoying, almost willfully misunderstood evolutionary biology.
For reasons I don’t fully understand, Michael Egnor—a pediatric surgeon in New York and an advocate of Intelligent Design (he’s a senior fellow at the ID Discovery Institute)—is obsessed with me, combing my posts regularly to find instances of what he thinks is hypocrisy. (Google “Michael Egnor Jerry Coyne” for a panoply of obsessiveness.) Perhaps it’s because in 2009 I went after an article he wrote in Forbes, calling him out for his egnorance of evolution. (His article, replete with ID boilerplate, can be seen here.)
Here are two paragraphs from my critique:
There are no observations in nature that refute Darwinism, but there are plenty that refute Egnor’s creationist alternative. How does he explain the persistence of “dead genes” in species (like our own broken one for making vitamin C)–genes that were functional in our ancestors? What explains those annoying hominin fossils that span the gap from early apelike creatures to modern humans? Why do human fetuses produce a coat of hair after six months in the womb, and then shed it before birth? Why didn’t the creator stock oceanic islands with mammals, reptiles and amphibians? Why did He give us vestigial ear muscles that have no function? Why do whales occasionally sprout hind legs? Did God design all creatures to fool us into thinking that they evolved?
The good news is that Egnor is just one benighted physician. Far more disturbing is Forbes’ ham-handed policy of “balancing” the views of evolutionists by giving a say to Egnor and four other creationists. (Their articles, found here, are at least as misleading as Egnor’s.) Perhaps Forbes sees Darwinism as “controversial.” But it’s not, at least not in a scientific sense. Scientifically, evolution is a settled issue–a fact.
I don’t know if Egnor is holding a grudge after 14 years, or is simply evincing an obsession with someone who opposes his dumb intelligent-design ideas. Regardless, he’s gone after me once again. As is often the case, the subject is my belief in determinism, which he sees at odds with what I write. You can read his lubrications in the new article below on the ID site Evolution News, published by the Discovery Institute. (It does not allow comments.) Click below to read:
Egnor has two complaints about things I’ve said, but in both cases I never said what he claims! In fact, I’ve said the opposite. The topic is my denunciation of Hamas’s butchery of Israelis.
His first wrong claim is that I think morality is objective, and that there can be no “objective moral law” without God, whose existence I reject. Egnor:
Which brings me to the Hamas atrocity. I am perplexed by Coyne’s view that Hamas culpably violated objective moral law, considering Coyne’s metaphysical commitment to atheism, determinism, and free will denial. After all, if there is no God, there is no source for objective moral law at all. Nature is a collection of facts; without God nature has no overarching values, and the only values on tap are the separate values of individual human beings. Without God, value judgments are merely individual human opinions, akin to individual preferences for flavors of ice cream. There is no factual basis to prefer Coyne’s value judgments to Hamas’ value judgments — values like “don’t kill innocent people” are not facts of nature. But Coyne clearly (and rightly) holds Hamas to the moral responsibility not to kill innocents. If there is no God, from where does Coyne get this objective moral law that he invokes? Who is Coyne to judge?
Clearly Dr. Egnor has not done his research, as I’ve repeatedly argued that morality is subjective, not objective. For one example, see my 2013 article on this site, “Why there is no objective morality.” Here’s another of mine from 2021, “The absence of objective morality.” I’m not going to repeat my arguments here, as they’re in these two articles. Suffice it to say that Egnor didn’t even Google “Jerry Coyne objective morality”, which would have yielded those sites in two minutes. The conclusion: Egnor is making up stuff about my beliefs in a failed attempt to show that I’m self-contradictory and hypocritical.
As for morality, yes, I do believe that actions are moral or immoral, but that’s according to one’s preferred code of morality, not to the dictates of a god. “Morality” is a codified view of what one thinks is right and wrong. I happen to be largely a consequentialist, judging things as “right or wrong” based on their overall effect on well being, So yes, I think that, at bottom, morality reflects preference: preference for what kind of society you want and what behaviors are good or bad. (Unlike Sam Harris, though, I don’t think this consequentialism is objective due to different people’s weighing of consequences.) By these lights, Hamas’s butchery is wrong and immoral.
His second false and made-up claim is that I hold people morally responsible for their actions.
In Coyne’s view, Hamas and (Raoul) Wallenberg are moral equals — they must be moral equals, if determinism is true. How can Hamas be held morally culpable, and Wallenberg lauded, when both lack free will and both are just involuntarily running the primordial determinist program of the universe?
I can’t see how Coyne as a determinist, an atheist, and a free will denier can hold Hamas morally responsible for their atrocities, any more than he could hold the wind morally responsible for deaths in a tornado. Perhaps Coyne will comment on the glaring cognitive dissonance in his condemnation of the murder of innocents and his embrace of a metaphysical perspective that reduces such murder to a value-free maelstrom of atoms.
Again, Dr. Egnor hasn’t done his homework. While I do believe that people have “morality” and views that involve morality, I have never maintained that someone can be held “morally responsible” for their actions. Why? Because the phrase “morally responsible” implies that you’ve done something that you could have chosen not to do. And, as a hard determinist (viz. Robert Sapolsky), I don’t believe people can make such choices. I thus feel that people are responsible for their acts, but not morally responsible. All you have to do to see these views is Google “Coyne morally responsible” and you’ll find article like this one and this one. In the second, I say this (bolding is mine):
I responded to Burgis’s post on this site, making four points in my reply (each point is discussed in more detail in my piece):
1.) You are always acting under compulsion.
2.) This does not mean that external circumstances surrounding an action should not be taken into consideration.
3.) The concept of “moral responsibility” is outmoded; we should simply retain the idea of “responsibility” since whether you are irresponsible or morally irresponsible are both results of the laws of physics.
4.) The concept of “moral responsibility” is injurious because it underlies a vindictive and retributive view of punishment.
So you can be responsible for a murder, but never morally responsible, for that implies you could have refrained from murder. I hasten to add that this notion of “responsibility” does not enable us to escape punishment, for determinists like Sapolsky and me think that if a bad actor does an injurious thing, he can be punished for several reasons: to keep a bad actor away from others, to deter that actor and others from doing similar bad acts, and to help reform that bad actor. Determinism does not lead to a world in which nobody gets punished, for even in a deterministic world people do bad things and it’s necessary, for society’s well being, to punish them.
I have to recount a tale from 2018, which I posted about here. In that year, after the “Moving Naturalism Forward” conference, Dan Dennett and I drove back from Stockbridge to Boston, just the two of us in his car. We disagreed about moral responsibility, with Dennett, a compatibilist, seeing it as a meaningful concept, while I argued the position I give above. The argument lasted nonstop for nearly three hours, and here’s what I wrote about it:
For me the epic bit [of the conference] was my battle with Daniel Dennett over free will (with the Great Man shamelessly insisting that he go first after we’d agreed otherwise), a battle that continued during the entire three-hour post-meeting drive from Stockbridge to Boston (remember the song with that phrase in it?). Dan, who can be rather forceful, insisted that a). compatibilism was good and b). it gave us true moral responsibility. I’m still proud that I, a puny worm, held out against his stentorian lucubrations, and I remember well the last words Dan said to me when I exited the car in Cambridge: “I’M NOT THROUGH WITH YOU YET!”
And he wasn’t, but he didn’t change my mind.
The upshot: Michael Egnor is a shameless liar who makes up stuff in an obsessive attempt to show that I’m a hypocrite. I hope the evidence above shows that he’s wrong. He’s not just ignorant, in fact, he’s duplicitous. And what’s worse is that he’s duplicitous in the name of his God, a god who surely thinks that Egnor is objectively wrong and morally responsible for lying.
*****
By the way, last night I read the first 30 pages of Robert Sapolsky’s new book on determinism and it’s superb. At the beginning he clearly lays out his position and what he’s opposing (including compatibilism). And his writing style is engaging and at times funny. All readers must read this book, whether or not you’re a determinist or a free-willy.
