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.
My insomnia continues, and has apparently worsened for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it’s anxiety about the war, but it’s definitely anxiety about something. Perhaps subliminal anxiety—after all, we can’t control what our brain does. Last night I woke up at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. When this happens nearly every night, I try to suppress the worries that arise almost—like everyone, I have a panoply of items on the worry list. But anxiety seeps in and keeps me awake. AT 4 a.m., I hauled my sorry tuchus out of bed, did my ablutions, and came to work. That is the usual situation.
If I were to guess at the items that make me most anxious (besides the worry about getting back to sleep, which is counterproductive), there are these:
The Middle East. Because I post daily about the war in Iran and other Middle Eastern matters, I seem to have gotten caught up in the roller coaster that is this region of the world, a roller coaster exacerbated by Trump’s waffling, which may be a deliberate strategy. Regardless, like the mess that is American politics now, I realize that there’s little I can do to affect matters. And given that, I should simply observe the situation, express my opinion when I can, but not get so engaged that I’m destabilized by the ups and downs of both the war and politics. But in this I’ve failed.
The ducks at Botany Pond. I should just do what I can to take care of them, including feeding the ducklings when they come, but caring for them has almost become an obsession. “No ducklings left behind” is my motto. There’s nothing I can do to stave off most predators or prevent errant mallards from entering the pond and harassing Vashti, but somehow it’s a constant anxiety until the ducklings grow up and fly away.
Death. I guess a lot of readers don’t worry about their mortality, but when you get into your seventies it’s almost inevitable. I’ve already lost several friends and classmates, and of course, as the syllogism goes, all men are mortal.
In response, some people have said that because they don’t worry about the time before they were born, which they equate with the time after they die, it’s futile to be afraid of death. In response to that I quote Christopher Hitchens, who knew he was dying of cancer but never openly admitted it:
“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise.”
I once asked readers if they wanted to be immortal (with the stipulation that you don’t fall apart completely), and most said “no”—they will have seen enough of life when the Reaper comes. But I like the party too much!
I would have missed this video had reader Doug not called my attention to it. It’s a very good half-hour discussion by evolutionary biologist Zach B. Hancock, a professor at Augusta University, in which he recommends the the top ten most influential books in evolutionary biology. Since Hancock is a population geneticist, the books deal largely with evolutionary genetics, but not all of them.
I slipped in at #10 with my book on Speciation with Allen Orr, but I won’t be too humble to claim our book wasn’t influential, for, as Hancock notes, it’s the only comprehensive book on the origin of species around. (Darwin’s big 1859 book was about the origin of adaptations, and had little that was useful about the origin of species.) Hancock regrets that Allen and I aren’t going to do a second edition, but Allen refuses to, and I don’t have the spoons (I do have 200 pages of notes on relevant papers that appeared after our book came out, but that will go nowhere.)
The rest of the list is stellar, and shows a keen judgement about the field. I’m not sure I would have put Lack’s book on the Galápagos finches in there, as it’s pretty much out of date. It should be replaced by a very important book by Ernst Mayr, his Systematics and the Origin of Species or the updated version in 1963, Animal Species and Evolution. It was Mayr who codified the Biological Species Concept and paved the way for experimental and observational studies of speciation, and hence my book with Orr.
I’d expect every graduate student in evolutionary genetics to have read most of these books by the time they get their Ph.D. In fact, when I was on prelim hearings, judging whether students could be admitted to candidacy after a year or two, I and my colleague Doug Schemske made a habit of asking students to name the major accomplishments of several of the authors listed below. My impression is that the history of the field is not given so much weight now, so I wonder if students could still explain the major accomplishments of say, Theodosius Dobzhansky or Ronald Fisher. The books are of more than historical interest, for they raise questions that are still relevant. (I spent a lot of my career trying to understand the phenomenon of “Haldane’s Rule,” explained by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922. The paper was completely neglected until I read it in the early eighties and started a cottage industry of explanations [my own was largely wrong]).
Hancock’s explication of each book is excellent. If you’re an academic teaching evolutionary biology, you might see how many of these books your students have read.
One commenter on YouTube gave the list and the time points in the video where each is discussed (the links go to those time point).
2:26 #10 Speciation – Jerry Coyne & Allen Orr 4:50 #9 Darwin’s Finches – David Lack 6:59#8 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – Julian Huxley 9:15 #7 The Origins Of Genome Architecture – Michael Lynch 11:23 #6 Chance & Necessity – Jacques Monod 13:26 #5 The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins 16:54 #4 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution – Motoo Kimura 19:34 #3 Genetics and the Origin of Species – Theodosius Dobzhansky 22:20 #2 The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection – Ronald Fisher 26:35 #1 On The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin
Unbeknownst to me, the powers that be in our department decided to celebrate my creation of the Jerry Coyne/Honey the Duck Graduate Fellowship (a grad-student fellowship for studying organismal evolutionary biology) by putting pictures and captions on the wall of our seminar room, which features other photos of research activities of department members. Here are two photos related to the JCHDGF over the blackboard:
And enlargement of the photos:
And the two captions that go with the photos (first one for the left photo, second for the right).
I was delighted to see this, for the photos and fellowship will be the only real form of immortality I have. Like all scientists, I realize that whatever research I produced will eventually be outmoded or replaced. And Honey will live at most a dozen years; in fact, she’s probably already crossed the Rainbow Bridge. But my fellowship is forever.
Kudos to the office staff for getting this made and installed.
And two other photos of Honey, just for old times’ sake:
Here’s the second part of my interview with Scott Jacobson, published on the Substack site A Further Inquiry (part I is here). I’ll give just two excerpts below:
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re speaking mainly about Christian-majority countries. However, according to recent census data from Statistics Canada, the total number of Christians in Canada is around 53 to 54%. If you track the trend line from the 1971 data through 2001 and 2021, Canada will fall below half-Christian in terms of its total population sometime this year. That’s a significant shift. The United Kingdom is already closer to 40%. While the United States still reports around 67%, that was different from two decades ago. So, there is a general decline. Does this mean that the acceptance of evolution—or at least theistic evolution—is likely to become more prevalent in these cultures?
Jerry Coyne: Yes, that’s what the statistics suggest. If you look at Gallup polls, you’ll see that the only steady increase is in the acceptance of naturalistic evolution. It started at about 9% in 1982 and has risen to around 25% by 2024. That’s a promising trend, but it’s important to note that more than half of Americans—nearly three-quarters—still oppose purely naturalistic evolution.
Keep in mind that 34% of Americans are theistic evolutionists. They accept evolution, but only up to a point. That point usually involves human evolution because they believe God created humans in His image. This belief skews the data, making the acceptance of evolution seem higher than it truly is. Many people struggle with the idea that what they perceive as a random, accidental process could lead to the complexity of human beings and our brains. This is a mischaracterization of natural selection, but it’s a common barrier to accepting evolution.
. . . \Jacobsen: It’s quite a story. So, when you’re less active on that particular subject, such as tracking the Discovery Institute’s activities, what do you consider the enduring thread from Mencken’s era to the present regarding attempts to infiltrate school systems and advocate for a divine role in evolution? What common themes have persisted over time?
Coyne: The fact that evolution is inherently offensive to many people. Steve Stewart-Williams wrote a book about this—although I can’t recall the title—that delves into the different ways in which the concepts of evolution and natural selection challenge deeply held beliefs. It’s not just about religion. Evolution strikes the core of human exceptionalism and the belief that we are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world.
You don’t have to be religious to believe in human exceptionalism, but religion certainly reinforces it. The idea that naturalism alone is responsible for everything, including consciousness, is unsettling for many.
Some people propose supernaturalism or extranaturalism because they don’t believe naturalism can account for phenomena like consciousness. I remember talking to Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, at a meeting several years ago. My presentation was on free will and why it doesn’t truly exist—because our will originates in the brain, which is composed of molecules that follow the laws of physics. Therefore, we can’t step outside ourselves to make truly independent choices. At any given moment, the arrangement of molecules in the brain allows for only one possible action.
That idea is offensive to many people, including Weinberg. He asked, “Are you telling me I couldn’t have chosen something else when I choose what to eat at a restaurant?” I said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” He objected, saying he didn’t believe it.
That reaction highlights how deeply unsettling naturalism can be, especially when it challenges the notion of free will. Naturalism, which underpins evolution, is inherently challenging. Evolution itself isn’t a philosophical concept, but it embodies methodological naturalism. Darwin’s work epitomized this, especially at the end of On the Origin of Species, where he wrote about the natural laws governing cosmology and biology. He drew a parallel between the laws of physics that dictate planetary motion and the laws that drive evolution, which are based on chemistry and physics.
So, yes, evolution offends people on multiple levels. Even if religion were to disappear—which it won’t, at least not in our lifetimes—people would still find reasons to object to evolution. However, it’s also true that the less people believe in God, the more likely they are to accept evolution. Suppose you graph countries based on religiosity and acceptance of evolution. In that case, you’ll see a clear trend: the more religious a country is, the less likely its population is to accept evolution. This appears to hold globally.
The least accepting countries are typically the most religious ones, such as Muslim-majority countries. Even within Europe, countries like Spain and Italy, which have strong Catholic traditions, are less accepting of evolution compared to more secular countries.
If you analyze the 50 United States similarly, you’ll also see a significant positive correlation between acceptance of evolution and atheism or lack of religiosity. The states most resistant to evolution, such as Tennessee—known for the famous Scopes Trial—are primarily in the American South. These states are also the most religious in the United States. The underlying thread is the tension between materialism and religion, which inherently rejects materialism.
Religion, by its nature, involves the supernatural. This theme has consistently run through the debate over evolution.
Apropos of the negative correlation between religiosity and acceptance of human evolution, below is one figure I gave in my paper in Evolution, “Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America” (access is free). It was the paper I was allowed to publish in the journal because I was President of the Society of the Study for Evolution.
Now the plot below shows a correlation and doesn’t indicate causality. For example, one could posit that acceptance of evolution in a country erodes its acceptance of religion, or, alternatively, the higher the religiosity of a country, the less likely its inhabitants are to accept human evolution. Or both. My own view is that the latter is more credible because people get their religion before they learn anything about evolution—if they ever learn anything about evolution. They may simply, as happens often in Islam and Orthodox Judaism, reject human evolution from the outset because that’s what it says in the scripture they encounter.
(From paper): The correlation between belief in God and acceptance of human evolution among 34 countries. Acceptance of evolution is based on the survey of Miller et al. (2006), who asked people whether they agreed with the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” (Original data provided by J. D. Miller.) “Belief in God” comes from the Eurobarometer survey of 2005, except for data for Japan from (Zuckerman 2007) and for the United States from a Gallup Poll (2011b). “US” is the point for the United States. The correlation is −0.608 (P= 0.0001), the equation of the least-squares regression line is y= 81.47 − 0.33x.
Here’s another excerpt from my paper:
There is ample evidence, then, that aversion to evolution stems from religious belief not just in the United States but in the world as a whole, and no evidence that resistance to evolution reflects a lack of outreach on the part of teachers and scientists. A final bit of data (Masci 2007) supports this conclusion:
When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of [American] people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.
That last bit of data is scary!
There is another section of the paper called “Incompatibilities between science and faith,” which made me have to fight a little to get the paper published. For the mere suggestion that religion and science are incompatible (in my view, the incompatibility lies mainly in their different ways of ascertaining “truth”) gets people riled up. That section also inspired my book Faith versus Fact, which I published a few years later.
I often hear “liberal” religionists say that true religion doesn’t need evidence, as faith comes from authority, scripture, and revelation, so religion and science occupy “nonoverlapping magisteria,” as Steve Gould maintained. (See my TLS review of Gould’s book about this, which I’ve reposted on this site.) But of course every bit of evidence supporting religious doctrine, like miracles (two are required for sainthood in Catholicism), evidence of life after death with Jesus (books like Heaven is for Real are invariably best sellers), or bogus evidence of “irreducible complexity” adduced by ID advocates—this “evidence” is eagerly glommed onto by believers, who also often make pilgrimages to holy sites.
Yep, undergirding nearly all faith is acceptance of a set of empirical tenets, tenets without which religion becomes superfluous. (Reread the Nicene Creed if you don’t believe me.)
Reader Lou Jost, a naturalist and evolutionist who works at the Dracula Reserve of Ecuador’s EcoMinga Foundation, just sent me this Facebook post put out by an Ecuadorian province a few years ago. It features MY frog, Atelopus coynei (it’s got a Wikipedia page, too), so it’s a bit self-aggrandizing of me to post this, but in fact the species is critically endangered and I want it saved. There are surely other undescribed and endangered species on the property (here’s a new tree frog discovered and described by the tem on the reserve.)
The story of the frog, how it got my name, and how it seemed to have gone extinct, but, Lazarus-like, was discovered by Andreas Kay decades later in Chinambi, Carchi, Ecuador, can be seen here.
Isn’t it a beaut? I suspect that its colors indicate that the frog is aposematic, i.e., toxic or dangerous to eat or touch. (The photo is by the late Andreas Kay courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Click photo below go to the FB post:
Lou adds this:
The province is proud to be the only place in the world where your frog survives. It is one of the fruits of our work trying to raise awareness for the rare species of our reserves.
Our president, Noboa, is firing massive numbers of public employees from ministries he doesn’t like, and closing or re-organizing them so he can do what he wants. Last week he placed the ministry of the environment into the ministry of energy and mining, and this is expected to make it harder for us to fight our main threat in the Dracula Reserve, mining.
There is at least one population of A. coynei outside our reserves. It was the first one that Andreas Kay found. We tried to buy it but the property was apparently involved in drug trafficking and arms dealing, and this scared us too much to deal with it. Maybe someday we or others will be able to protect this population too. We also continue to search for more populations using eDNA. Meanwhile we are monitoring our own populations and they are doing well. Each individual can be identified by their back pattern, so we can keep track of many of them.
If you want to donate to the reserve to save not only the frog, but tons of rainforest wildlife, Lou gave me this information:
Thanks Jerry, the Orchid Conservation Alliance is a US charity that can accept donations for us, and give tax credit for the donations. Donors should specify that their support goes to EcoMinga’s Dracula Reserve (which protects your frog)
I hope some readers can cough up a few bucks for the Reserve! Any amount will help.
photo by Juan Pablo Reyes and Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga
From January 10-12 (Friday through Sunday), there will be a substantial conference at the University of Southern California on censorship in science, and by that they mean all the sciences: STEMM. You can see details about the conference at the website below (click on screenshot), and view the preliminary program here. (There was an sketchier announcement of the conference in August, but now things are in their final stages.)
You can register here; the fee is $200 ($100 for students), and that’s not a bad deal given that the registration includes lunches, coffee breaks, and receptions with drinks and food. And the participants include, beyond a passel of working scientists, people like Jonathan Rauch, Jesse Singal, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff and, mirabile dictu, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Science.
And of course there’s this by way of self-promotion (end of the meeting):
Yes, I team up again with my partner in crime Dr. Maroja, on a two-person panel moderated by UC Berkeley molecular biologist Julia Schaletzky.
I hear that space is filling up, so if you want to register, and have the time and ability to go to USC (in LA), I recommend registering ASAP.
Greg Lukianoff is, as most of you know, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He’s also a lawyer and co-author, with Jon Haidt, of the excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind. Yesterday in Quillette, Lukianoff wrote a piece that many of us may find useful, outlining how to give comebacks to flimsy arguments against free speech. The advice is especially useful now that both extreme Left and extreme Right are finding reasons to curtail speech, the former through demonizing certain opinions that go against Righthink and the latter through banning or censoring books. I think the article below is free, so have a look.
I’m just going to put the arguments down, and if you’re savvy you should be able to give comebacks to most of these. Nobody will get them all, I think, so go back and read the piece. I’ve indented Lukianoff’s arguments below, but have left out the ripostes. For some reason I can’t see the graphics that Lukianoff has embedded in the article.
I’ll note first that anyone using the phrase “freeze peach” when referring to free speech is simply mocking this important concept. On to the objecftions (Lukianoff thanks some people at the end for helping him out.)
Assertion 1: Free speech was created under the false notion that words and violence are distinct, but we now know that certain speech is more akin to violence.
Assertion 2: Free speech rests on the faulty notion that words are harmless.
Assertion 3: Free speech is the tool of the powerful, not the powerless.
Assertion 4: The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say; it still leaves other people free to kick you out.
Assertion 5: But you can’t shout fire! in a crowded theatre. (I have to do some self-aggrandizing here by quoting part of his answer):
This old canard, afavourite reference of censorship apologists, needs to be retired. It’s repeatedly and inappropriately used to justify speech limitations. People have been using this cliché as if it had some legal meaning, while First Amendment lawyers point out that it is, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, “a caricature of logical argumentation.” Ken White penned a brilliant and thorough takedown of this misconception. While his piece is no longer available online, you can find a thorough discussion of the arguments by Jerry Coyne here. Please read it before proclaiming that your least favourite language is analogous to “shouting fire in a crowded theatre.”
Assertion 6: The arguments for freedom of speech are outdated.
Assertion 7: Hate speech laws are important for reducing intolerance, even if there may be some examples of abuse.
Assertion 8: Free speech is nothing but a conservative talking point.
Assertion 9: Restrictions on free speech are OK if they are made in the name of civility. (Note that this argument doesn’t hold for this website; as I explain in the Roolz, if your comment is uncivil or insulting to another reader, I don’t have to publish it. On a website like this, I do not have to put up every comment that comes in, though I try to use a light hand when moderating. But First-Amendment-style free speech doesn’t apply to websites, discussion groups, and the like.)
Assertion 10: You need speech restrictions to preserve cultural diversity.
Assertion 11: Free speech is an outdated idea; it’s time for new thinking. (Note that this is the same argument made in #6 above).
Assertion 12: I believe in free speech, but not for blasphemy.
Of these, the one I think it’s most useful to understand is the rebuttal to #7: the claim that “hate speech” doesn’t count as free speech. To answer this properly you’ll have to know what exceptions to First Amendment-style free speech have been carved out of that Amendment by the courts (false advertising, defamation, etc). Indeed, in countries like Germany and Britain, “hate speech” is a violation of the law, but Lukianoff notes that, at least crudely, “hate speech” laws don’t seem to go along with a strong reduction in bigotry, nor would you expect them to.
In his conclusion, Lukianoff once underlines the need for free speech. And speaking personally, I’d recommend that everyone who hasn’t read Mill’s “On Liberty” do so now (it’s free here on the Internet).
Lukianoff:
Free speech is valuable, first and foremost, because, without it, there is no way to know the world as it actually is. Understanding human perceptions, even incorrect ones, is always of scientific or scholarly value, and, in a democracy, it is essential to know what people really believe. This is my “pure informational theory of freedom of speech.” To think that, without openness, we can know what people really believe is not only hubris, but magical thinking. The process of coming to know the world as it is is much more arduous than we usually appreciate. It starts with this: recognise that you are probably wrong about any number of things, exercise genuine curiosity about everything (including each other), and always remember that it is better to know the world as it really is—and that the process of finding that out never ends.
