Some braggadocio

July 7, 2026 • 10:30 am

I started this website in 2009, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been going for 17 years (this is the 31,860th post!). It began simply as a suggestion from my editor, Wendy Wolf at Viking/Penguin (now Penguin/Random House), that I start a website to promote my first trade book, Why Evolution Is True. (I was supposed to do what Neil Shubin did to promote his book Your Inner Fish). And that’s what I did, intending to perhaps post a brief item every few weeks about new evidence for evolution.

As you know, I quickly abandoned that intention and, discovering that I not only liked writing but also wanted to air my views about many things, including a love of cats, the website became a monster, eating up huge amounts of time. I don’t regret that, or have any plans to stop, for it’s only when I’m writing on this site that I’m able to forget the thousand natural shocks that kosher flesh is heir to.

This all came to mind when yesterday I got a request from my agent to allow a translation of WEIT into a new language: Uzbek! Of course I get a tidy but not huge sum for each such translation, and now the book is in 21 languages besides English. I’ve listed them below, including the publisher:

Original English:      Viking/Penguin (US), and Oxford University Press (UK)

Foreign:

ARABIC National Centre for Translation and Publishing, Egypt
BASQUE Universidad del Pais Vasco (hardcover and ebook)
BENGALI Agradoot and Company, Dhaka, Bangladesh
BRAZIL JSN Editora
CROATIAN   In.Tri d.o.o
FINNISH Vastapaino
FRENCH Markus Haller, Switzerland
GREEK Diadromes
JAPAN Nikkei Business Publications
HEBREW Books in the Attic
ITALIAN Codice
KOREAN Eulyoo Publishing Company
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (Mandarin) KeAi Communications
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (Simpified Chinese) Shanghai Translation Publishing House
POLISH Proszynski i Ska
PORTUGUESE Edicoes tinta-da-china (Portugal)
RUSSIAN Alpina
SPANISH Editorial Critica
TURKISH Palme Yayinevi
UKRAINIAN NashFormat Publishers
UZBEK           1000 Books Project

The translation I’m proudest of is the one in Arabic, because the Arabic-speaking and Farsi-speaking world is rife with creationism since the Qur’an, which is often taken as literal truth, paints a creationist scenario for the origin of life and humans. Sadly, the Arabic translation, done in Egypt, is almost unavailable: I’m told you can buy it in only one small bookstore in Cairo.

Here are two questions I’m sometimes asked:

Are you going to update the book? I have no plans to. The material is pretty much up to date, though there are a handful of errors that remain. And it’s short on molecular evidence for evolution. But there is no other book that covers the same ground, and I’ve heard from many people who said it convinced them that evolution was indeed true, as well as from a few who said it made them abandon their religion. Which leads to the next question:

Is this book the accomplishment you’re most proud of? No, though I am quite proud of it, for it was successful in doing what I wanted (it even nosed onto the NYT bestseller list), even if it didn’t dispel the pervasive creationism of America and other countries. A 2024 Gallup poll, for example, shows that 71% of Americans continue to think that God had some hand in human evolution, with more than half of those being Biblical creationists. But a naturalistic belief in evolution is gaining!:

In terms of the quality of analysis and comprehensiveness of coverage, I’m still most proud of the academic book I wrote with Allen Orr, Speciation. It grew out of my whole career working on the origin of species, and summarizes and analyzes what we knew at the time (2009) about how single lineages could split into two or more species. Speciation was originally published by Sinauer, but when that estimable publisher disbanded when its founder retired, its books were bought by Oxford University Press. Now Speciation is hideously expensive ($189.00 in paperback and $239 or more in hardcover). I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you’re an evolutionist or other biologist, as it presumes knowledge that most laypeople don’t have.

When I dip into Speciation, as I do on rare occasions, I am impressed at how well I could think and write back then. I would not be capable of writing it now, as my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. But I’m glad that Allen and I took the six years required to write it, as it’s the definitive book on the subject, and no other book had come along to supplant it. Is it out of date? Certainly, but neither Allen nor I have the will to update it. And it still lays out the problem in a way that’s useful, even if we have a lot more examples.

What I would add it I were to rewrite it would be a lot more about on “hybrid speciation”, especially the phenomenon of diploid species hybridizing and then the hybrids evolving into a new and distinct species. In 2009 we had a few examples of the phenomenon, but they’ve proliferated. (Polyploidy in plants is one example of hybrid speciation, but we did include a lot of material on that.)

I’m also proud of the cover (in color below), which shows three congeneric species of fish. (I didn’t want to show Drosophila because everybody expected that the book would be Drosophilocentric, and it wasn’t.) I spent hours sitting on the floor of the biology library here (no longer extant), trying to find good pictures that would represent speciation. I finally found one, and I could use it without permission as the copyright had expired. Here’s the source of the picture as detailed inside the book:

I loved the connection with David Starr Jordan and Teddy Roosevelt. I took out the book and carried it to the main library, which had a huge scanner that could reproduce things in great detail. And that’s what I sent to Sinauer to go on the cover. By the way, the fin going through the “O” in my last name was done on purpose by Sinauer. That’s cool, too:

Such are the thoughts engendered by a request for translation.

If you haven’t read Da Roolz, please do so

June 8, 2026 • 10:45 am

Over the years I’ve developed a set of posting guidelines, affectionately known as “Da Roolz” in Chicagospeak. You can find them on the left sidebar, or by clicking here. If you’re new here, or haven’t yet read them, I urge you to do so, as it will facilitate discussion as well as making my job easier. I’ll just point out three of them that are particularly important these days.

a) f you’re a first-time poster, I have to approve your initial comment. This won’t necessarily be immediate, as it depends on my checking email. After that, posting is automatic unless you become moderated for some reason.

Sometimes first-time posters assume that their comment was fouled up because it didn’t appear. And that could lead to them trying to make the same comment several times. Not necessary: first comments need to be approved and thereafter, if you’re not moderated (some people are), your comments should appear automatically. I do appreciate people using their real names, but understand if you have good reasons not to do so.

b) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

This guidelines is often violated, and I vary in how much I feel like enforcing it. If there’s a good back and forth going on, I am not strict about it. But some persons feel that they have to respond to every comment, and in that case I will warn people. I almost never remove comments when they’re posted.

c.) Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments. I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it. Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

This guideline I do try to enforce, either by emailing the person with logorrhea or by adding a “reply” saying that “this comment is over the word limit; please try to post shorter comments”. Comments are just that—comments and not essays. Also, please try to keep your comments in line with what the post is about, though sometimes readers can introduce a diversion if it’s timely or important.

WEIT, now online in Arabic!

April 23, 2025 • 11:20 am

I have long wished for my first trade book, Why Evolution is True, to be published in Arabic. That’s because many who adhere to Islam take the Qur’an literally (it’s almost a requirement) and the Qur’an is explicitly creationist, saying that Allah created the Universe in six days and that humans were created from a glob of mud. I am unsure how often evolution is taught is universities or secondary schools in Islamic countries, but I at least wanted the evidence for evolution that I adduce in WEIT to be available to Arab-speakers.

The book was translated into Arabic by the Egyptian Translation Service, but their copyright has apparently run out, and at any rate, someone told me that the translation was now available free on the internet.

So, if you are in an Arab-speaking country, you can find the contents of WEIT here or by clicking on the title page below. You can also find the pdf here.

I was amused to see that when I translated the cover into English, it reads this way:

So be it, I am Dr. Quinn. Spread the word about this so that others can read the book, a book up to now available only in one small bookstore in Cairo, and only in a few copies (I have only one). Certainly the original book in Arabic, as Rodney Dangerfield might say, “got no respect.”

Note to readers

January 9, 2024 • 7:30 am

Two items this morning:

If you’ve never posted here before, please read the commenting rules “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar (or here), paying particular attention to the comments about civility towards other readers and your host. There have been a lot of nasty comments here, laden with insults that will not be tolerated. Any comment that addresses me as “dude” will be deep-sixed, and I’m not keen on comments who call me “Coyne.” As I say in rule #7, “Pretend that you’re speaking to me in my living room which is, in a sense, what this website is.” There are all too many readers who completely disregard not only the rules, but don’t seem to have read a post before commenting on it.

Second, I have one more day’s worth of wildlife photos after today’s post. If I don’t get any more, it’s possible that I’ll cancel this feature—part of the slow death of this website. If you like the photos and want to keep the feature going, please contribute your good photos. I needn’t point out that content here is free, unlike Substack, and I count on readers to pitch in from time to time.

Thank you,
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), whose origin is shown below::

Thank you!

An Israeli Jew rejects “Why Evolution is True”

September 16, 2023 • 12:00 pm

My book Why Evolution is True has been translated into 18 languages, and one of them was Hebrew. I was pleased about that because many Orthodox Jews are Biblical creationists and I wanted them to at least have a shot at learning about the evidence for evolution.

In fact, I know of at least two American Orthodox Jews who accepted evolution (but then left the faith and were expelled by their families!) after reading the English version of the book. They both told me they had no regrets. (I met them both at Randi’s The Amazing Meeting some years ago.)

Now that a Hebrew version is out, one of my Israeli readers managed to get two copies of it (not easy to procure!) and sent me this tale this morning:

I showed your (Hebrew edition) book to an intelligent young Jewish man living opposite me – he looked about 17 – 18 years old.

He is a student and shortly going to college.

He claimed he was happy with the ‘truth’ that the earth is less than 6,000 years old, and why would he want to consider anything that would detract from his ‘happiness’?

I suggested the possibility that his truth might not be the truth, but he rejected that possibility out of hand. His truth was most definitely the true truth..!

I offered to lend him the book for a few days but he politely refused, saying he had much preparation for college.

There are a lot of orthodox Jews in my area, and I’m considering delivering an A4 leaflet, English on one side, Hebrew on the other, with a basic explanation of Big Bang, stars formation, nucleosynthesis, planet formation, life, us.

But now wonder if such an action will result in unhappiness……?

It seems such a shame that otherwise intelligent humans are so far removed from aspects of critical thinking in their lives…

p.s. the young student even went as far as saying you are not a ‘real’ Jew for even publishing such a book…!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, is why I am sad every time I see a child being brought up as an ultra-Orthodox Jew. Am I a “real” Jew? I’ll let others decide on their own. I’m certainly not a “religious” Jew, but you know the old joke:

Q; What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?
A: A Jew.

And as for the truth making them unhappy, well, they can always reject it.

(Remind me to tell you the story about the edition in Arabic.)

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