Tag: jerry coyne

Interview with Jerry in American Scientist

March 5, 2009 • 8:36 am

by Greg Mayer

An interview with Jerry on evolution vs. creationism appears in the online pages of American Scientist. In the interview, Jerry talks mostly about his approach to teaching evolution based on 25 years experience, and how he applied that experience in the writing of WEIT. A couple of highlights:

…when you read Darwin, the thing that’s most fascinating is the evidence he musters in support of it. In talking with professional biologists and evolutionists, they didn’t ever learn why people thought evolution was true, because you’re not taught that in class. But I thought that that should be passed on to the students because of the second reason I wrote the book, which is the pervasiveness of creationism in this country. I wanted to educate the students so they know that evolution really happened, so they don’t really doubt that, but also to arm them against the forces of irrationality that were going to be impinging on them and society….

And so when I teach the stuff I teach it as sort of an object lesson in how to adjudicate between competing theories in science. And that’s the way I wrote the book, too. I’m constantly asking the reader, “How does creationism explain this observation? It can’t.” So it’s more than teaching the evidence; it’s teaching them how to discriminate between good science and bad science, and that’s a good lesson for students too.

WHYY radio interview

February 14, 2009 • 8:01 am

Yesterday I had the privilege (and it is indeed a privilege) to talk to Marty Moss-Coane at WHYY (Philadelphia’s NPR station). She’s a terrific interviewer, and had read my book thoroughly before talking to me: her copy was covered with scribblings and post-it notes. You can hear the mp3 version of the interview here.

Radio show Friday

February 11, 2009 • 7:14 pm

On Friday, Feb. 13 (!), I’m scheduled to appear on WHYY-FM in Philadelphia (the local NPR station) from 11 a.m. to noon EST on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, who is supposed to be a great interviewer. I will, of course, be talking about evolution, Darwin Day, etc. (and of course a plug for the book). You can listen live here.

marty-moss-coane

Review of WEIT in Wall Street Journal

January 29, 2009 • 9:38 am

A very nice review of WEIT appeared today in the Wall Street Journal.  It was written by the distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher, who has written extensively on evolution, creationism, and evolutionary psychology.  I highly recommend his recent book, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, which not only dismantles intelligent design, but deals with the thorny problem of how nonreligious people can find the same kind of solace and social networking that is provided by religion. Philip also wrote what I consider the definitive critique of evolutionary psychology (then called “sociobiology”): Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature.  Finally, his avocation is James Joyce, and he’s just penned an introduction for the general reader to Finnegans Wake: Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake, an accomplishment which I can regard only with astonishment.

A really cool evolutionary timeline

January 28, 2009 • 11:14 am

One of the best ways to appreciate not only how long life has had to evolve, but also how short the period has been since “modern life” (aka birds, mammals, and humans) arose is to look at an evolutionary “timeline” that is drawn to scale. In the footnotes of WEIT I direct readers to one of these, but I have since found a much better one on the Web. It was constructed by John Kyrk, and is seen here. It’s a great teaching tool, with nice graphics, including eight telescoping timelines, each one a small piece of the previous one.