Darwinism and culture: Jerry Coyne threatens no more science posts

No more science posts by Jerry Coyne? Good riddance! Truth Will Set You Free

I guess that means more posts that show 30 or more pictures of his recent 'noms'. And hey, what about that never changing Chicago skyline (because he always takes the same shot outside his office, apparently)? He hasn't posted one of those in a while... soundburger

Jerry Coyne threatens no more science posts What science posts??? Has he lost his mind? Again? The speculations about what natural selection can and cannot do without any evidence that nobody, even Darwinists, don't take seriously anymore Jerry calls science? Well Jerry...get some help before it's too late! I beg you! BTW: If Jerry hadn't banned 95% of his blog readers, including many Darwinists, because he can't handle any criticism, maybe there would be more people reading his blog other than cat lovers.... J-Mac

Since when are the readers to blame for a blog's lack of popularity? Especially when the readers have no free will... Andere Stimme

No wonder the management forbids me to put photos of my editorial assistants, Tom, Dick, and Harry, on the site ... It'd soon look mainly like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbP2N1BQdYc News

When he posts only about science it's pretty boring. I don't think anyone considers him a great scientist, do they? At best he's a popularizer. If people want to read about science there are much better sources. Jerry's appeal is as a culture warrior, or anti-culture in this case. I only find him interesting when he has one of his mental melt-downs over atheism or when he tries to philosophize. That is hilarious. He needs to go back to being the Captain Lou Albano of atheism. He's got to rally his troops, throw some grenades, break some heads, screaming all caps, embittered nastyness ... That's the Jerry Coyne people want to see. The maniac. Trying to be serious about science? He can't be. Silver Asiatic

I used to read all of Coyne's posts. I got tired of his cat posts, his anti-religion posts, his determinism posts, his excessive number of readers wildlife photos. I still read his science posts, and I still notice the others on my RSS readers. But I think the answer for Jerry, is that many of the folk interested in science have stopped reading his blog because they see the signal to noise ratio as too low. So I guess clickbait is what still attracts some viewers. Neil Rickert

I don't understand why he thinks anyone came to his site for science at all. I've never even heard of someone going to Jerry's site for interesting science tidbits. I haven't been there for a while, but I know Pharyngula used to have some interesting science as well as ID-bashing, but I've never known Coyne to do so. I have to say, this sounds a bit like those "notice me please!" facebook posts. johnnyb

Coyne threatens less science so as to increase traffic to his blog? How does he decrease from practically nil coverage thus far? Does he propose more Darwinian pseudo-science in place of the meager real science from physics and chemistry that he currently covers? Or perhaps more cute cat pictures and videos to entertain Darwinian diehards?

“In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.” - Jerry A. Coyne – Of Vice and Men, The New Republic, April 3, 2000 p.27 - “Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.” (Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?,” reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006).)

OT trivia:

Ginkgo 'living fossil' genome decoded - 21 November 2016 Excerpt: The (Ginkgo) tree is famed for being a “living fossil” - a term used to describe those organisms that have experienced very little change over millions of years. In the case of the Ginkgo, there are specimens preserved in the rock record from 270 million years ago, in the Permian Period.,,, The specific species sequenced in the study was Ginkgo biloba. It reveals the tree’s genome to be huge, comprising some 10.6 billion DNA "letters".,,, Its anti-insect arsenal is particularly smart. The Ginkgo will synthesise one set of chemicals to directly fight a pest, but also release another set of compounds that specifically attract the insect’s enemies. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38057741 Hummingbirds see motion in an unexpected way - January 5, 2017 Excerpt: the hummingbird's brain processes motion in a unique and unexpected way. "In all four-limbed vertebrates studied to date, most of the neurons in this [motion-detecting] brain area are tuned to detect motion coming from behind, such as would occur for an impending collision or when being attacked from behind by a predator," says Douglas Altshuler of the University of British Columbia. "We found that this brain area responds very differently in hummingbirds. Instead of most neurons being tuned to back-to-front motion, almost every neuron we found was tuned to a different direction. We also found that these neurons were most responsive to very fast motion.",,, "This study provides compelling support for the hypothesis that the avian brain is specialized for flight and that hummingbirds are a powerful model for studying stabilization algorithms," Gaede says. http://phys.org/news/2017-01-hummingbirds-motion-unexpected.html

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