Jerry Coyne

Here’s Jerry Coyne (who is beginning to “get it” about a bunch of stuff), bashing Templeton Foundation again: Nautilus Magazine is an online site that bills itself as “a different kind of science magazine.” And indeed it is—for it’s partly supported by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). The Foundation is largely dedicated to showing that religion and science are compatible,—even in harmony—for Sir John left his dosh to the JTF to fund projects showing how science would reveal the divine. Thus the magazine publishes accommodationist articles, like this one from last July, and now we have a new one by Brian Gallagher, editor of the Nautilus blog Facts So Romantic and a “Sinai and Synapses” (oy!) fellow. As we see Read More ›

One of our scouts has been following the way retired professor of Darwinian biology Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is trying to confront the SJWs in science, where others are capitulating. The recent question has been whether sex is a real category in biology. (We explain here.) Anyway, Coyne decided to look more closely into the world of the marching Woke and he discovered that most seem to be cool with anti-Semitism, though some are not: I’ve published a fair number of pieces (see here) criticizing the leadership of the Women’s March (WM), including Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez—three of the four co-chairs—for cozying up to Louis Farrakhan, a bigot, a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe. There Read More ›

Well, the guy has guts: Cordelia Fine, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, has carved out a niche for herself by attacking the notion that there are any evolved and genetically-based differences between males and females. Her books have been best-sellers (Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society book prize), probably because her conclusions appeal to those of a certain ideology. But those conclusions are flawed (see here, for instance). Fine’s critiques of some studies purporting to show sex differences are often good, but they’re combined with misguided characterizations of other work as well as the ignoring of results that go against her men-and-women-are-pretty-much-the-same thesis. In other words, Fine is tendentious, not objective, Read More ›

And anyway, does it even matter, if no one will join him?  At least, that’s the word on the street, they’re scared.* Meanwhile, here is Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, concerned about a Woke science studies course that tells us: In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge? – Science After Feminism (Catherine Taylor) Jerry says the obvious about the course: Do any of you doubt for a moment that the answer to both questions is “yes”? (My answers to both would be Read More ›

The most recent thing we had heard that Darwinian biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was unhappy about was David Qualen’s book on Carl Woese. The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life has far too much about horizontal gene transfer for a Darwinist’s liking. Before that, we heard that skeptical mathematician David Berlinski had vexed him. Hey, say what you want about Jerry; he allows his complaints about life to be heard! This time, it is about Templeton, for funding a study of atheism. Lois Lee, a religious scholar whom I’ve written about before, is the lead investigator on a big Templeton grant, or, as The Conversation describes her in erroneous spelling, “Principle [sic] Investigator on the Understanding Unbelief Read More ›

Readers will remember science writer David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Carl Woese, who first identified the Archaea (and doubted Darwinism). They will also doubtless remember Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who does not life Tangled Tree, and… Well, he still doesn’t like it and has been holding forth of late: Most of the publicity about the book—to be sure, publicity pushed by Quammen himself—centers on HGT. It is, we’re told, something that radically overturns Darwin’s view of the “tree of life” and of evolution, and even revises our own view of “what it means to be human” (after all, we’re also told, a substantial part of our genome is dead, Read More ›

As we might expect. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne offers his thoughts on science writer David Quammen’s new book about Carl Woese, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life: Quammen is right that the horizontal transfer of genetic information does complicate our effort to understand the evolutionary past, but he goes too far in claiming that HGT essentially undermines any and all attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary past: “The tree of life is not a true categorical because the history of life just doesn’t resemble a tree.” Before accepting this radical conclusion, we must answer two questions: How in practice can horizontal genetic transmission occur, and how common is it? … In the end, Quammen provides us with a lucid Read More ›

 From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: In June, I wrote a piece here at MercatorNet, “A shambolic atheist community faces some tough choices,” reflecting on the discontent of some members of that community. It attracted a good many comments and at least one riposte shortly afterward. The riposte garnered 114 comments too. Clearly, the piece struck a nerve. That said, fewer readers than I had expected took up the issue that seemed most significant to me: “‘Eiynah’ fears that the [atheist] movement is going ‘right wing.’” I don’t think the atheist movement is going right-wing so much as that some prominent atheists are re-evaluating their relationship with progressivism. It’s about time too. Considering how many atheists see science as a worthy Read More ›