Jerry Coyne says lots of basic (but well-stated) things about evolution, creationism, and education in an interview with American Scientist. Here’s a taste:
Some creationists seem to feel that it’s the scientists who are being dogmatic here–that you’re somehow invested in this idea or want it to be true, or that your training has blinded you to other possibilities. How do you respond to that?
I think they’re the ones who are dogmatic, because the difference between religion and science, which is the difference between religion and evolution, is that we question things. Nobody worships Darwin as a religion. We don’t adhere to a set of dogmas that are unchanging and unquestionable. We all recognize that Darwin was wrong about a lot of stuff. His theories of genetics were wrong, his theories of biogeography were wrong–that’s been corrected by plate tectonics–his stuff on sexual selection is very good but not complete. Evolutionary biology is constantly changing and revising its conclusions. But the main conclusions that Darwin made–that evolution occurred, that it occurred through natural selection, that there were common ancestry and splitting and that it happened slowly–those have all been supported.
Read it all.
There’s a shorter answer to that question:
It’s the evidence, stupid.
Amen…
So as it is …so shall it be ;-)
It was a good read, though those seem to be the stock standard questions asked to evolutionary biologists today.
Currently reading WEIT, I’m really enjoying it so far. Thoroughly entertaining read.
Thanks, a good read indeed.
I’ve not be at it nearly as long – 3 years teaching evolution – and have come to the same conclusion…throw lots of evidence at them, it’s just too cool and it works to well. Then you can get into mechanisms and theory but first you need to see it for yourself.
I teach at a religiously affiliated college and have no issues with the teaching of evolution from theology faculty or our chaplain. Our chaplain will be the first to tell students when the bible and science don’t agree, you have to go with the science, it’s true and it’s tested. Sadly we don’t see enough theists like that, maybe because we spend too much time dealing with the lunatic fringe.
In a recent exchange I had with a creationist, who claims to have a science background, he claimed that evolution is false because it has never been observed in the laboratory with “simpler” organisms which can easily produce multiple generations in a short time. I assume he means to produce a new species, not just show mutations.
Can any one offer a response to this?
Castletonsnob wrote:
The Lenski experiments are a thing of beauty. I used the Blount et al. (2008) paper in my evolution course this year for the first time and it worked really well. E. coli evolved to use the citrate medium as a carbon source – how cool is that?! They might be considered a different species…then again, what is a species designation to a bacteria?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
This was a nice interivew. Coyne has some choice quotes in it. First, I liked this especially:
And of course the creationists will simply ignore or completely miss this example of what’s really beautiful about the process of science:
And then, there’s this:
’nuff said. Next.
The more I here from Jerry Coyne the more I like him. I think I’ll go ahead and buy WEIT. Kind of reminds me of Hector Avalos for some reason.
Very nice, very effective short interview. I’d love to see things like this reprinted in even more mass-market publications, like Time or Newsweek, or one or more of the major papers. Clear, accessible arguments like this I think are one of the best ways to advance the cause. I also plan to pick up the book.
I’m surprised to hear Jerry Coyne say in this interveriew that most schools don’t teach the evidence for evolution. I taught general biology and evolution courses for 13 years at our local community college, and in both courses the evidence for evolution was the most important aspect of the topic we teach. I don’t really see how it could be otherwise when a large percentage of your students are skeptical of evolution in the first place. Talking about the wealth of evidence for evolution really helps them understand the theory. Once they see there is evidence, they’re much more likely to want to listen to how evolution works.
Jerry Coyne owes you some kind of a kickback, or something. You should have an Amazon affiliate link, at the very least. I had kind of forgotten that “Why Evolution Is True” had been published, but I got my ass right over to Amazon to get my own copy book after reading this.
Unrelated: Amazon Prime is, in fact, the very best thing since sliced bread.
Ouch!
Coyne was on the money (no pun).
castletonsnob @#5,
This gem from Jesus and Mo is the perfect answer to the micro- vs. macroevolution argument that creationists are so fond of.
The premise of evolution is indeed that organisms change over time, but even the longest running experiments (like Lenski’s, mentioned by Dr. J, above) pale when compared to evolutionary time. A couple of decades is nothing; the oldest of the Galapagos islands (which are VERY young in geological terms) is about 3.5 million years old – 175 thousand times longer than the long-term evolution experiment.
Another difference is the size of the population, and the number of challenges they face. Lenski’s lab looked at many cells (around 40 trillion cells – that’s 40,000,000,000,000), but the fact is that E. coli colonizes humans shortly after birth, and we’re just one species. The number of microbial cells in our bodies is about ten times the number of human cells, and E coli makes up a large portion of these.* Since the body has roughly 10 trillion cells, there are about 100 trillion microbial cells. Even at only 1% of the microbes in our bodies (a very low estimate, given that 50% of total bacteria ribosomal RNA in caecal contents correspond to Escherichia coli, enterococci, and lactobacilli), the population of E coli in humans alone at this moment would be over 150,000,000 times the total number of cells in the Lenski experiment.
Given the relatively small time scale involved in the long-term evolution experiment and the relatively small population involved, the amount of change observed seems fine. We’ve seem organisms change in a lab – small changes in a small period of time – this is exactly what theory would predict. The world provides plenty of opportunity to observe the changes that have happened over long periods of time.
* Guarner F, & Malagelada J-R (2003). Gut flora in health and disease, The Lancet, Volume 361, Issue 9356, 8 February 2003, Pages 512-519.
The only “dogma” – if you could call it that – that scientists have is to resist dogma. But I guess that the dogmatic consider resisting dogma dogmatic itself, because everything that disagrees with them is “dogmatic and oppressive.” For the dogmatic, anyone who disagrees and fails to go along with them is dogmatism.
It’s nice, for a change, to read something on the web and not end up stupider for the experience.
My training in spelling has blinded me to all the other possibilities, which of course are all spelled wrong.
@castletonsnob: if you haven’t already done so, check out the talkorigins page on new species: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910.html
“But the main conclusions that Darwin made–that evolution occurred, that it occurred through natural selection, that there were common ancestry and splitting and that it happened slowly–those have all been supported.”
He’s batting .500
I guess two out of four ain’t bad!
Evolution occurred: TRUE
Through Natural Selection: FALSE
There was Common Ancestry: TRUE
It happened slowly: FALSE
Doesn’t he know that neo-darwinism is DEAD?
Yawn, Charlie. Wrong blog, wrong thread. Just wrong.
I
“Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island”
Ran across this National Geographic article wandering about last night.
Wow, so Coyne can explicitly say that Darwin was wrong about stuff but New Scientist can’t?
The only ‘dogma’ I see in science is belief in CITOKATE and that we can uncover truth by careful consideration of evidence and the consequences of how we think it is connected to other evidence.
Oh – CITOKATE, in case you hadn’t heard of it before, is not a new god but
Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.
Michael Marshall, you haven’t been paying attention.
That doesn’t bode well for a career as an alleged science journalist.
@Michael Marshall:
Look, it’s a New Scientist journalist trying to justify completely missing the point, by pointing out what he is mistakenly characterizing as inconsistency and adherence to dogmatism.
Yes, Darwin was wrong about a great many things, being as he wrote his main exposition 150 years ago, before the benefit of modern genetics, molecular biology, geology and plate tectonics, among other things.
However, using that as a thought-terminating sound-bite cover, knowing full well that it would add fuel to the ongoing fire of the Culture Wars, in order to simply sell extra copies, is a case study in irresponsible journalism.
When will you be releasing your Bat Boy issue?
Throughout the history of the theory, people keep declaring natural selection dead. Yet each time this happens, the evidence shows that natural selection is still an important part of the process. There’s a good article about it here, not that it’ll change your mind Charlie. When you assert with no evidential backing and think you are being profound – chances are that you’re wrong. Follow the evidence…
CITOKATE is new to me. I love it and shall attempt to spread the meme.
Dr. J,
The distinction between co-called ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ evolution is arbitrary in many ways, and in many ways if he accepts micro evolution, he accepts evolution even if he won’t say so.
Likewise, he’s side-stepping that you don’t have to show something happening to show that the process exists, you can show that it happened. You could ask why showing that something happened isn’t enough. (Observing the process happening is more useful for the details of how it happened, than “that” it occurred; “that” evolution occurred can be shown by showing that it happened.)
Like almost every biologist who works in the field, Jerry Coyne believes that modern evolutionary theory still kicking – not only is it alive but all the evidence supports it. If you think it’s dead, why are you wasting time pronouncing so on this blog instead of submitting papers for peer review?
Michael Marshall #23 wrote:
It’s just fine and dandy (and accurate) for New Scientist to explicitly say that Darwin was wrong about ‘stuff.’ But of course Darwin wasn’t wrong about everything — including the basic theory of evolution.
Yet the cover was written in a way which deliberately implied that the article inside was going to disprove evolution. Instead, the information in the article only helped to explain it a bit better.
And the cover gave ammunition to the sorts of people who only read covers. That’s not fine and dandy. But predictable.
Wow! That doesn’t bode well for New Scientist. Creationists in Texas are using your magazine cover to promote turning the USA into a theocracy, and you don’t understand why rational people are concerned about it.
If Coyne had written a book called “Evolution is a Lie” just to sell more copies, many of us would be mad about that too. We would be upset even if inside, the book declared the opposite. Why? Because from that point on the creationists will just use the cover as “ammo” and never mention what the inside really says. It gives their position a false air of legitimacy.
Fortunately…Coyne didn’t do that.
Unfortunately, New Scientist did, and now they’re even pushing it in their ads too.
(sarcasim)
Oh, yes Mr. Marshall…why there’s no difference at all!
(/sarcasim)
castletonsnob @ #5:
If you have exhausted the archives and FAQs at TalkOrigins, try a web search for:
amoeba + Kwang + Jeon
Or, for a web page that has a brief list of early references to Kwang’s work, Google “Evidence for the Plausibility of an Endosymbiotic Origin of Eukaryotic Organelles”
I think that The Panda’s Thumb had some mention of this late last year, although Kwang’s results were first published nearly 40 years ago.
A cursory summary: A batch of Amoeba proteus in Kwang’s lab were accidentally infected with a bacteria that proved fatal to nearly all colonies. A few survived despite the infection. Later, Kwang discovered that the infection resistant amoeba could no longer survive without the bacteria trapped in its body and that the bacteria could no longer survive outside of the amoeba!
This is really cool, immediately comprehensible stuff to introduce to those who claim that evolution “has never happened in the lab” or anywhere else.
Of course, plenty of creationists simply discount any examples of evolution that involve microbes. I guess, since they can’t see ’em, they don’t count ’em. But the genuinely curious evo-doubters I’ve spoken with in the past seemed to react with positive enthusiasm when they heard about these amoeba. It makes a natural launch point for discussions about mitochondria.
YMMV
Thanks to all of you for your information about evolution in the lab. More is welcome, of course, but I just wanted to thank those who have already contributed.
For what it’s worth, I take back my sarcastic comment. I wrote it in a moment of frustration, and on reflection I think it was unfair and, well, rude.
At this late date I’m not sure if anyone will notice, but in the interests of politeness, I’d just like to withdraw it and offer an apology for being obnoxious.