Jerry Coyne

The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

Jerry Coyne (born 1949) is an American professor of biology.

Sourced

• In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.
  • Coyne (2011) "For the love of God... scientists in uproar at £1m religion prize" on independent.co,uk, April 7, 2011

Why Evolution is True (2009)

All page numbers from the hardcover edition

• The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
  • p. xiii

• This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason.
  • p. xiv

• It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.
  • p. xvii

• We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.
  • p. 60

• Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.
  • p. 64

• The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist.
  • p. 88

• We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.
  • p. 90

• If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.
  • p. 138

• If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
  • p. 140

• Because of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution.
  • p. 192

• Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.
  • pp. 224-225

• Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.
  • p. 231

• A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.
  • p. 240