Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne in 2014.

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Not to be confused with George Coyne.

“”Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

—P. Z. Myers

Jerry Coyne is a Professor Emeritus of biology at the University of Chicago who specialised in speciation (how species separate) and ecological and evolutionary genetics before retirement in 2015. He is also increasingly prominent as a public skeptic, writer, racialist and atheist.

Coyne claims the invention of the neologism "sophisticated theology".

Summary of beliefs

Jerry Coyne is a New Atheist who claims religion and science are incompatible, in the same way astronomy and astrology, or medicine and homeopathy are incompatible. He thinks NOMA is unreasonable, and believes trying to reconcile religion (Christian, Islamic, or other) with science is futile. It is a recurring topic on his blog site, and he since has co-authored a paper in philosophy no less, and written a book on the subject, "Faith Vs. Fact" (2015). Coyne fears the Templeton Foundation money has a corrupting influence on science. He argues that religion fails the test of scientific scrutiny and that religious dogma harms science. In his writings on religion, Coyne has challenged theology, questioning its place as an academic field. Coyne believes that evolution is completely unguided.

Coyne is an incompatibilist, who believes that free will is illusory and that the notion is incompatible with determinism.^{[citation needed]}

Coyne's political incoherence

Coyne claims to be on "the Left", but on his blog he strongly aligns with those funded by Republicans, as in the case of Bari Weiss who is funded by "GOP sugar daddy" Harlan Crow and Quillette, funded by Trump-and-DeSantis-supporter Peter Thiel.

Woke obsession

Coyne is strongly critical of what he calls the regressive left or extreme liberalism, to the point of being obsessed with "woke" which he has used in the title of sixty of his blog posts since 2020. He is also obsessed with "cancel culture."

Coyne's political incoherence is especially clear in his criticism of Trump supporters:

“”Any working class person who voted for Trump probably wasn’t thinking, for Trump is also rich, favors the rich (as does his party), and his pandering to the working class was largely an appeal to prejudice and nativism. But it was still an alternative to the status quo. We, the Left, need to offer something tangible to the poor, both black and white, and not just demonize Republicans or sneer at working-class whites, people who are generally seen by RLs as racist and sexist—and therefore unworthy of consideration.

—Jerry Coyne

Coyne is apparently incapable of making the connection between Trump and Thiel, in spite of the fact that Thiel is famous for his support for Trump.

It would seem that Coyne's constant promotion of right-wingers is contrary to Coyne's own political interests as someone on "the Left," so why does he do it? One possible reason is because Coyne doesn't bother to put any effort into researching the political world about which he is so opinionated and doesn't remember anything he does learn about that world. For example, although Peter Thiel was mentioned on Coyne's blog on August 27, 2022, on October 21, 2022, when Coyne announced he would be a speaker at the Stanford conference on academic freedom (Thiel was the keynote speaker), Coyne claimed he had never heard of Peter Thiel.

I've never heard the name before today...

Although Coyne is a well-known atheist, he did not criticize Thiel's keynote speech, which was bad enough for Steven Pinker to call it "data-light and impressionistic". In the speech, Thiel claimed the current political climate is "Armageddon" versus "Anti-Christ" and supported his view by citing the Bible (First Thessalonians five, chapter 3). Although Coyne complains regularly about religious views on his blog for some reason, Peter Thiel, Republican Party stalwart, gets a pass.

Pinker's mouthpiece

Jerry Coyne is a devoted admirer of Steven Pinker: "Since Pinker is wickedly smart, eloquent, and apparently remembers everything he’s ever read, lunch with him is not just a culinary experience, but a bout of cerebral ping-pong" and has, on several occasions, acted as Pinker's mouthpiece, conveying Pinker's views through his own blog. Coyne solicited Pinker's response to a critique of Pinker's Better Angels and then posted it on his blog. The "hit piece" pointed out, accurately, that Pinker had misrepresented the words of others. In his response Pinker said: "The rest of Torres’s complaint consists of showing that some of the quotations I weave into the text come from people who don’t agree with me. OK, but so what?"

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man," Nathan J. Robinson said that Coyne believes the reason people dislike Pinker is because he's famous. Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne also enjoys posting photos of Pinker's cowboy boots.

Coyne vs. Myers

Coyne's slide into far-right hereditarianism can be tracked through his relationship with biologist and progressive P. Z. Myers.

When Coyne first began his "Why Evolution is True" blog in February 2009, Myers cheered him on from his own blog "Pharyngula". In 2009 Coyne actually mocked evolutionary psychology. In 2011, Myers shared Coyne's rebuttal of the "evolution of rape" argument.

Coyne and Myers had a running joke of cats versus cephalopods. Myers recommended Coyne's blog. In November 2012, Myers can be seen having a friendly disagreement with Coyne and Michael Shermer. Coyne and Myers often made common cause in opposition to religion.

Myers' disagreement with Coyne over evolutionary psychology appears on Pharyngula July 15, 2013. Myers says: "I have disturbed and distressed Jerry Coyne, because I have dissed the entire field of evolutionary psychology." I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece.

In January 2014 Myers wrote a piece "Jerry Coyne is trying to defend evolutionary psychology again."

In March 2015 Myers allowed "Ben Allen of the Plektix blog" to post on Pharyngula "Why is Jerry Coyne blocking scientific discussion?" although Myers had reservations about the piece. Allen noted that Coyne "has taken to blocking commenters who disagree with him, even over substantive scientific issues."

In December, 2016, Coyne referred to Myers as a "blinkered ideologue" in defense of the extreme adaptationism of evolutionary psychology.

And it was all downhill from there.

In January 2018 Myers said Coyne was part of the "racist circle-jerk." In January 9 2019 Myers noted Coyne's support for Quillette. On 12 January, Myers compared Coyne to Goofus in the Goofus/Gallant dichotomy.

In October 2020, Myers wrote: "This “cancel culture” nonsense has gone on far too long — it’s nothing but an imaginary assault on the power and privilege of conservatives. It’s a label, nothing more, that idiots hang on any attempt to criticize them. You’re canceling me! How dare you! <swoon>. It’s all really tiresome. Unsurprisingly, Jerry Coyne falls for the BS. He races to defend the notion of racist Noah Carl in the racist online rag the Genetic Literacy Project that Darwin might be next to be canceled."

In 2021, Myers says: "My first thought was to wonder how far gone Coyne has become — I haven’t been interested in reading his blog in ages because he was already incredibly regressive, and his active commentariat mainly seems to be rat-droppings from the slymepit. In 2022 Myers noted that Coyne hated the McLemore article on E. O. Wilson, noted Coyne's support for gender essentialism, and responded to Coyne's attack against him, made during Coyne's presentation at the Stanford Academic Freedom conference.

In 2023 Myers said "If anyone wants to find the Slymepit gang today, they’re usually hanging out on Jerry Coyne’s blog." In May of that year, Myers wrote: "I guess I should mention the terrible Wall Street Journal op-ed by Coyne & Krylov." In June, Myers wrote: "Years of ignoring Jerry Coyne, a record ruined by the fact that I felt obligated to find out what he’s complaining about in order to address that recent bad article…and what do I find? His usual half-assed whining about people different from him." and on the same day: "Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see." A few days later: "Fresh off that paper about how the liberals are destroying “merit” and science, Jerry Coyne fearlessly rides his hobby horse onto the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, where he complains about a a grave threat to biology." Several days after that:

Do they seriously think Coyne & Maroja’s BS is not ideological, and is entirely objective and empirical? Its conservative bias is naked and flapping in the wind, but apparently conservatism and prejudice and blind defenses of the status quo are not a subjective presentation of an ideology.

Coyne's support for "human biodiversity"

It's likely that Coyne, a one-time critic of evolutionary psychology, was influenced in favor of hereditarianism by Steven Pinker. In Coyne's August 28, 2021 blog post "A sensible article on human 'race'" Coyne wrote that "As a biologist, it irks me when ideologues distort biology in the service of politics. My view, which I absorbed from Steven Pinker, is that we should be able to accept scientific facts without perforce turning those facts into government policy."

Coyne, in the hereditarian tradition, goes on to accuse opponents of biological determinism of politicizing science.

The "sensible" article is "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" published in the arch-hereditarian magazine Quillette and written by advocates of "human biodiversity" Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell.

So race can be classified any way you want, but Bo Winegard would like to be reasonable about maintaining a country's racial demographic composition - presumably he and his friends would determine the race demographic categories

The article is bizarrely post-modern, arguing that racial "categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value." So although the hereditarians believe that race is a biological reality, as Steven Pinker has claimed at the same time, they argue you can invent any racial classification system you wish:

...there aren’t a fixed number of film categories. The amount and the granularity of film categories depend upon the interests of the people using them. Your friend might use four (horror, comedy, drama, and science fiction), whereas Netflix might use an apparently limitless and startlingly specific supply. (See Daniel Dennett’s book for a variety of points and related examples centering on the topic of species).

The same principles apply to racial categories. If one knows that Thomas is a Caucasian, one can be reasonably sure that Thomas has relatively light skin, and that he has recent ancestry in Europe. But racial categories, like film categories, aren’t immutable essences that perfectly sort humans into distinct groups. There aren’t a fixed number of racial categories, and the number researchers use is partially a matter of convenience. One might start with five continentally based categories (i.e., Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines) and then add more categories as one’s analysis becomes more granular (e.g. Ashkenazi Jewish, Mizrahi Jewish, and so on). These categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value. In this, they are like many other constructs in the social sciences such as self-esteem, intelligence, and agreeableness. They represent traits that cluster together; they predict outcomes; and they can be quantified.

The term Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification and strictly non-scientific, demonstrating how little human biodiversity has to do with science. In the Winegard-Winegard-Boutwell category scheme, anything goes. This is especially interesting considering that Bo Winged has declared on Twitter that he believes it isn't racist to want to "preserve a country's (racial) demographic composition." Presumably Winegard sees himself in the role of determining who counts as which race, before implementing his desired racial quota system.

Coyne and Bo Winegard

Coyne is not content to help mainstream race extremist Winegard by promoting his crackpot racial theories. In July 2023, Coyne and Luana S. Maroja co-wrote an article for the "Skeptical Inquirer" called "The Ideological Subversion of Biology" using the hereditarian tactic of presenting themselves as pure pilgrims of empiricism opposed to the woke mob. In it, Coyne and Maroja present racialist extremist Winegard as a poor victim of progressive politics:

A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

As Coyne well knows, Winegard doesn't merely "suggest the possibility that there are differences in cognition among ethnic groups" - Winegard is a true believer who would be happy to impose a political system of national racial quotas if he had the chance.

Winegard's extremism apparently does not cause Coyne to have any qualms about continually promoting him and his crackpot theories.

Coyne has also promoted racist Richard Hanania.

Writings

Coyne is the author of standard text Speciation (with H. Allen Orr, 2004) and science popularization Why Evolution Is True (2009). The latter has spawned a regularly-updated website (he dislikes the term "blog") of the same name, which contains much top-quality skepticism and atheism (and tangling with other bloggers, theist and atheist) to go with the stuff on evolution. In 2015. Coyne published Faith VS. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, in which he argues that any attempt to reconcile religion and science is doomed.

Coyne writes daily on his WordPress blog Why Evolution Is True, named after his first book for a general audience. He covers a wide range of recurring topics, and cats. Greg Mayer, Matthew Cobb and Grania Spingies support him regularly.

Debates and disputes

Coyne vs. Haught (On science and religion)

Coyne took on theologian John Haught in an October 12, 2011 public debate at the Gaines Center, University of Kentucky over whether science and religion were compatible. After Coyne decisively won the debate, Haught tried to suppress the video of the event.

“”I am deeply angry about this stand, and can see only one reason for what Haught has done: cowardice. He lost the debate; his ideas were exposed for the mindless theological fluff that they were; and I used his words against him, showing that even “sophisticated” theology, when examined under the microscope of reason, is just a bunch of made-up stuff, tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

—

After approximately the entire skepticsphere flooded UKY (and the Gaines Center's funders) with complaints, Haught begrudgingly agreed to the release of the video and ensuing Q&A (having already destroyed his reputation). It's worth the hour's viewing. Never debate a theist without a signed release in advance.

Coyne vs. Thornhill and Palmer (On evolutionary psychology and rape)

See Rape and evolutionary psychology

Coyne became part of a larger debate surrounding Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, the biologist-anthropologist duo who authored A Natural History of Rape. Coyne gave the book a scathing review in the journal Nature and argued against them on a radio debate hosted by NPR. Although Coyne supports the idea of evolutionary analyses of psychology and behavior, he is a critic of much current evolutionary psychology. PZ Myers has criticized Coyne for what evo-psychology he does support.

Coyne vs. Pigliucci (On new atheism, the nature of science, and free will)

Coyne and Massimo Pigliucci have disagreements on a number of issues that have led to some blogospheric debating (and navel-gazing), such as the legacy of Christopher Hitchens and "new atheism." However, their most recent dust-up has been over the issue of free will. Coyne has argued on the basis of scientific findings (the laws of physics, genetics, and neuro-imaging) that free will is an illusion. Pigliucci responded that Coyne's arguments were flawed in two ways: (a) presupposing certain debatable positions such as causal closure, denial of emergent phenomena, and physical determinism, and (b) misinterpreting Benjamin Libet's neuroscience experiments. Coyne replied by re-iterating his original position. Pigliucci added that his issue with Coyne's claims is that they are philosophical or metaphysical rather than scientific, as he claims. Pigliucci contended that Coyne was advancing an eliminativist argument that he had failed to justify. Considering that these criticisms are being leveled by someone who thinks that free will is an incoherent concept, Coyne might benefit from brushing up a bit on the arguments for and against free will.

Coyne vs. Pigliucci (On the extended evolutionary synthesis)

Coyne has been very critical towards the idea of an extended evolutionary synthesis proposed by Massimo Pigliucci and others. Pigliucci has responded.

Coyne vs. haters

Coyne feels labeling people as "haters" is a way that sloppy thinkers avoid addressing the reasons people criticise something. Antitheists are written off as people who hate religion. Opponents of Islam are called haters, as are critics of Roman Catholicism — and the same goes for others who criticise anything. Terrorists are described as haters without analysing the reasons for terrorism.

Coyne vs. Templeton

Coyne dislikes the Templeton Foundation. He thinks there is too much money and not enough Science. Basically, Coyne feels vast sums of Templeton money are used to bribe journalists and scientists to think in warm fuzzy ways about religion and spirituality and also to write warm fuzzy material about religion.

Coyne vs. psychiatry

Coyne became convinced, after reading a book review in the New York Times, that the medical field of psychiatry is a scam. His prime target is antidepressants, which he believes are ineffective. He also argues that psychiatrists frequently portray them as effective, and pretends to know their mechanism of action. He does not address other drugs with similar low efficacy (statins), other drugs with an unknown mechanism of action (acetaminophen), or other psychiatric drugs with demonstrably high efficacy (antipsychotics). Coyne attributes this scam partly to "the desire of pharmaceutical companies to milk the public out of as many dollars as possible" (see Big Pharma). However, he doesn't explain why other countries, many of which lack pharmaceutical industries and for-profit medicine, also continue to practice psychiatry in roughly the same way.

Coyne vs leftist college students

Coyne memorably wrote several long posts defending Bret Weinstein as Evergreen University's controversial Day of Absence unfolded. Some of his posts linked to Benjamin A. Boyce, a Youtuber who said he was a student with inside information about what was really happening at Evergreen because he was a student there. It later emerged he was a reactionary propagandist and a reactionary whose most recent tweet as of this writing attacks "the Privilege Game."

Rabidly anti-woke, Coyne linked to Boyce's video in 2017, signal-boosting him before he blew up online. Boyce would later go on to change his major from "Early Childhood Development" to journalism, and film a long documentary series that white nationalists keep linking to as propaganda titled "the Truth about Evergreen University." Attending Evergreen doesn't mean Boyce wasn't a white nationalist in the fold, and statistically speaking there had to be a few at a university of a couple of thousand students. (Boyce happens to be white and a middle aged 40-year old who obsessed over students briefly protesting Bret Weinstein for ten minutes in a video before leaving him alone to march past his classroom.)

Coyne vs deplatforming

Coyne has repeatedly criticized students for the practice of deplatforming, and a non-exhaustive list of examples includes Richard Dawkins, Dave Rubin, and for when students helped revoke an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Richard Spencer. He also condemned a progressive for shaming Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Trump's then-White House propagandist press secretary) while she was eating at a restaurant.

Coyne vs the Intellectual Dark Web's critics

For more information, see: Intellectual Dark Web

Coyne constantly supports grifters from the Intellectual Grift Dark Web, but not their critics who he usually calls "the authoritarian left." He routinely signal boosts reactionaries, and insists he is a liberal Democrat even though he almost always attacks left. To the initiated, he is best thought of as an "Enlightened Centrist," or a Dave Rubin style "classical liberal." Without Trump, he would probably be a pro-science Republican, except there's a bigger audience to be had from saying you're a Democrat even though you keep attacking the left. If you say you're a conservative, you limit your audience to conservatives. He still insists he is a Democrat even though he even attacked the left for criticizing Charles Murray and his friend Sam Harris. He has appeared on the Rubin Report, and defended Dave Rubin from controversy.

Coyne vs the Squad

Coyne still insists he is a liberal, though he loathes "the squad," from Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to Ayanna Pressley, to Rashida Tlaib. It's funny how for so many years he said he was in favor of reforming Islam, but then showed such hatred of prominent progressive Muslims politicians like Ilhan Omar. He appears to have unmasked himself.

Coyne vs Millennials

He really hates Millennials in general and routinely rants against them. (How dare they use "OK Boomer!"). He has easily acquired his share of "old man yells at the cloud" moments (but don't you dare call the retiree a conservative or he'll ban you from his blog).

Regressive left's Antisemitism and Israeli moral superiority over Palestinians

For example, in his view, regressive leftists are best represented by those from the left who support Palestinian rights, or considered Islamophobia to be a racism, or calling out people for stereotyping and generalizing identity groups, or Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) for hypocrisy. Just recently his site posted an article decrying "regressive leftists" take on Gal Gadot "activism".

In the context of these events, he posted that the Israeli Army "has killed Palestinian children in military operations", but he knows that this was just collateral damage, a fluke, the IDF does not kill Palestinian kids deliberately — only the "ignorant" could say such a thing. On the other hand, those well-informed and knowledgeable, like he is, know for a fact that the opposite is true: it's Palestinian children who kill and/or attempt to kill, because, you see, these little monsters so often do get imprisoned by Israel for terrorist acts. In this light, he's defending Gal Gadot from "regressive left" criticism in the following words: "Gadot had no part in this; her crime was solely to be Jewish, to be Israeli, and to be in the IDF." He then compiled a list of examples where Palestinians kids killed Israelis, or Palestinians killing Israeli kids, while the general Palestinian population "relished acts and celebrated murderers". The post is followed by numerous comments, almost in unison agreement with Coyne, but when one poster strayed from the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, pro-Coyen path he — Coyne — decide to plunge himself into debate. On the matter of ethnicities, religions, and nations' propensity for violence and child murder, some commenter who was not actually against Coyne's claims in the article per se simply wanted to point out that he was against blood libel, generalization, and stereotyping, and that he, Jewish himself, won't "stay silent while anybody claims that a particular ethnicity, religion or culture, have a greater propensity for child killing (or any other atrocity) than others", and more clearly that "an individual’s membership of a “race”, ethnicity, culture, nationality, does not give them an inherently greater propensity to commit atrocities", to which Coyne respond that all that is exactly how things are, and why Palestinian Muslims eagerly want to kill Israeli Jews, through developing "murderous instincts" in their children as a result of their culture. There is no doubt on moral superiority of Israeli Jews over Palestinian Muslims in Coyne's mind.

Coyne vs Bill Nye

Coyne is not at all fond of Bill Nye and has several blog posts criticizing him over the years. He feels that Nye deliberately spends most of him time as a "buffoon who will engage in any shenanigans that keep him in the public eye and help him retain the fame he desires-fame accrued as 'The Science Guy'." However Coyne admits that he never watched Nye's show The Science Guy and concedes that he might have been outstanding in teaching science to kids back in the day, before his "comeback" which Coyne has not been a fan of, to say the least. Coyne also criticized Nye for debating with Ken Ham.

Coyne vs RationalWiki

Coyne is not a huge fan of RationalWiki. He says that while this site appears to be mostly rational, it is also tainted with "authoritarian leftism" and has "swung too far in the opposite direction" while trying to counter Conservapedia.

Bibliography

• Coyne, Jerry A.; H. Allen Orr (2004-06-30). Speciation. Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland, Mass. ISBN 978-0-87893-089-0.
• Coyne, Jerry A. (2009-01-22). Why Evolution is True. Viking, New York (USA); Oxford University Press, Oxford (UK). ISBN 978-0-19-923084-6.
• Coyne, Jerry A. (2015-05-19). Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Viking (USA); Penguin (UK). ISBN 978-0670026531.

External links

• Why Evolution Is True (personal blog website)
• Jerry Coyne, Ph.D. (University of Chicago faculty page)
• Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible by Jerry A. Coyne, Viking (2015) ISBN 0670026530.