Jerry A. Coyne Quotes

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

Jerry A. Coyne

#2. It is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term "person of faith" as a compliment.

Jerry A. Coyne

#3. I argue that in a world where people must support their opinions with evidence and reason rather than faith, we would experience less conflict over issues like assisted suicide, gay rights, birth control, and sexual morality.

Jerry A. Coyne

#4. If nearly two-thirds of Americans will accept a scientific fact only if it's not in clear conflict with their faith, then their worldview

Jerry A. Coyne

#5. Supernatural explanations always mean the end of inquiry: that's the way God wants it, end of story. Science, on the other hand, is never satisfied: our studies of the universe will continue until humans go extinct.

Jerry A. Coyne

#6. 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.

Jerry A. Coyne

#7. Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.

Jerry A. Coyne

#8. 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. Ironically,

Jerry A. Coyne

#9. My main thesis is narrower and, I think, more defensible: understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don't, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith.

Jerry A. Coyne

#10. Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible - though very unlikely - that our whole world is controlled by elves.

Jerry A. Coyne

#11. Take the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), a single species that comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and temperaments. Every single one, purebred or mutt, descends from a single ancestral species - most likely the Eurasian gray wolf - that humans began to select about ten thousand years ago.

Jerry A. Coyne

#12. Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it.

Jerry A. Coyne

#13. Come on, readers, give me one example of a question that religion has answered to everyone's satisfaction one example of a "truth" found in religion's quest for truth.

Jerry A. Coyne

#14. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.

Jerry A. Coyne

#15. It's time for students to learn that Life is Triggering. Once they leave college, they'll be constantly exposed to views that challenge or offend them. There are a lot of jerks out there, and no matter what your politics are, a lot of people will have the opposite view.

Jerry A. Coyne

#16. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Jerry A. Coyne

#17. Each species is a masterpiece of evolution that humanity could not possibly duplicate even if we somehow accomplish the creation of new organisms by genetic engineering. - E. O. Wilson

Jerry A. Coyne

#18. These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

Jerry A. Coyne

#19. [W]hen one has a religious experience, what is 'true' is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science.

Jerry A. Coyne

#20. Voltaire noted in 1763: The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.

Jerry A. Coyne

#21. The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God's or Jesus's commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources.

Jerry A. Coyne

#22. Theology is a subject without an object. Theologians don't study God - they study what other theologians have said. The claims

Jerry A. Coyne

#23. We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured how we came to be.

Jerry A. Coyne

#24. Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn't happen? That's not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty.

Jerry A. Coyne

#25. Selection is both revolutionary and disturbing for the same reason: it explains apparent design in nature by a purely materialistic process that doesn't require creation or guidance by supernatural forces.

Jerry A. Coyne

#26. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance "God".

Jerry A. Coyne

#27. If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period.

Jerry A. Coyne

#28. Some believers are fundamentalists about everything, but every believer is a fundamentalist about something.

Jerry A. Coyne

#29. Faith may be a gift in religion, but in science it's poison, for faith is no way to find truth.

Jerry A. Coyne

#30. 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.

Jerry A. Coyne

#31. If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.

Jerry A. Coyne

#32. 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.

Jerry A. Coyne

#33. My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe.

Jerry A. Coyne

#34. The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

Jerry A. Coyne

#35. We don't have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!

Jerry A. Coyne

#36. What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.

Jerry A. Coyne

#37. If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing.

Jerry A. Coyne

#38. In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.

Jerry A. Coyne

#39. In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding "truth": dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.

Jerry A. Coyne

#40. Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord "respect" to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?

Jerry A. Coyne

#41. Religion and science could be considered "mutually tolerant," in that some scientists and believers tolerate each other's existence, and could even be seen as "capable

Jerry A. Coyne

#42. Religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.

Jerry A. Coyne

#43. If you can't think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn't scientific.

Jerry A. Coyne

#44. Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn't produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what is has to work with.

Jerry A. Coyne

#45. It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can't reconcile for yourself.

Jerry A. Coyne

#46. We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.

Jerry A. Coyne

#47. or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." He did not mean, of course, that religion turns all good people bad, but merely some of them,

Jerry A. Coyne

#48. No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. - Robert Green Ingersoll

Jerry A. Coyne

#49. Religion and science are engaged in a kind of war: a war for understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true.

Jerry A. Coyne

#50. Since many traits can affect an individual's adaptation to it's environment (it's "fitness") natural selection can over eons sculpt an animal or plant into something that looks designed

Jerry A. Coyne

#51. It is clear, then, that whatever genetic heritage we have, it is not a straitjacket that traps us forever in the "beastly" ways of our forebears. Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

Jerry A. Coyne