Jerry Coyne: Why Evolution is True

[Music] welcome to free thoughts I'm Dan Barker I'm co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation which produces this show and I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor and today we have a very special guest with us here in the front the a theist studio at freethought Hall in Madison Wisconsin professor Jerry Coyne Jerry welcome to free thoughts well thanks for having me it's great to be here now your first book is called why evolution is true which is very plain spoken title why well it expresses much to sink Lee the thesis of the book which is the evidence for evolution which I've been teaching for 30 years and I couldn't think of a taro I mean it's only four words I couldn't think of a title that would convey the book in a more direct and way I have to say I got some pushback from people I think my publishers were a little bit worried about that because you know America is an evolution resistant country and that's an in-your-face title so what I fought for it and I think it's a good title and ultimately they used it so what do you think they wanted the title to be know if we actually discussed alternative titles I can't really think of one Richards is called the his book on the evidence Richard Dawkins the evidence revolution is called the greatest show on earth but then he has a subtitle and my editor Wendy Wolfe who's a great editor at Viking penguin she's resistant to subtitles so I didn't want to have one for this book so that well I think it's a great title yeah and is it the kind of title where you you're just making the case to the American public anybody can pick this book up and understand why evolution is true yeah you don't really need a biology background all you need is intellectual curiosity the audience were people who already accepted evolution but didn't know the evidence for it then you know people tend to defer to experts but it's nice especially given the fact that only one in five Americans accepts naturalistic evolution that everybody who accepts it knows what is true but one in five I thought yeah about 50% of Americans present how you define accepting evolution the latest Gallup poll shows that 40% of Americans are young earth creationists so they just accept the biblical story in Genesis another 30 odd percent are theistic evolutionists so let's say that evolution happened but God had a hand in it I don't consider them real evolutionists they span the whole gamut from people who believe in sporadic divine intervention and evolution to people who just say well God created the universe and evolution was the byproduct of that you know but if you put God in it that it's not naturalistic and then the people who accept evolution who answer the question that humans evolved from other creatures in God had no hand in the process is 19% one in five and that's the way we teach it in the classroom so that's almost like as many free thinkers there are in the country where we're almost 1 in 4 yeah yeah kind of dismayed yeah it's distressing and it explains you know the explanation for that our resistance as I talked to you earlier the fact that we're one of the most religious in fact the most religious first world country and there's a definite negative correlation between how religious you are in a country and how much evolution you accept so aren't we tied something with a country like Turkey for acceptance of evolution turkey is the only so-called first world country that's lower I don't know who determines where the country's first world or not but turkeys in that class and that's the only one that's lower than we are but they're also very religious because they're a Muslim country it also holds by the way for US states so if you look at the religiosity of all 50 states and plot acceptance of evolution the more religious states which of course are in the south are the ones that are most resistance evolution so this negative correlation holds for countries as well as states so why is evolution true because the evidence you know that's why any scientific theory we can discuss where the theory means if you want but there's so much evidence in favor of evolution the fossil record by geography embryology each one of these has a chapter in the book supporting it vestigial organs etc there's so much evidence and it's not just evidences confluent hammered it so it also is the same thing evidences for welfare natural selection and there is no evidence against evolution which is important because there could be evidence against evolution but you just use the word theory yes some viewers might think aha you don't think it's actually true you're saying it's a theory yeah that's an old canard a really old canard and inedible canard that was promulgated by Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he denied evolution by saying well it's only a theory and some scientists that and only a theory means to the average person it's just a speculation or wild guess but in science a theory is a an explanatory scheme that accounts for a lot of data and other theories are the germ theory of disease that things like smallpox and pneumonia and AIDS are caused by microorganisms infectious microorganisms that's the theory it's called the germ theory it still is so you wouldn't say the germ theory of disease means there's no such thing as germs yeah I mean I use the word theory after use that if you try to impugn evolution by saying it's only a theory but at the same time you're impugning the germ theory of disease and the atomic theory which claims that elements are made up of chemically indivisible bits of matter called atoms that retain those chemical products eery there's no such thing as music yeah so you know there's this misunderstanding in the public of what a serious and to say the theory of evolution means that's a guess or speculation it's just wrong and the data in this book is the evidence that supports the theory so theory can be a theory and it can be a true theory and evolution happens to be one of those Jerry what do you see as the harm of all of this ignorance in the United States are this resistance to acceptance of evolution well it's not as dire as accepting climate change because you know if you don't accept evolution it's not going to bring on the end of the world let's but it denies people the wonder of biology in a way studying evolution is like studying Fine Arts in that it allows us a greater appreciation and an understanding of our universe but it happens to be true and you can't say a painting is true or not true either moves or doesn't but evolution you can say it's true and by understanding evolution we understand a lot about where we came from to science evolution is important because accept thing that opens up whole new areas of research that could not be answered before for example if you see a cardinal and the male is very bright red and the females is drab Brown if your evolutionary biologist you can ask well why is that why is always the male the brighter bird and then Darwin added an answer to that sexual selection based on evolution if you have a religious theory then the only answer you can have is well that's the way God wanted it that's the way things are yeah and God wanted the male birds to be brighter than their female Brazilian you have to ask well why did God wanted that way and theologians would just say you know we don't understand so it opens up whole new areas of research and understanding I can't say that the study of evolution has considerably benefited humanity materially but it's certainly benefited us mentally and in a scholarly way and if I can use that word spiritually and also what about things like stem cell research and all of the the scientific progress that we need to make aren't we hamstrung if our country is sort of in the dark ages when it comes to well in some ways we are not necessarily from stem cell theory but for other areas for example people will now use evolutionary algorithms when they develop new micro organisms or try to figure out ways to build computers they will use natural selection algorithms which they wouldn't be doing and when they predict the flu vaccine for next year they will use considerations of evolution the reason why microbes become resistant to antivirals and antibiotics is that selection of course those bugs that are resistant to the ones that survive and so doctors have to be aware of that and that's one reason why you have to take all your antibiotics even though you feel better so there are medical implications of evolution well and then in agriculture of pesticides and you know resistant and having to be changed all the time yeah let's see the the people have been doing selective breeding before long before we learned about evolution so one thing you could you could realize is that something's going to become resistant to whatever you try to kill it with now we didn't understand why until Darwin came along but that particular phenomenon is not something that depends on natural selection but the way to combat it the particular machination is used to fight herbicide resistance or things like that depend on evolutionary considerations but I don't want to leave readers with the idea that evolution is something that we really is so important in the human material welfare and health that you know it's vital to understand for that reason the best reasons to wonder study evolution ever because it tells us the true story of our origins how we're related to everything else and it just adds a them I hate the word spiritual but you know in terms of it before nature it adds a certain amount of when you see a woodpecker and realize that every feature on that web pecker the fact that you know it has eyelashes to keep the wind ships from flying into its eyes or it has a highly padded skull with things that each one of those is a product of them blind a materialistic naturalistic process that adds a lot of wonder to your appreciation of a nature so you of course are an ardent atheist and don't you think most scientists are non-religious for the most part yeah I'd say most scientists are non-believers above a certain level I think for the average scientist in America it's about 40 to 60 percent or atheist of course that's a lot higher than that populace as a whole if you look at scientists at elite universities which are defined by the sociologist he did study University of Chicago is one places like Harvard and Princeton where you have to do research about 65% of them are atheists and then as you go higher up the ladder of professional accomplishment the more atheistic you get so in the National Academy of Science which is the most August body of elected scientists in America 97% of them that's like the complete reversal of the poet Gustavo and I've often asked myself well why is this is it that doing science turns you in an atheist or is it that atheists are differentially attracted to studying science and I think it's a mixture of both so you also then went on to write faith versus fact and why science and religion are incompatible well that book grew out of the first one because I have a naive hope when I wrote this that I could convert all of America to accepting evolution I mean at that time I didn't realize that Americans are resistant to accepting evolution because their religious and and most people are impervious to the facts when it comes to changing their minds so you know the book did have an effect I got lots of letters from people say VI now I accept evolution and by the way I've also given up religion as well Richard Dawkins has gotten thousands of these letters so that that is heartening but I still was puzzled as to what it was about religion that made people so resistant to evolution why couldn't they just accept evolution have their beliefs as well so I started reading theology and that was the death knell for my ex couple years I mean theology is like you know jumping into the La Brea Tar Pits you never can extricate yourself from it and the more you struggle the more Mar you go and they all disagree with each other ya know genes don't even talk the same language some yeah in fact when you and Annie Laurie we're on Oprah show I notice that I've been getting lower made this point that all the different Christian sects believe different things you know yeah so and of course there's thousands of Christian sects and thousands of religions and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see this and not only that but that religion depends on factual assertions that's sort of the thesis of my book that they're in conflict because in order to really believe as a Christian or a Jew or as a Muslim you have to accept certain facts about the world to be true like for example the Quran was dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel or that Jesus was crucified and resurrected and we have to go through him to get to the Father and those are all factual assertions and that there's an afterlife and that there's a god and so insofar as science as religious people make fat claims that buttress their beliefs then that puts them in contradiction with science insofar as those fat claims are wrong but you go so far as to say that faith in fact are incompatible yes they don't overlap at all yeah well of course I mean you know the way you ascertain fact is through basically the scientific method or a version of it use empirical logic he's raising these testability you use direct observations of nature whereas faith requires none of that it just requires you to intuit something or learn something from your priest or read a holy scripture and those are two completely different ways of finding out what's true in fact faith is no way of finding out that's true as you said when you recognize that each religion makes different truth claims so the incompatibility of wives on the methods that these two areas used to make their fact claims and in the different results they get when they apply these methods because religion comes up with no facts and science comes up with facts that continually advance so what about these very intelligent very successful very accomplished scientists who still have faith in God how to you wouldn't they say it's compatible you know they do and I'm one of them use the Steve Julian paradigm no my non-overlapping magisteria which is that religion is the purview of meaning morals and values whereas science is there to adjudicate the truths about nature and these two completely different areas you know meaning morals of values have nothing to do with science well they do insofar as science can inform you as to whether your values are correct sometimes or not but the people that are objected to Gould hypothesis which by the way is the most common way that people rationalize compatible is making science and religion compatible the people who objected most strongly to that are the oceans we scientists could care less with their you know science whether Gould says this I mean we do our business atheistic alee we don't care about what feelings do by and large but the theologians were upset by what Gould said because they're upset because Gould said that religion makes no fact claims it's about meeting moral values and in the book I have a whole several pages because they had to prove this of statements by theologians well-known theologians and science scholars that say that religion is undergirded by claims of fact and of course Stephen Jay Gould was an atheist it was yeah got involved in he was testifying in one of those Supreme Court cases over evolution yeah obviously affirm evolutionist day yeah and I always wondered why he wrote this book my conclusion is that he wanted to be wild wieck's because in America the way to be well liked is to say that science and religion are comparable but aren't we learning through science that many of our traits are evolved traits even empathy and you know virtues like that can there's an evolutionary explanation for some of these some of them yeah so though there's a huge cultural overlay I mean humans show a much greater degree of empathy then for example rats do not only there but we show behaviors that can't be explained by natural selection like a volunteer firefighter risking his or her life to save somebody is an act of pure altruism which you never see in the animal kingdom there's no such thing as that kind of altruism in any other species where you sacrifice your own reproductive welfare to help somebody who's not related to you at all and that's people that's got to come from culture it's an extension of the kind of empathy we may have evolved but it's not the same thing so do you think maybe gold was trying to say hey you people who believe in God you can go ahead and believe and you can also accept the fact of evolution because they don't conflict with each other so evolutionist can be valuable to you even as a believer yeah I mean you could construe that as God's way of getting people to accept evolution but I don't think we'll really believe that I mean go with an atheist okay so but in that book it doesn't say anything in fact he is sort of invidious because he claims that the only purview for me any morals and values is religion but the only look is for where you can find meaning morals and values is out of religion and I called them out on that and he said well let's just call it religion if you're dealing he just became tautological so well I mean because you could extrapolate from that that atheists are amoral yeah that's one of the biggest myths that we face that somehow morality does come from religion therefore if you don't believe in a god you're not a moral person yeah that's a common misconception I noticed you had to deal with that in the Oprah show too and that woman go up in the audience and said you know what reason you have to be good if you don't believe in God when you just put her down but we know that that is wrong because in a fish the countries like Scandinavia and Denmark and Sweden they're perfectly moral if not more moral than we are in America because if your idea of morality is it just comes from on high and you can't question it that could be supremely immoral yeah I mean your morality should be grounded in reality and how you treat people consequences absolutely so when did you become an atheist yeah as I was thrown down on the previous show it happened within a span of five minutes and I think it was in 1966 or 67 was when the Beatles released their search and pepper album I remember this moment as if it was yesterday I was sitting on the couch of my parents house in Virginia listening to the album for the first time and for some reason I mean there's nothing a theistic on that album although the Beatles didn't believe in God I don't think but all of a sudden listening to the music got my brain working was a physics I know free will and it it convinced me that everything I had ever been taught about God was wrong that I had been lied to and conned although I had a secular Jewish upbringing which is barely distinguishable from an atheistic out ring but I suddenly realized that you know there was no evidence for anything religious and I just got really upset for a couple minutes I started sweating I member caking I remember thinking oh my god I'm not going to be immortal when I die that's it really and then within a few minutes I came to terms with it and I've been an atheist ever since that's a very unusual deconversion story Jerry since you've retired you are traveling around the world you already were a world traveler mm-hmm I think this partially stems from my atheism the fact that this is the only world we have and you have to make the most of it and I realized that what gives me pleasure its so-called meaning in my life is to see the vast panoply of cultures and peoples in this planet and there's so many to see you'll never see them all and since I spent the first thirty five years of my career buried in the lab although I took occasional trips now is my chance to actually do that so you know traveling is the way I will accomplish that because this is the only world we have we may as well yeah go ahead space I would do that too but I don't have the money being human to take one of those short excursions so well as ffs billboard says enjoy life now there is no afterlife yeah that's so true but nobody believes that I've talked to psychologists that tell me that everybody secretly thinks they're the one exception for more chocolate and if you dwell on mortality then you become lugubrious and stuff so you can't really you want to find a way to live in which you know you're gonna die but not dwell on that instead take pleasure from the limited amount most of your life your professional life studying the fruit flies and they have very short generation well just a couple of weeks is it well their lifespan could be about three weeks to a life but to go from one generation to the next can be like ten days to two weeks so you're seeing these living creatures live and die their whole yes and compared to the human life we're gonna you know what do we have 70 80 90 years yeah and well I'm gonna live to 108 but still you can see how fragile and how that cyclic keeps going around all the great people Darwin and Einstein and Newton and I'll they live their lives in they're gone and now it's our turn we may enjoy our turn then first effect is that humans are the only animals that are aware that they're gonna die and somehow I wish that we were like cats and dogs and that we didn't know we were gonna die and then we could just live our lives blithely we wouldn't have these worries about mortality and you know it would happen someday but we wouldn't know so well speaking of grim topics and with the new administration with the cabinet packed with creationists and fundamentalists who are running our agenda here what's your opinion about that well like all good liberals I cannot stand Trump or his cabinet selections I can't think really of a single good person that he's appointed to his cabinet and when he's just active for people that are just determined to dismantle their own departments well there's a definite anti science Jancy science agenda that's where the science March originated unfortunately I don't think it's that much from effect nor could it given the people that are in power that it was just resistant this I'm trying to take the long view about this the Steve Pinker view that the general trend is up the people are gonna recognize that science and reason is the way to make progress and let this Trump thing it's just a temporary glitch I'm after all I've lived through Nixon I lived through Reagan and then we had Barack Obama and during and over their whole period if you look at the data that Pinker reduced to sent his new book things have been improving what but what about global warming what about climate change which does seem to be quite a threat yeah it is and again I just almost fell near the end of enlightenment now Steve's book which I highly recommend and he has a long chapter on climate change he sees it as a serious problem he doesn't off by any means as you don't know we're in danger of killing off our whole planet people won't take that seriously until Miami starts going underwater I'm afraid but that would be too late so we have to do something now but our country is also an outlier on climate change of course we weren't for a while but that's also the anti science religious blindness isn't it yeah although most Americans accept human-generated climate change the administration doesn't withdrew from the Paris Accords but in the end I think it's the people is gonna recognize that I still think that the next administration is going to be democratic maybe that's foolish but you know Obama though I mean you know he did some stuff but he needed to take this climate change more seriously I don't think people realized what we're facing that a three degree rise in average temperature over the next you know a couple of centuries is going to wreak havoc not just with humans cities and stuff but with species of animals so we'll all be in heaven in this earth it's just a stepping stool won't matter my little saying is the only afterlife that we should be concerned about is leaving our descendants a secure and pleasant future and descendants I don't just mean children human children yeah the planet the other animals wildlife and so it is a real concern if you think there's another life that we go on to we don't it devalues this life that's true in effects Congress people have said explicitly that they're not that concerned about this because you know if God will God will find a way to save the planet if he wants to save it and this sort of religious mindset that everything will be okay because God wants it to be okay is hampering our well that's right you know that if there are human problems we don't really have to worry about it God will provide yeah this is these days of prayer and praying about drought and praying for snow even in Utah this is all coming from that same religion has always been a way to keep people from having to improve their own mod I mean the slaves were preached every Sunday about how they're gonna have a better life for the next life if to keep them down on the plantation well you know we're being till the same thing by eventual Christians that it doesn't matter much because the next rule is going to be a better one well I think there is a source of hope here if people would read your books if people would read dr. Jerry coins books why evolution is true in faith versus fact that would make a difference I think so we really appreciate the fact that you wrote those books well I would hope it make a difference I'm not so sure I would add of those steeped you know Steve Pinker's two books of better angels of our nature and enlightenment now I don't know if you've had him on this show and Steven Pinker is the honorary president yeah he is very important and I did the very first interview with Steve about his new book which aired on this show oh really yeah yeah he had to keep quiet about it before it came out because he didn't want to give people too much away but he's making a very good case that first of all things are getting better but second of all insofar as we still have problems the way to address them as tease reason humanism optimism towards project progress and not to use superstition so there's a current of religion dissing which goes through his book but it's not overt Steve's never been a in-your-face atheist he's a quiet yes but it's it's the Enlightenment and have helping to keep the Enlightenment candles burning brightly and you have to so thank you very much thank you for your work [Music]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 12,615

Keywords: why evolution is true by jerry coyne, Evolution, why evolution is true, is evolution true, evolution and atheism, jerry coyne youtube, jerry a coyne, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism, Freethought Matters

Id: pVv-5k4dlg0

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018