#10 — Faith vs. Fact

Today I'll be speaking with Jerry Coyne. Jerry is a biologist at the University of Chicago, and he's written over a hundred scientific papers and several books, the most recent of which is faith versus fact, why science and religion are incompatible, and I highly recommend that you pick it up. Jerry is one of the more frequent and articulate commentators on the clash between scientific and religious ways of thinking, and he's been a colleague and comrade and friend in this area for several years. I should probably apologize for the audio here. We did this interview remotely, and the recording of Jerry's voice especially leaves something to be desired, but you can hear the clarity of his thinking nonetheless. So without further ado, I bring you Jerry Coyne. Hey, Jerry. How you doing?

Fine. Yourself?

I'm good. I'm good. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this. You are the first proper interview on my podcast. Yeah. Which makes me happy.

I'm honored.

Nice. Well, I was trying to remember where we met. Was that in Mexico at the De la C's conference?

Yeah, that's the first time I met you. It might have been the first time I met Dan, and it was certainly the first time I met. Yeah, last time as well.

That was a good conference. It was a surprisingly well organized one.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I had to miss the big debate with you guys. That was supposed to be nice, but had to get back to catch my flight.

If you missed the debate, you missed Nassim Taleb's performance, where he gave voice to one of the most bizarre eruptions of anti science gibberish I can ever recall hearing. That's on YouTube. For any interested person to listen to.

Realize that was on YouTube, I'll have to go back and look at it.

It was amazing. He insinuated himself into this debate that was already too crowded with, like, three or four people on each side, and he insisted that he had something of compelling interest to all of humanity to say. And then he got up there and just laid down a word salad of.

A sort that, well, I guess you're used to word salads and he's kind of debates.

I also remember from that conference, this is the first time I witnessed just how different a human organism Christopher Hitchens was than myself. I don't know if you recall, but it was like a three hour drive to Mexico City from where the conference was because the traffic was so brutal at every hour of the night. And he had to go to DC the next day. So he was flying in the morning. He had like a 06:00 a.m. Flight from Mexico City. And he had an event that night in DC. And I met him at the bar at midnight where he was having a scotch and a club sandwich. And he was not planning to sleep. He was just going to get in the car, get on the plane, go to DC and perform again that night.

He had amazing stamina, that guy, especially given the way he abused his body. I'm glad he got to meet him once before he.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to get into the topic of your new book, but just a couple of questions about how you got in a position to write it. First, how did you get into science, and what is your current focus in biology?

Well, getting into science, people have asked me that, and that's not clear. If I were to name something, I suppose I'd say it was my parents, because my dad was an animal lover. So from the very first I can remember, he was always dragging us to zoos and things. And then when I was a kid, they bought me all kinds of science books, the golden Book of geology, the Golden Book of Dinosaurs, that whole series. And I didn't really choose science as, I guess, a profession until I went to college. And I took an introductory biology course that was taught by an evolutionary biologist, guy named Jack Brooks at William and Mary. He was extremely charismatic, and that's all it takes, basically, for the tipping point. From that point on, I was hooked on evolution and studied it throughout college and then went to graduate school. So that's how I became a scientist. My area of research has been pretty much through my career, with a few digressions, the origin of species, that is, how one lineage can branch into two or more lineages. What are the genetic changes that accompany the origin of species that make these different lineages reproductively separated from one another? And are there any generalities or regularities in this process that we can study and which genes are involved in that process. So I was basically taking up the question that Darwin started with his book, the Origin of Species, which he, of course, neglected to answer. He didn't say anything about the origin of species. He talked about how a single species would evolve. And that question lay pretty much fallow until about the 1930s and then became fallow again. And I was interested in it, so I started working on it when I went to graduate school.

And you're working in Drosophila or what animals?

Yeah, and fruit flies. If you want to study the gens of how species form jags defined in a hard way, then that means doing crosses, not just sequencing dna, which we couldn't do anyway when I started it. So if you want to, for example, find out where and how many genes distinguish two closely related species for a character like the sperm motility or behavioral isolation, mating discrimination, or any of their traits, like how they look different or anything, there's no way around that, even in these days of dna sequencing, except to cross them. Unfortunately, in fruit flies, many closely related species can be crossed under lab conditions, and they have a generation time of about ten days to two weeks. So you can go through 30 generations of genetic manipulations in a year, which makes them ideal for this kind of study. Of course, you can't do that with any other organism except maybe flatworms or something, but at least for studying flies, I've gotten a deal out of that system.

Yeah. And so now you also spend a lot of time policing the boundary of science and non science, and you've been a very vocal critic of religious dogmatism and a real ally of mine on that front. And you have a blog, why evolution is true, that you do most of that writing on, and now you have a couple of books. The first, why evolution is true, where you go into the details of answering that question and your new one, faith versus fact, why science and religion are incompatible, deals with the collision between science and religion very directly and very usefully. It's a book I highly recommend people read. What percentage of your time now are you allocating toward doing primary science, and what percent is this? More public communication of science, defense of science against unreason?

Well, I'm sort of at the tail end of my scientific career. I turned 65 and I'm actually going to retire within a year. So the amount of new research I'm doing is zero. But I'm cleaning up what I have done, which means writing the final papers that I got on my last grants and everything. And I've been half time for about a year and a half. So right now I'm seguing from science into more public kind of journalism, writing, et cetera. So right now I probably spent about 80% of my time doing the latter and 20% of it doing straight science, because that just consists of writing up the research that I haven't finished writing up yet.

Right. Well, the thing you focus on in the new book is this phenomenon that we've come to call accommodationism. Can you explain what that is? Did you coin this word? Where did this word come from?

Coin is a good verb for that. I think I did, but I'm not sure. It's one of those words that I use a lot and I think people got from me, but I'm not sure I'm the originator of it. So since I don't know that, I'm not going to claim credit for that neologism, but it is a good one and people have picked it up in terms of what it means. It's a view that is held by both believers, agnostics and atheists themselves sometimes that there is no inherent conflict or any kind of conflict between science and religion. There are various ways that you can couch that compatibility thing, but that's basically the view that there is no conflict between the two areas.

And was the first clear and clearly wrongheaded expression of this, Stephen J. Gould's non overlapping magisteria. Where do we get this notion of fundamental compatibility?

Yeah, actually he's the guy that made it famous. But I think I have actually the book here. I can find the first expression of it in 1925 by Alfred North Whitehead. I just have a quote from him here that says that, remember the widely different aspects of events which are dealt with in science and religion respectively. Science is concerned with the general conditions which observe to regulate physical