Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution Is True (2009)

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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 Coyne
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 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
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.

Jerry Coyne
Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

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

Jerry Coyne
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.

Jerry Coyne
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.

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

Jerry Coyne
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.

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

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

Jerry Coyne
It's clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.

Jerry Coyne