Education Quote by Jerry A. Coyne

““There is an increasing (and disturbing) tendency of psychologists, biologists, and philosophers to Darwinize every aspect of human behavior, turning its study into a scientific parlor game. But imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories. Stephen Jay Gould satirized them as ‘Just-So Stories,’ after Kipling’s eponymous book that gave delightful but fanciful explanations for various traits of animals (‘How the Leopard Got His Spots,’ and so on).””

Jerry A. Coyne

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More by Jerry A. Coyne

In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding…

Jerry A. Coyne

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

Jerry A. Coyne

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“Many people require more than just evidence before they’ll accept evolution. To these folks, evolution raises such profound questions of purpose, morality, and meaning that they just can’t accept it no matter how much evidence they see. It’s not that we evolved from apes that bothers them so much; it’s [[the emotional consequences of facing that fact.]] And unless we…

Jerry A. Coyne

“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…

Jerry A. Coyne

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

Jerry A. Coyne

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

Jerry A. Coyne

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“In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as…

Jerry A. Coyne

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

Jerry A. Coyne

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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…

Jerry A. Coyne

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“Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years…

Jerry A. Coyne

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Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible.…

Jerry A. Coyne

“IDers argue that such traits, involving many parts that must cooperate for that trait to function at all, defy Darwinian explanation. Therefore, by default, they must have been designed by a supernatural agent. This is commonly called the "God of the gaps" argument, and it is an argument from ignorance. What it really says is that if we don't understand…

Jerry A. Coyne

Explore all 48 Jerry A. Coyne quotes

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I put myself in the student's place and remember the frustrations, doubts, determination, and desires I felt when I was going through the initial…

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For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow…

Alfred North Whitehead

Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that…

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There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very…

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“What's the best thing about being in college? Good teachers. They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even…

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“If one has not a head of steel it will burst; if he has not within it a brain of liquid quicksilver, he will not obtain in it a looking-glass; if he has not a skin of tin he will not be able to endure the toil of education; if he has not leaden posteriors he will not be able…

Ioannes Amos Commenius

“let us not teach / what we have learned badly / and not profited by”

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle

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“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really…

Erica Jong