Pharyngula

Posted by: Alessa Mendes | November 4, 2009 8:56 AM

Wow! Everyone is at this conference. This is great. Thanks so much!

Posted by: The Science Pundit | November 4, 2009 10:05 AM

I saw Greg Paul speak several months ago, and I, like Coyne, agree with his hypothesis. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you like heated debate), some libertarians showed up and dominated the Q&A.

Posted by: CunningLingus | November 4, 2009 10:32 AM

Speaking as a layman, I thought that was an awesome talk by Jerry Coyne, thank you kindly for linking to it. I especially liked the horse toe part, and the finger to creationists, priceless.

Posted by: Wrysmile | November 4, 2009 10:46 AM

First time I've seen Jerry Coyne give a lecture. I liked it so much I made my first comment on here.

Cheers PZ

Posted by: bilbo | November 4, 2009 11:09 AM

'the principle guru to go to on evolutionary genetics in the world...' Wow, that's a lofty attribution. And while I like Coyne's work a lot, I'd probably give that attribution to Jerry's student, H. Allen Orr.

Uh oh. Conundrum alert! Coyne's student, Orr, is a raging faithiest!! He frequently speaks out against new atheism and has called Dawkins an "amateur atheist" and says he and others like him "aren't very good" at promoting atheism.

Looks like the apple can fall very far from the tree. In this case, that's a damn good thing.

Posted by: Cosmic Teapot | November 4, 2009 11:29 AM

I get bored very easily, but that was fascinating.

Posted by: Lynna | November 4, 2009 11:58 AM

Thank you for posting this talk, PZ. Like most people, I am both too busy, and too lazy. If you did not collate some of this material and post in this single source, I would miss it. Over a period of a couple of years of reading Pharyngula I have slowly begun to put talks like Coyne's into context, so that I have a reasonable overview of evolution. You can take credit for that as well.

In Coyne's presentation, I especially liked the biogeography explanation. It was the clearest I've seen. Coyne also did a good job of presenting his main points, following up with just a few examples (with telling details), and then giving us a roundup or summary. Just what a non-scientist like me needs. Thanks, Jerry!

Oh, yeah, and I liked the diatoms.

Posted by: Porco Dio | November 4, 2009 12:49 PM

that lecture was total crap...

i'd rather spend sunday in church singing psalms...

OH WAIT!

Posted by: Steve in Dublin | November 4, 2009 3:38 PM

You know, if I was sitting on the fence regarding evolution (I'm trying really, really hard to put on the other hat, and probably failing miserably), that lecture would swing me over to the side of reason.

Oh wait... would that be because I have critical thinking skills? You could show that lecture to 1000 creationists, and all they'd be doing to a person is putting their fingers in their ears and saying: "La la la la la, I'm *not listening*!".

I think Jerry is correct in positing that the teaching of critical thinking skills is key to winning this battle for our children's minds. But as the woman asked in the Q & A, how are you gonna do that when the kids are brainwashed into accepting the religion that their parents happen to follow from Day One? :-\

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | November 4, 2009 3:53 PM

Orr, is a raging faithiest!

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | November 4, 2009 5:41 PM

Lone dissident opinion:
Like the book "Why Evolution is True", Coyne presents a somewhat incoherent view of the connection between theory and phenomenon. The use the word "true" regarding a theory is misleading and inappropriate. This sets my sphincter to tightening, which is probably a dogmatic reaction, but nonetheless a dogmatic reaction that those steeped in Popperian hypothetico-deductivism likely share. Several points:
1. A theory explains a set of observations, or a phenomenon. If evolution is the fact being explained, it can't be part of the theory that explains it. Initially, Darwin was interested in explaining the diversity of life--that was the phenomenon. Evolution had been used as an explanation for the diversity of life WELL before Darwin, since at least Buffon, but maybe even earlier. Remember that the Bill Buckner of evolutionary biology (LaMarck) was a predecessor of Darwin's. However, the conjecture that organisms change over time to produce diversity needs further explanation. Darwin provided this explanation in the theory of natural selection. At the time, natural selection was a conjecture that explained another conjecture. Since then, evolution itself (not evolutionary theory) has become a fact, because we witness it when we witness alleles change in a population.
2. Evolutionary theory in its modern sense is the bundle of hypotheses that explain the fact of evolution. Natural selection is one of these, but certainly not the only one. Mutation, recombination, drift, patterns of non-random mating, and gene flow contribute to changes in allele frequency in populations. Each of these hypotheses can be represented mathematically, and should be interpreted as contributing rather than competing causes of evolutionary change. However, these mechanisms are in every sense of the word hypothetical and are not subject to verification...they can't be considered "true" unless you adopt a metaphysical approach that is different from the scientific method.
3. Natural selection by itself is therefore not sufficient to explain evolution, but no-one really has ever pretended it was, except when extolling the insight of Darwin (which I agree was vast)or before 1930. The field of frequentist statistics had to be invented to marry Darwinian natural selection to these other mechanisms in a way that was coherent. Too little credit is given to the architects of this union: primarily Fisher, Wright, and Haldane (among others).
4. There is no reason to say that the vast majority of evolutionary change occurs as a result of natural selection. In fact, the neutral model of maintenence of genetic variation seems to be supported most often in empirical studies. What Coyne and Dawkins and others probably should say is that the majority of evolution that is interesting occurs as a result of natural selection. As an ethologist, Dawkins is following a paradigm of his field, but nonetheless, most change involves genes associated with traits that are not behavioral. Drift is often a better null hypothesis than selection because it is easier to falsify.
5. Coyne's area of expertise is speciation, which is also a fact explained by evolutionary theory. The reason that I have a burr up my ass on Coyne's take on speciation is that Coyne downplays all but the most boring form of speciation, which is allopatric. However, on this topic, I suppose Coyne could rip the burr out of my current and only deep rift and stick it in the new one that he made for me.
6. The last chapter of Coyne's book is wonderfully insightful. This chapter alone makes the book worth buying.

Got that off my chest.

Posted by: sc0tt | November 5, 2009 1:42 PM

That was a good bit more entertaining than I was expecting. I liked the organization, the energy, and the material. Most of the slides sucked though - and the backwards flag thing was distracting.

Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline. | November 27, 2009 3:58 PM

Finally got around to listening to this (at the expense of Mozart's Requiem).

I liked how he spend the first couple minutes hammering home the fact that anyone rejecting the germ theory of disease is a blithering idiot. I hope Orac appreciated it.