I adore Jerry Coyne, the atheist evolutionist and University of Chicago emeritus biology professor. At Why Evolution Is True, he goes after Granville Sewell for a post here, “Jerry Coyne Asks a Good Question.” In his theologian mode, Coyne demands to know why God doesn’t do “ONE BIG MIRACLE, of the type I describe in Faith Versus Fact (p. 119) — a miracle that was taped and documented worldwide.” To be honest I didn’t fully read Coyne’s latest, but I noticed his claim, which he’s made repeatedly in the past, that intelligent design proponents, especially at Evolution News, write about him because he is clickbait.
What’s that? Clickbait is defined as “a sensationalized headline or piece of text on the Internet designed to entice people to follow a link to an article on another web page.” Coyne: “I swear that they keep banging on about me because I’ll bring them clicks!” In fact, he won’t include a link to Professor Sewell’s post but instead archives it elsewhere “so the DI [Discovery Institute] doesn’t get clicks.”
Sorry to disappoint, but if I wanted to get “clicks” I think I would go for “Meghan Markle Asks a Good Question” or “Brad Pitt Asks a Good Question,” not Jerry Coyne. I might try to put something about a wardrobe malfunction in there. Or better yet, “HORROR: Man high on zombie drug saws off own leg…,” a selection more or less at random from today’s Drudge Report. “Jerry Coyne Asks a Good Question” is almost the exact antithesis of clickbait.
Darwinists’ Collective “Id”
Why talk about him, then? Oh, as our colleague Dr. Michael Egnor has observed in the past, it’s simply because Coyne and a few other evolutionists — Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, a couple others — are the collective “Id” of the Darwinist community. They don’t bother to dissemble about the implications of their theory. You don’t have to tease out the deeper significance of anything they say. It’s displayed nakedly there before you. That’s why we love them.
Most evolutionists are far savvier in how they seek to persuade the public. When you go around praising the science of eugenics because it “works,” as Dawkins did with a tweet the other day (even as he “deplored” it as a policy), that worried others on his side, resulting in a great blowback directed at Dawkins. That’s an example of what I mean. If Coyne and Dawkins were cleverer about concealing what their way of thinking really would mean if it were widely embraced, we’d cover them a lot less.
On the Dawkins and eugenics theme, Coyne, meanwhile, headlines, “Discovery Institute makes hay of Dawkins tweet, and a geneticist mistakenly says that artificial selection won’t work in humans.” I swear he’s trying to get clicks with us!
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