Standing O for Jerry Coyne
Ladies and gentlemen, shall we all give a standing ovation to atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne? The Wall Street Journal platformed the University of Chicago emeritus prof today as a champion of free speech and common sense about gender — the existence of ladies and gentlemen as categories jointly exhausting the possibilities with human beings. The platforming comes in the form of an op-ed by Coyne about how he and fellow atheist scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker quit the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation over issues of censorship and woke overreach.
Censored on Gender
He recounts being censored by the group about the gender binary:
The trouble began in November, when the organization published an essay on its website denying the basic biological fact that all animals, including humans, have only two sexes. The FFRF piece, titled “What is a woman?,” concluded by begging the question: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”
I wrote a rebuttal, “Biology is not bigotry,” which FFRF published in late December. But the woke care more about “progressive” ideology than scientific facts, and within a day the FFRF took down my article and issued a statement asserting the publication of my piece was an “error of judgment,” that it “does not reflect our values or principles,” that it had caused “distress,” and that the FFRF stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”
He criticizes “transgender ideology,” saying that it
makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy (tarring of dissenters as “transphobes”), attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics (J.K. Rowling is the best-known example).
The Criticisms Are Valid
But hold the applause a moment as Coyne has left out two relevant points. First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.
In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.
Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution Is True (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”). Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.
Mistakes Were Made
And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from? In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”
Hold on there. In the paradigm of intelligent design, it makes total sense to uphold the concept of there being only two genders, established by biology and not capable of being breached or amended by surgery or other methods. A male will always be a male no matter what medical interventions he seeks out to change that. Being male is his design, reflecting the intention of a purposeful designer.
Nothing Sacred or Ordained
But in the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, there’s nothing sacred or ordained about gender. There couldn’t be, because in the atheist evolutionary view, nothing in the world is sacred or ordained. Trying to amend one’s gender is not a “denial of evolution” but, if anything, an affirmation of it. Evolutionary processes may have resulted in an individual being born with male genitalia, but the “fact” of evolution means there’s nothing to object to if he wishes to change his anatomy in keeping with strong feelings about identity.
And if he now says he’s a woman, well, so he is! I mean, why not? The surgical results may seem a little rough at the moment, but that’s only because medical science hasn’t perfected them yet. After all, the science of organ transplantation has come a long way since its own pioneering days. In explaining the rise of what Coyne calls “transgender ideology,” evolutionism with its denial of design should not be skipped over.
Silencing Science
Coyne is not the only atheist scientist to fail to realize the contradictions in his own advocacy, either for gender realism or for free speech. Physicist Lawrence Krauss is another one. Dr. Krauss wanted to hide from school students in Ohio the fact that Darwinism is the subject of scientific controversy. Instead, evolution should be presented, propagandistically, as an unquestioned fact. What was that about, in Coyne’s words, “proselytiz[ing] children in schools”? Now Krauss is all in for academic free speech, supposedly (“Lawrence Krauss Exposes the Censorship Crisis Gripping Academia”).
Richard Dawkins, as Coyne says, and Colin Wright are two other atheist evolutionary biologists who have argued for the reality of gender and have been subjected to woke outrage for it. But do they recognize that intelligent design, which they reject, supports their view while evolutionism undercuts it? Not that I’m aware.
Of course, I’m not saying you can’t change your mind about big issues. You certainly can, and admitting you were wrong is a mark of character. If Coyne and these others have performed such a public reassessment of their past positions, again, I’ve not heard about it.
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