Coyne Quotes & Sayings

Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length. That is, if you are about to go to bed and you're reading a terrific novel and the scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you'll tell yourself that you'll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after you finish one of these bites, you won't be able to help yourself reading another. If the Story is extremely well told, you'll just keep eating the potato chip scenes all through the night. — Shawn 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 something that looks designed — Jerry A. Coyne

In 186 species showing that a huge variety of male traits are correlated with mating success, and the vast majority of these tests involve female choice. There is simply no doubt that female choice has driven the evolution of many sexual dimorphisms. Darwin was right after all. So far we've neglected two important questions: Why do females get to do the choosing while males must woo or fight for them? And why do females choose at all? To answer these questions we must first understand why organisms bother to have sex. — Jerry A. Coyne

Keeping perspective and being happy and being energetic and being creative - that's all tied to being healthy. — Wayne Coyne

If nearly two-thirds of Americans will accept a scientific fact only if it's not in clear conflict with their faith, then their worldview — Jerry A. Coyne

I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything. — Wayne Coyne

I know that is absolutely true for people when they are young - you don't want to be alive if the things that you love in your life aren't there. — Wayne Coyne

Anything they have to advertise is something you don't need. — Kelly Coyne

With out art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed. — Wayne Coyne

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight. — Jerry A. Coyne

Christianity has always had sort of an ability to absorb the developments in science. But, it's always done it very slowly. — George Coyne

There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs. — Wayne Coyne

Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds. Surprisingly, these exemptions were required by the U.S. government in 1974 as a condition for states to receive federal aid for child protection. — Jerry A. Coyne

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It's a given that it's nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don't do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare. — Jerry A. Coyne

You want the world to be what you want it to be, and sometimes the world doesn't want that. — Wayne Coyne

Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality. — Jerry A. Coyne

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 adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. — Jerry A. Coyne

I want to know what you're thinking, you want to know what I'm thinking. But we're alone. In our own minds. We're trapped in this sort of isolation. — Wayne Coyne

It is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term "person of faith" as a compliment. — Jerry A. Coyne

Love is larger than life. — Wayne Coyne

When I do yoga, it gets all sweaty, and the best thing for dried up hair isn't shampoo, it's sweat. — Wayne Coyne

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. The "constructive dialogue" between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monlogue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process. — Jerry A. Coyne

[...] if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
[review of The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, Nature 442, 983-984 (31 August 2006)] — Jerry A. Coyne

The chemist Peter Atkins correctly observed, "Natural selection was a revolution and a stepping-stone to fame; so was relativity, and so was quantum theory. The sheer thrill of discovery is the spur to greater effort. All young scientists aspire to revolution." The same can't be said for theologians (Martin Luther is a rare exception), who either bear their heresies in silence or aspire only to trivial reinterpretations of church doctrine. — Jerry A. Coyne

Right Question can lead to some great ideas, — Kevin P. Coyne

I think the more music becomes something you could simply download and have on your iPod, I think to a lot of people that is plenty, but to some people, they still want these artifacts that are touchable, and you can smell them, and look at them, and hold them and just have other dimensions of experience with this music. — Wayne Coyne

We love playing music but we're too weird to play music. — Wayne Coyne

Steve Paikin : Can you imagine evolution being unproved someday ?
Jerry A. Coyne : It's possible, there are some facts that could disprove evolution, for example if I dug down into rocks say.. a billion years old and found a fossil of human or a fossil of rabbit and you did that and you were certain enough that these rocks were old, that would completely overthrow darwinism but the fact is, you know, over a 150 years of digging we haven't found a fossil out of place.
[Evolution and Religion - Paul Nelson vs. Jerry Coyne/Denis Lamoureux, 16m40] — Jerry A. Coyne

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word "scientism" should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I'll define as "the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority." Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's "fine-tuning" are evidence for God. — Jerry A. Coyne

My answer to someone who is in contrast with me - by not seeing God in the scientific data - is that you don't see God in the scientific data because you're not me. I have other experiences than you have, that bring me to look at this data as enriching my experience of God. — George Coyne

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured. — Andrew Coyne

Investing scarce resources in large-scale public projects and capital goods does increase output, but it does not contribute to economic progress if these investments do not produce things people value. — Christopher J. Coyne

We wish that we could take magic drugs, play around all day, read, and do nothing strenuous, and be the smartest, happiest people in the world. The truth is, it's all about sweat. — Wayne Coyne

A lot of times I'll doodle on something while I'm doing interviews, because sometimes I'm on the phone for three or four hours and I want to get something going. I'll just start from a scribble, or something that someone else already put on the page. — Wayne Coyne

It is comforting to know that there is at least one place where we can go and be confident that we will find an audience thirsting to find new music. Paste Magazine is that place. It's loss would create a very large black hole. — Wayne Coyne

Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad. — Wayne Coyne

I would say anybody who's willing to listen to Dark Side of the Moon and watch The Wizard of Oz is already a very sensitive, creative person. — Wayne Coyne

Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn't answer, didn't know, or believed in a "universal spirit or higher power"). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling. — Jerry A. Coyne

If you've ever seen the movie Spinal Tap, I think you know where we should try and reach by the end of our crime Story. — Shawn Coyne

The Christian church has a long history of gradually absorbing scientific perspectives and new discoveries. It seems to me that, in fact, that has been one of the strengths of Christianity - it has ultimately had great flexibility in absorbing new information about the world that we get from science. — George Coyne

What The Story Grid offers is a way for you, the writer, to evaluate whether or not your Story is working at the level of a publishable professional. If it is, The Story Grid will make it even better. If it isn't, The Story Grid will show you where and why it isn't working - and how to fix what's broken. — Shawn Coyne

To try to please people is an endless chasing of one's own tail. That's not very satisfying, so we do what we like and that satisfies us. When it does work out, its a bonus, really. — Wayne Coyne

Here's a simple example. The wooly mammoth inhabited the northern parts of Eurasia and North America, and was adapted to the cold by bearing a thick coat of hair (entire frozen specimens have been found buried in the tundra).3 It probably descended from mammoth ancestors that had little hair - like modern elephants. Mutations in the ancestral species led to some individual mammoths-like some modern humans - being hairier than others. When the climate became cold, or the species spread into more northerly regions, the hirsute individuals were better able to tolerate their frigid surroundings, and left more offspring than their balder counterparts. This enriched the population in genes for hairiness. In the next generation, the average mammoth would be a bit hairier than before. Let this process continue over some thousands of generations, and your smooth mammoth gets replaced by a shaggy one. — Jerry A. 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 A. Coyne

I think if you're lucky, you start to make music and it gets things out. — Wayne Coyne

Each species is a masterpiece of evolution that humanity could not possibly duplicate even if we somehow accomplish the creation of new organisms by genetic engineering. - E. O. Wilson — Jerry A. Coyne

Even though I don't have any kids of my own, I love this idea of family and taking care of things. — Wayne Coyne

Being a scientist helps to support both my life as a Jesuit and my belief in God. — George Coyne

The Copernican revolution was actually a contribution to the life of the church, the development of our view of ourselves in terms of the Universe, and therefore our view of God, et cetera. But, that took centuries, and struggles, and conflicts before that happened. — George Coyne

After you plant a seed in the ground, you don't dig it up every week to see how it is doing — William J. Coyne

Religion and science are engaged in a kind of war: a war for understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true. — Jerry A. Coyne

If SANTA CLAUS came down the chimney in a f**king jogging suit, you wouldn't even know it was him. — Wayne Coyne

Love is the thing that you pursue because it's the thing that gives you all this life, or you believe that, anyway. — Wayne Coyne

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. - Robert Green Ingersoll — Jerry A. Coyne

Here haue I cause, in men iust blame to find,
That in their proper prayse too partiall bee,
And not indifferent to woman kind,
To whom no share in armes and cheualrie
They do impart, ne maken memorie
Of their brave gestes and prowess martiall;
Scarse do they spare to one or two or three,
Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small
Does all their deeds deface, and dims their glories all,
But by record of antique times I find,
That women wont in warres to beare most sway,
And to all great exploits them selues inclind:
Of which they still the girlond bore away,
Till enuious Men fearing their rules decay,
Gan coyne straight laws to curb their liberty;
Yet sith they warlike armes haue layd away:
They haue exceld in artes and policy,
That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t'enuy. — Edmund Spenser

When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players. — Wayne Coyne

You want to be influenced by the world because it has so many cool things about it, but it also has a bunch of bad things about it. — Wayne Coyne

We don't ever want to shut down and say, I'm afraid to go that far down the road because there's going to be pain. There'll be beauty, too, and if you stop here, you stop all that. — Wayne Coyne

Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well ... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child. — Lisa Coyne

It is clear, then, that whatever genetic heritage we have, it is not a straitjacket that traps us forever in the "beastly" ways of our forebears. Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go. — Jerry A. Coyne

if your Story doesn't change your lead character irrevocably from beginning to end, no one will deeply care about it. It may entertain them, but it will have little effect on them. It will be forgotten. — Shawn Coyne

Science is and should be seen as "completely neutral" on the issue of the theistic or atheistic implications of scientific results. — George Coyne

You can say that Wayne Coyne sounds like Neil Young. — Mike Lowry

The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong? — Jerry A. Coyne

If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. — Jerry A. Coyne

There are dimensions to me that are not just the thinking person, but the person who is much richer, the person who has other emotional experiences, psychological experiences, these experiences also enrich me. — George Coyne

I think today the church faces a very real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past, in sort of a stand off, a fear of science. — George Coyne

Every time you use a GPS device, a computer, or a cell phone, you're reaping the benefits of science. In fact, most of us regularly trust our very lives to science: when you have an operation, when you fly in an airplane, when you get your children vaccinated. If you were diagnosed with diabetes, would you go to the doctor or consult a spiritual healer? — Jerry A. Coyne

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 A. Coyne

There's a cave, we go inside of ourselves because we want to know more, and we turn this one corner and we go, Oh my god - I didn't know that was in here. We can never go back to the way we were. It's like a horrible car accident - you're never the same after that. It's something that you'll think about every day for the rest of your life. — Wayne Coyne

What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence. — Jerry A. Coyne

Stories change people. — Shawn Coyne

I don't know where the sun beams end
and the starlight(start of our lives) begin(s), it's all a mystery
And I don't know how a man decides what's right for his own life, it's all a mystery. — Wayne Coyne

The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God's or Jesus's commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources. — Jerry A. Coyne

Supernatural explanations always mean the end of inquiry: that's the way God wants it, end of story. Science, on the other hand, is never satisfied: our studies of the universe will continue until humans go extinct. — Jerry A. Coyne

Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe. — Jerry A. Coyne

I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness. — Wayne Coyne

A great editor sees the Story globally and microscopically at the same time. He has x-ray vision. He looks down from thirty thousand feet. A great editor can break down a narrative into themes, concepts, acts, sequences, scenes, lines, beats. A great editor has studied narrative from Homer to Shakespeare to Quentin Tarantino. He can tell you what needs fixing, and he can tell you how to fix it. — Shawn 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. — Jerry A. Coyne

Your life is built on when love dies. — Wayne Coyne

Scientism is in fact a mug's game, a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown. Nearly all articles criticizing scientism not only fail to convince us that it's dangerous, but don't even give any good examples of it. In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism is a completely undefined term. It just means science that you don't like. — Jerry A. Coyne

If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period. — Jerry A. Coyne

The things that affect you most deeply - the things that will destroy you if you don't sing about them - are the things that you often end up singing about. It's really just about saying those things that everybody thinks but no one will say and making a connection by uncovering these diamonds that are inside of all of us that no one wants to tell each other about. — Wayne Coyne

Take the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), a single species that comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and temperaments. Every single one, purebred or mutt, descends from a single ancestral species - most likely the Eurasian gray wolf - that humans began to select about ten thousand years ago. — Jerry A. Coyne

The knowledge of God, the belief in God, is what I call an a-rational process. It's not rational - it doesn't proceed by scientific investigation - but it's not irrational because it doesn't contradict my reasoning process. It goes beyond it. — George Coyne

As Darwin noted, "It is certain that with almost all animals there is a struggle between the males for the possession of the female." When males of a species battle it out directly, be it through the clashing antlers of deer, the stabbing horns of the stag beetle, the head butting of stalk-eyed flies, or the bloody battles of massive elephant seals, they win access to females by driving off competitors. Selection will favor any trait that promotes such victories so long as the increased chance of getting mates more than offsets any reduced survival. This kind of selection produces armaments: stronger weapons, larger body size, or anything that helps a male win physical contests. — Jerry A. Coyne

We are all really alone. We're isolated in our own mind. — Wayne Coyne

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

Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves. — Wayne Coyne

The hardest part of leaving isn't the looking back; it isn't the loss you feel for a place or people; it's the fear that what you intended to leave isn't ever going to go, and that what you really want, you're never going to get. — Teri Coyne

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

It really is no different in the way that we make records and shoot music videos. I don't think of the movie as being a great leap out of my current profession. — Wayne Coyne

As a religious priest I find it a very enriching experience to do my scientific research. — George Coyne

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together. — Joe Hill

Religion could never be made compatible with science without diluting it so seriously that it was no longer religion but a humanist philosophy. And so I learned what other opponents of creationism could have told me: that persuading Americans to accept the truth of evolution involved not just an education in facts, but a de-education in faith - the form of belief that replaces the need for evidence with simple emotional commitment. — Jerry A. Coyne

We're getting close to making our vision a reality. It's exciting to be on the cusp of opening our doors to the public. We're right on schedule. — James K. Coyne, III

I wish I did believe in God. It would be a great relief to think, 'God'll take care of it. God'll put gas in the car tomorrow' — Wayne Coyne

It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can't reconcile for yourself. — Jerry A. Coyne

Religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves. — Jerry A. Coyne

Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it. — Jerry A. Coyne