This article actually appeared on the Museum of New Zealand’s website, and is about as explicit an argument for the country adopting indigenous “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) as I have found. You may remember that MM is a mixture of practical knowledge, religion, superstition, morals, teleology and guidelines for living. Despite this […]
Christopher Hitchens, whom many of us admire despite occasional differences of opinion, died at only 62 on December 14, 2011. Lawrence Krauss organized an event with four of Hitchens’s friends, all reminiscing about the Great Lion of Rhetoric. The panel was filmed in London on December 13, 2024—just 19 days ago—and I’ve put the video […]
For years, scientists and commentators who questioned COVID policies were censored, blacklisted, and canceled across the country. Many of these dissenting views have since been vindicated from the lab origins theory to the lack of efficacy of surgical masks to the opposition to the closure of schools. Now, a new study in the Journal of […]
If you want to see a compilation of all of Trump’s executive orders, you can find links here that will take you to the contents of the official orders. I’ve talked about the new rules on sex and gender before, but wanted to discuss them again, briefly. Click the screenshot below to see Trump’s EO […]
Last night, I discussed a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump that included an extension of his earlier move against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies to the area of higher education. The order makes direct reference to the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, […]
This will be the next-to-last item I write about my entanglement with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)—I hope. I am pretty sure that the joint statement below resulted from the fracas that ensued after the FFRF took down my post about biological sex, followed by my resignation and those of Richard Dawkins and Steve […]
When I was invited to go on Piers Morgan Uncensored, I was deeply undecided. I knew Morgan was quite conservative and religious, and I’ve seen clips of him bullying his guests. So I had a back-and-forth with the producer, trying to discern what Morgan wanted to ask me about. I got a long list of […]
Mark Zuckerberg announced: In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making […]
Below is my column in Fox.com on the potentially historic change in policy at Meta to restore free speech protections. As one of the longest and loudest critics of the company over its censorship history, it is admittedly hard to trust. However, an alliance of Mark Zuckerberg with Elon Musk could prove the most important […]
Jerry Coyne writes: When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! … One part of what Coyne wrote resonated with me: The first […]
Penny Simmonds announced: Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds and Associate Minister of Education David Seymour today announced legislation changes to strengthen freedom of speech obligations on universities. “Freedom of speech is fundamental to the concept of academic freedom and there is concern that universities seem to be taking a more risk-averse approach,” Ms […]
Hobson’s Pledge reports: We attempted to book the Sunday Star Times, The Post, the Christchurch Press, and The Southland Times. It would have been a tidy sum of money for the financially beleaguered media outlet… Our ad was very simple. Just words on a page communicating what is at the heart of the debate – equal rights. Vote […]
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is under fire this week after it censored a leading scientist, atheist, and board member, Jerry Coyne, a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Chicago. The FFRF took down a column in which Coyne published a column titled “Biology is not bigotry,” a critique of an earlier […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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