Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is writing a book on the origin of species.

Letter
Jerry Fodor makes the striking claim that evolutionary biologists are abandoning natural selection as the principal, or even an important, cause of evolutionary change, and that ‘it’s not out of the question that a scientific revolution – no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory – is in the offing’ (LRB, 18 October). This is news to us, and, we believe, will be news to most knowledgeable...

A recent Radio Four programme had a distinguished retired geneticist, who is also a devout Christian, pondering the virgin birth. Jesus, it turned out, is something of a biological conundrum. As a male, he must have carried a Y-chromosome, which can be transmitted only by the father’s sperm, yet apparently he had no corporeal father. Where, then, did his Y-chromosome come from? The...

As I write, machines around the world are chewing up human chromosomes and spitting out the raw DNA sequence at an astounding rate of 5 billion bases a year. The four nucleotides that make up the sequence of DNA – adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine – are represented by their initial letters, A, G, C, T. If we take each of these as equivalent to a letter of the alphabet, the machines are producing text roughly as long as 18 copies of The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences