Coyne on McGinn
Coyne on McGinn
I will reply to Jerry Coyne’s comments (January 23rd, 2026) on my blog post “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge”. I will keep this as brief and factual as possible without restating his criticisms.
1.I am not just a philosopher of mind but have written on many philosophical subjects. I was also trained as a scientist and have two degrees in psychology.
2.I don’t “conflate” consciousness and knowledge, as a perusal of my writings will confirm. There is no mutual entailment between them, though there are complex relations.
3.I don’t define consciousness in terms of qualia.
4.Instances of knowledge are commonly acquired not innate, but I was discussing types of knowledge (cognitive capacities) not instances of it: knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, and knowledge of different types of subject matter, e.g., states of mind and external objects. These do evolve unlike learned items of knowledge.
5.Consciousness evolves but not its passing contents, obviously, just like knowledge.
6.I am not “dead certain” of the pain theory—see my other articles on pain and evolution, cited in the paper we are discussing. Coyne is mistaking expository convenience with (misguided) certainty. Do I ever say that the pain theory is known to be true? I just think it is a good hypothesis.
7.Pain is important because it is highly motivating and very widespread. There can be other theories, such as tactile knowledge, which would deliver different results for later knowledge. See the articles footnoted. I was simply presupposing earlier work in the present article instead of repeating it.
8.Pain is more than adaptive reflexes; it is a sensation.
9.Not all of morality is acquired, as many have argued; the case is like language (as Chomsky has pointed out).
10.Coyne is wrong to say that biologists (scientists generally) are more cautious than philosophers; the opposite is true. I am both.
11.It is odd that he ignores my mysterianism, presumably because he thinks I’m a dogmatist. Ironic really.
12.The person out of his lane here is Jerry Coyne. I can guarantee that I have studied a lot more science than he has studied philosophy to judge from these comments (I do have a first-class degree in the science of psychology and used to teach experimental psychology).
13.This was an opportunity for constructive dialogue between disciplines, but it came out as tetchy incomprehension. All I can suggest is to read a philosophy book on epistemology: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy would be a good place to start. Coyne never sent me his comments to get my response.
14.I was expecting my readers to be philosophers, so I didn’t spell out everything for the non-philosophical reader. This is true of everything on my website; it is not for beginners and I keep it concise.
15.It would be perfectly possible to have a cultural history of knowledge to be set beside a biological history, charting the main developments recorded in human history. I wasn’t much concerned with this distinction in the essay, though I focused more on the biological history of knowledge, it being neglected by intellectual historians.
An interesting debate that may help to clarify certain aspects.
The distinction between “knowledge” and “consciousness” is misleading, especially if we speak of their evolutionary origin.
Might it help here to use the term “perception”?
According to existential phenomenology, at the origin there was “anonymous perception,” that is, the perception of the environment and of the subject without “explicit consciousness” of it. It was a “repression of immediacy,” or a “creation of the mediated,” or else the “creation of a point–horizon axis.” I think the evolutionary origin of this axis may be the mouth, as McGinn describes in his book.
At this level there is a “pre-personal” consciousness or a “body schema” without attribution to a cognitive subject. The smallest element would be the atomized sensation, understood as an object–subject perception localized in an organism or in a sensory faculty, without integration at a higher level.
If the architecture of these sensations evolves, grows, and becomes integrated, unified perception is born.
(It is not the first time that Coyne’s limited social skills have worked against him).
That is the right level of analysis for this subject; evidently a bit beyond our biologist friend. I didn’t find his comments at all interesting.
Notice that Coyne could find nothing of value in my essay, or nothing he would admit to. He seemed desperate to find fault. Why?
Who can know the reasons!
My experience with Coyne has two acts.
Act 1
Years ago he refused to give an interview to a Spanish journalist, Julio Valdeón, alleging the following:
I’m sorry, but after some investigation I’ve determined that your newspaper is on the far-right side of the Spanish political spectrum and its biases do not align with my own views at all. Therefore, I do not wish to contribute to your paper’s financial gain by being interviewed in it.
Valdeón’s response was:
For years I have written, in this and other media, about your work and ideas and those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, etc., and about determinism and free will, citizenship and secularism, neuroscience, evolution, and more.
(…) I am a writer and journalist aligned with reason and science, with cosmopolitanism and globalization, with human rights and democracy, and estranged from religious superstitions, nationalisms, and populism. I try to write articles that are true to these principles. And I have never been censored. Freedom of the press still exists in our increasingly threatened liberal democracies. But it will be more difficult to protect if intellectuals opposed to a medium’s ideological line deny it an interview (…).
And that’s where the story ended.
Like many millions of readers in Spain, I read La Razón. Of course, after the Coyne affair, I feel like a fascist every time I do.
Not to his credit.
https://scienceandculture.com/2025/09/jerry-coyne-and-his-readers-attack-academic-freedom-and-call-for-more-intolerance/
Quoting from Casey Luskin’s 9/17/25 essay:
Coyne’s rebuttal, though, turns out to be quite weak, and Dr. McLatchie has already easily refuted Coyne’s main scientific points. . . .
. . . Coyne and his commenters used all the classic personal attacks listed by Dawkins. They attacked the authors’ competence and knowledge (“ignorant”), their religion (essentially what Dawkins labels as “insane” or “brainwashed” or “stupid”), and their intellectual integrity (the “wicked,” obviously).
. , , At the end of his post, it became clear that Coyne’s whole point was to gin up harassment of the journal so they won’t publish critiques of evolution in the future. After writing, “Sadly, the journal was played by creationists, and should be really embarrassed,” he provides a link to the editorial board, falsely caricaturing their argument, calling on people to pressure the journal:
You can see the editorial board (two editors-in-chief and six editors) here. Someone should write them and let them know what they published. And that, in science, ignorance does not equal God.
So what have we seen here? We’ve seen two credible scientists who submitted a paper to a mainstream scientific journal critiquing a naturalistic origin of life. That paper was accepted and published. Then we see ID [Intelligent Design] critics on the internet attacking the authors personally. This follows a call by a leading influential evolutionary biologist for his blog commenters to press the journal to make sure that it never publishes anything critiquing Darwin again. Theirs is not a movement committed to academic freedom or open scientific debate. It’s committed to personal attacks and trying to silence the intellectual voices of people they disagree with. , , ,
Coyne’s criticisms of me were quite personal.
Act 2
On another occasion, I had the opportunity to analyze some unjustified remarks that Coyne makes in his book Why Evolution Is True.
I was in scientific heaven, where nothing is accepted unless it is first proven, happily surrounded by falsifications and retrojections, far from the lack of rigor of the ordinary mind, together with Coyne. Japan’s common honeybees have a formidable enemy in giant hornets—mass killers capable of wiping out a hive of some 30,000 honeybees with just 20 or 30 individuals in a matter of hours by decapitating them one by one. But honeybees have developed a defense that works as follows: when the scout hornet enters the hive, they prevent it from leaving to alert the others. They surround it and vibrate their abdomens until the temperature inside the hive rises above 47°C. The hornet dies, but the bees survive. The hornet is cooked, and the hive is saved. A spectacular evolutionary adaptation—hats off to Darwin and Coyne.
“I cannot think of another case (except for the Spanish Inquisition) in which animals kill their enemies by roasting them” (location 225 of 546, Why Evolution Is True). Is this a joke? Do scientists joke? Is this a falsified fact?
Scientifically speaking, was the Inquisition a rarely cruel or deadly evolutionary adaptation, to the point of being an anomaly without possible comparison, or simply another expression of the wars of religion at the beginning of the early modern age? Perhaps the numbers—the people burned alive—are the answer. Fortunately, the Inquisition was a very well-documented repressive system, like the Holocaust and unlike communism. According to the most serious estimates, between 1500 and 1700 there were around 10,000 death sentences and executions (Joseph Pérez, La leyenda negra, p. 124). A lot or a little? Let’s compare.
A simple search yields the following figure: between 1560 and 1630, Wolfgang Behringer of Saarland University estimates that between 50,000 and 60,000 people in Europe died accused of witchcraft. It is true that official documentation only records institutional trials undertaken by authorities. But it does not include the macabre misadventures of popular witch hunters such as Matthew Hopkins, who in the mid-17th century, in the midst of the English Civil War, proclaimed himself “Witchfinder General” and turned it into a profitable business. He offered to flush witches out of their lairs using his infallible methods. His favorite was swimming—especially scientific, according to James VI, King of England and author of the lamentable Daemonologie, which encouraged witch hunts in his kingdom.
The poor wretch’s right hand was tied to her left foot and her left hand to her right foot, and she was thrown into the river. If she did not float, she was innocent and drowned, to the consolation of relatives and acquaintances (few of whom remained by then), who at least were spared accusations of collaboration. If she floated—which happened if she was carefully placed on the surface—she was a witch. She was burned, and Hopkins pocketed a tidy sum, while leaving the door open to new suspects. Thank God, this fellow ended as badly as he had treated the poor old women whose only crime was being poor, ugly, ignorant, and old. Life under accusation was so cruel that many of them preferred death to continuing to live under suspicion (Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, p. 826).
Which brings me back to Coyne and gives rise to the following theory, ready to be falsified: scientists seem less scientific to me when they talk about things I know more or less well. And on that list I place Pinker, Kahneman, and now, Coyne.
(I am referring here at the numbers of mass murders Pinker offers in his book the Angels regarding Spanish massacres in America. I think they are highly inflated and not critical enough).
Scientists regularly talk rubbish about philosophy.
Biologists are more careful than philosophers, as Jerry Coyne illustrates in his super careful and not at all presumptuous piece…
Exactly so–so confident!
Sapolsky speaks about the regularities of the non-living material world as a precursor to the creation or organization of simple living beings such as viruses. He talks about the regularity of the tides, about the formation of chemical chains that are created and destroyed with each back-and-forth movement of the waves. This would be the first stable organization.
Going further would mean analyzing the geological evolution of the Earth: the formation of the Himalayas, the Sahara, the seas, winds, and ocean currents.
And one step further, the creation of the universe and the laws of physics.
These are hypotheses, without a doubt, but they follow the pattern of seeking a reasonable antecedent for each projection or advance in evolution
I completely agree.