Jerry A. Coyne

Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.

Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.

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.

The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist.

Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be.

This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason.

If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.

We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.

The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.