Fresh off that paper about how the liberals are destroying “merit” and science, Jerry Coyne fearlessly rides his hobby horse onto the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, where he complains about a a grave threat
to biology. That threat? Ideology and dogma are strangling research and scientific communication. Scientists are too cowed
to speak their minds. Well, except for Jerry A. Coyne and his coauthor, Luana S. Maroja, who are willing to confront the dogma of the Progressive Left.
It’s somewhat peculiar to read the complaints about a dogmatic stranglehold from these people. Coyne is a well-known, established, and successful scientist — he is a graduate of Harvard, and is now an emeritus professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious institutions of evolution research in the country. Maroja is a full Professor of Biology, and Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. I don’t see how they can complain that their careers have been “strangled” by the Left.
Coyne and Maroja are the establishment.* Their careers are built on convincingly supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.) They have immense amounts of academic power and influence, and have far more potential to be the strangler, rather than the strangled. Yet somehow they have the idea that science is being politically purged by progressive social justice, which they claim doesn’t care about truth.
That’s a remarkable claim, fundamentally paranoid and conspiratorial, and I’m going to have to see strong evidence to support it. Coyne and Maroja write that they have six specific examples from just their field of evolutionary biology — examples of leftists distorting biology and altering education and devaluing “merit.”
Let’s see it. They’re going to give us six examples of “misstatements spread by ideologues” that they believe are impeding science.
1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
Coyne & Maroja claim this is false because there are only two kinds of functional gametes, sperm and eggs, and therefore there can be only two sexes. The claims of gender ideologues can be trivially dismissed because they can’t trot out a third kind of gamete, or can’t name all the other sexes. Furthermore, people aren’t assigned sex at birth, so it is not a sexual construct, but rather, sex is an observation of biological reality.
The Coyne & Maroja argument is nonsense at every level. First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.
It’s also an argument designed to misrepresent and distort the positions of their critics. No one is arguing that there are other kinds of gametes; trans men and women are not claiming to have transformed their gametes to some other form, and the ones I’ve talked with are acutely aware that their gonads do not metamorphose. Trans men may still be capable of pregnancy, trans women will not ovulate, and they do not pretend otherwise. This is the kind of argument that shows that the ones proposing it are totally unaware of the nature of trans culture, they are arguing against a proposition that no one is making.
As for the claim that the definition of sex at birth is simply a biological observation…well, that wrecks their premise, because the sex of a baby is not a question of what kind of gametes they are producing. It’s a superficial examination of morphology. You can have a penis or vagina without any correlated gamete production!
Here’s what I, a biology professor and progressive Leftist, teach in my classes.
Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors.
I would say that claiming that humans are trivially reducible to two simplistic categories is the greater distortion of biological facts and diminishes the evolutionary consequences of the differences within a sexual category.
Do Coyne & Maroja do a better job of explaining and dismissing the second misconception of those progressive leftists? No, they do not.
2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.
While you might be able to find a few fringe individuals who espouse that view, it’s not at all representative of what academic biologists — or even the majority of informed laypersons — think. This is a common pattern in the Coyne & Maroja review, though, misrepresenting the perspective of the people they critique by inventing a straw man argument. They go on to cite Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate, as if it were a fact-based source of data rather than a subjective and dishonest mess of prejudicial assertions. The biologists I know would laugh at this notion that people are blank slates.
Rather than citing an unqualified non-biologist to tell us what biologists think, I’d recommend instead Lewontin’s The Triple Helix, which is far more representative. Lewontin explains that the evolution of individuals is explained by the interplay of genes, organisms, and the environment. Note that genes are part of the equation, a significant part, but that you can’t explain genetics except in the context of their environment.
It’s a little surprising that they ignore this common view, since Lewontin was Coyne’s mentor at Harvard.
So what would this deranged Leftist teach in his biology classes?
There are clear average differences between men and women, but the attempt to tease them apart into purely biological and purely cultural differences is a futile exercise, often ideologically motivated. Biology and culture are inseparable, and what makes you you is a complex pattern of interaction between the two.
3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.
Great. On this one, he cites me directly as the purveyor of this supposedly misguided claim. I wrote, “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false,” which is accurate, I did say that. I also said a lot more, explaining what those faulty premises are…but Coyne & Maroja omit that, for some unexplainable reason. Instead, they come up with an anodyne definition of evolutionary psychology: our brains and how they work–which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts–sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors.
One problem here is that I agree with that sentence, so once again, they have invented dissent where none exists and have hidden away the problem with evolutionary psychology. The idea that genes and evolution have shaped our behavior is accepted and not at all problematic, but Coyne & Maroja assert that opponents of evolutionary psychology deny the role of evolution on behavior.
Bluntly, that is an outright lie.
They think they can get away with it because they’ve obscured what premises of evolutionary psychology I consider false. It’s a quote mine.
Where I consider evolutionary psychologists to fail is in methodology and poor theory — they take the unjustified shortcut of assuming any modern behavior is the product of genetic traits that were locked in place in the Pleistocene, and are always the product of selection, and that therefore any hypothetical selective scenario they invent is valid and worth publishing as science. They seem to be entirely oblivious to alternative modes of evolution, treating natural selection as the only significant force, ignoring the facts of drift and migration. They are masters of the just-so story, building hypotheticals about ancient human ways of life and ‘testing’ them with surveys of middle-class students enrolled in Psych 101 courses.
I do not deny that human biology and behavior are the product of evolution, but rather that evolution is more complex than evolutionary psychologists imagine it to be, and that the tools of psychology are sadly inadequate to address the problem.
What I teach in the classroom:
Every species is the product of a long history of evolutionary forces, and those forces involve more than just a cartoonish idea of endlessly optimizing selection. You’ve learned about nearly-neutral theory, about lineage analysis, about the mathematics of comparing traits (they would have gotten all that in even my introductory classes), and that accurately determining the evolutionary trajectory of a population requires detailed measurement and observation and rigorous mathematical analysis. Please do apply what you’ve learned to behavior and psychology, but do it better than the evolutionary psychologists have.
4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. In this section, Coyne & Maroja plunge into the world of the genetic basis of IQ scores and educational attainment and are saying that we should study genetic differences in the minds of people. The problem with that, and the reason we should discourage that kind of research, is that it inevitably leads to garbage science. Weak correlations will get used to prop up all kinds of biases. That’s why this topic is so popular among right-wing zealots and racists. They say,
This kind of study (genome-wide association studies, or GWAS) has, for example, turned up nearly 4,000 areas of the genome associated with educational attainment. Fascinatingly, many of these genes are active mainly in the brain. Using GWAS studies, it’s now possible to make fairly accurate predictions about a person’s appearance, behavior, academic achievement, and health simply by analyzing the DNA of an individual and calculating their individual “polygenic scores” based on large samples of their population.
No, you can’t do that.
GWAS are basically fishing expeditions — you search for correlations between genetic markers and social or behavioral phenomena. It might be useful when coupled to specific, prior hypotheses, but much of it is grinding through thousands of statistical correlations and grabbing any that rise above a chosen chance criterion. It can be hopelessly noisy. Look at the result of GWAS of “educational attainment” (already, a uselessly broad category): 4000 “areas” (not genes, just broad chunks of chromosomes) are somehow associated with learning, and we can at best say that many are active in the brain. Almost everything is active in the brain! Almost everything is active in the pancreas! Sorting out what is relevant is the problem, and we’re nowhere near achieving that.
There is such a volume of potential correlations that it may well be that most of what GWAS are picking up are accidental correlations by lineage — that is, the parameter is common among certain groups of people not because it plays a role in, for instance, intelligence, but because the people showing that trait are related. The danger is that, for example, you might think you’ve found a gene associated with the success of a certain group, but it’s only a coincidence and is actually irrelevant. Then that chance coincidence gets picked up as evidence of superiority of the tested group, and you’re off to the eugenics races.
It’s simply silly to suggest that we could feed a genome sequence into a computer, and it will then compute the organism. That’s genetic determinism, and it doesn’t work. Twins have strong physical similarities, but do twin pairs all share the same personality? I come from a blue collar family, generations of farmers and laborers, all good people but not really interested in things like college…I have to suspect that if universities had used a DNA sample as an admissions test, I’d be out picking fruit and plucking chickens in Yakima.
Coyne & Maroja are actually almost right in what I’d teach my classes.
We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals, unless we have clear causal and functional information and specific hypotheses about the genes we are studying. Vague, sloppy generalizations will be abused!
5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.
Oh god, make it stop. Coyne & Maroja take a bold step in favor of race realism.
To be fair, they take a waffly stance, being ambiguous about how we ought to talk about ethnicities instead, about how many races/ethnicities there are, and how we can use race information to fine-tune medical treatments or even how we can solve crimes by reconstructing perpetrators from their genetic information (see previous section; no, you can’t). He uses these excuses to defend…Bo Winegard?
Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.
“merely suggesting the possibility” is a curiously tepid way to describe a guy who openly describes himself as an “ethno-traditionalist”, “cultural nationalist”, and “racial realist” and who calls Arthur Jensen his “intellectual hero.” He’s a loud and proud racist who thinks white people are superior!
Here’s how I handle this in my classes:
Don’t be a fucking racist goober.
More seriously, in the last two weeks of my genetics course I gave the students a dozen peer-reviewed papers on how geneticists were addressing the issue of race, put them in groups, and had them give presentations on the papers they chose to discuss. Get into the literature, and you’ll discover most modern geneticists have little patience with so-called “scientific racism,” any more than they are interested in discussing “scientific creationism.” There are exceptions, obviously. Usually they’re posting on Quillette or other race-realist forums. Or publishing in Skeptical Inquirer or the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.
On Coyne’s blog, he seems to be moderatly obsessed with New Zealand indigenous culture, thinking it compromises science, somehow. Maori culture is a complex mix of ideas.
Matauranga Māori, the indigenous way of knowing in New Zealand, is a mélange of empirical knowledge derived from trial and error (including the navigational ability of their Polynesian ancestors and Māori ways of procuring and growing food) but also includes nonscientific areas such as theology, traditional lore, ideology, morality, and legend.
That sounds like a liberal arts curriculum to me. Teach the history, the cultural practices, the religion and mythology…just as we do in Western societies. You can’t, for instance, teach the history of science without discussing Catholic theology and its contributions; you also can’t avoid discussing the oppressive aspects of a culture without also talking about art and beauty. I don’t see the problem, although I’m not familiar with the Maori.
I do teach at a non-tribal American Indian serving institution, though, and I think their concerns are overblown. The Lakota have a myth that their people emerged from a cave — they can even point to a cave in South Dakota called Maka Oniye as their origin. We teach this in our Indian Studies classes, since it is a lovely story and tells us about how the Lakota think of themselves (it also includes a spider god, Iktomi, which I find quite nice). But we don’t teach it in our biology classes. There are no angry Lakota citizens shaking their fists at us and demanding that we incorporate it into our curriculum. Perhaps Coyne is thinking that these indigenous peoples have the same fanatical certainty that Southern Baptists do. They don’t. They would just appreciate it if you showed a little respect for the people who were displaced by Western colonialism.
The only experience I’ve had with our Indian students that comes even close is that, several years ago, some visitors commented on the fact that we had a display of mounted owls at the entrance to our atrium, which was mildly offensive to Native Americans who regarded owls as symbols of death. So we moved them. It’s not hard to respect people’s beliefs, and it does no harm to the science.
No one teaches that cultural preferences are equivalent to what we teach in physics, chemistry, and biology.
Coyne & Maroja are also indignant about the idea of repatriation — that Native Americans are demanding the return of bones from museum collections. They don’t seem to appreciate that these remains were stolen, looted from grave sites, or even taken directly from murdered or executed Indians. I guess it’s true that we progressive lefties consider consent important, and that it even trumps Science.
I would just ask how they would feel about the Jewish skull collection that was to be displayed at the Reich University of Strasbourg after WWII (fortunately, a plan that was aborted by the Reich’s defeat). The bones were returned to their families, where possible, and re-interred. The situation is directly analogous to what Native Americans experienced, except that imperialist forces haven’t yet been defeated. Why is one case an example of basic human decency, while a horrible anti-scientific crime in the other?
How would I teach this? I don’t. I suspect Coyne & Maroja don’t, either, and that neither have had to accommodate Maori traditions, so it’s a silly thing for us to be concerned about. If I did teach something in the appropriate field, I would probably steal the words of Jennifer Raff, who studies paleogenomics.
Actually, repatriation laws have really enabled a lot of the work I and some of my colleagues do. A lot of my work in North America is on ancestral remains that have been returned to tribes. As part of that process, some tribal representatives have come to me and said, “We are interested in studying the DNA before we rebury our ancestors.” A lot of these remains have been languishing in storerooms, and as part of NAGPRA they’ve been cataloged and looked at and new things have emerged as a result. Human remains from Shuká Káa [formerly On Your Knees] Cave in Alaska, for example, were excavated with the cooperation of local tribes and showed people living in the area today are related to an individual who died 10,300 years ago.
It’s not anti-science to take the beliefs of the people you work with into account. It’s the racism and colonialism and sexism and pseudoscience that are anti-science. Raff is pointing out that respecting the people of the cultures she studies literally benefits the science.
I’ll have to stop here — this is already over twice the length of the response Skeptical Inquirer was going to allow me, so I don’t think there’s any point in trying to submit it to them. I do have to say a bit about Coyne & Maroja’s conclusion, because that’s where they let all the fascist paranoia hang out.
Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom.
What restrictions on our freedom? I can say what I think, Coyne & Maroja can say what we think, and the only cost is that we each think the other is an asshole. I can live with that. So can the Emeritus Professor and the Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Of course, Coyne is only going to be able to publish this nonsense in not-very-distinguished journals. That’s fair, though, since his work clearly lacks merit.
And mainly what he’s going to do is complain about a nonexistent existential threat to all of science because it is infested with those dang liberals.
Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.
OK, now I’m inspired! I will continue to speak up against the toxic effects of conservative ideology on my field. You know, the ideology that would deny the existence of trans individuals; that advocates for genetic determinism; that thinks a sloppy science like evolutionary psychology that defies standard theory and practice is worthwhile; that promotes outmoded and dangerous ideas about IQ and the genetic basis of all behavior; that wants to return to an early 20th century version of race pseudoscience; and that thinks indigenous people who express their cultural beliefs ought to be silenced. Fine. I’ll declare that the Coyne & Maroja vision of science is broken and ultimately damaging. They represent old dogmas and tired ideas.
I do hope science is someday very different from the bad science that racists and sexists want to promote, and that the big change is that women and gay and trans people can work in science without old cranky scientists claiming that their existence does irreparable harm to the field.
Also, someday I hope staid old conservative skeptic organizations learn to recognize a moral panic when they see one and refuse to fuel it with more hysterical paranoia of the sort we see in the Coyne & Maroja article.
*By the way, so am I — I’m an old white heterosexual cis man. Isn’t it interesting how two people who belong to the same privileged demographic can have such radically different views?
Linguistic quibble:
Slightly unfortunate phrasing, there.
“I do not deny that human biology and behavior are the product of evolution, but rather [argue] that […]” is, I think, a better way to express the sentiment, because you do not deny that evolution is more complex etc.
Thank you – great post!
Well done. Good post.
But….but without moral panics how will you keep the rubes frightened and pliable?
One thing I forgot to mention: their entire article doesn’t use the word “woke” even once.
… supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.)
“Dogma”, when you take it back to the ancient Greek, comes from “revelation” – which The Church™ considers primary and therefore beyond question. I can’t see any “dogmas” in modern biology (and if anyone uncovers such, who would doubt they’d get the sand-blaster treatment? (both the dogmas and the uncoverers), and remain startled at how scientists (physicists in particular, in my reading) regularly contemplate revising fundamental concepts such as conservation of mass and energy.
Anyway, I suggest that problematic line works better with a word derived from “teaching”:
The fundamental problem with item 1 is that the “two sexes only” meme presumes that anything related to “reproduction” must remain rigidly and directly related to reproduction Because That’s How Life Works.
That might well be true for the most-“primitive” (sorry, having trouble coming up with a better term) organisms that use two-sex-based reproduction. The concept of an S&M club catering to flowers isn’t just bizarre — it’s meaningless, precisely because so far as we can determine there’s no volition involved in plant reproduction.
There’s a whole lot of volition involved in human reproduction (that’s the entire point of frat/sorority parties!). And as soon as one introduces multiple purposes and volition to any natural system, you’re going to end up with not-very-simple non-binary explanations as actually being the Occam’s Razor of the beast. Remember that Occam’s Razor is not “the simplest explanation is likely to be the true one,” but “the simplest explanation that accounts for all observations is likely to be the true one.” And the rigid-binary view of sex, umm, doesn’t account for all observations — so despite its simplicity, it’s disqualified. Right, Tango?
Reproductive capability and mechanism is a (primarily, perhaps exclusively) biological issue. Sex is a complex, subjective, variant, and somewhat related issue (again, consider S&M — merely calling it “deviant” does not mean “it therefore doesn’t exist”) that shares some of the same organs. They are related, but not congruent, sets of data and theories. Trying to pretent that they are nonetheless congruent is… hmm, I need an appropriate insult that doesn’t rely on the Anglo-Saxon phoneme fricative… intellectually dishonest. (Yes, I’m calling a Harvard faculty member intellectually dishonest. Not for the first time; probably not for the last.)
At point 3, it’s interesting these people who like the concepts of evolution and natural selection just have zero interest in analogs for it outside the field of biology. Culture can be analyzed through those lenses quite easily. Is patriarchy a result of common cultural descent or a property actively selected for in some way? What causes traits to emerge in cultures, to increase or to fade away? But, y’know, social studies are all eevil weevil.
It still bothers me that we can pretend that there is a strict dichotomy of sex when there are people out there who literally have half their body with cells with XY chromosomes and the other half with XX chromosomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chimera
Thus forcing them to retreat in their argument to “well, most humans fall squarely within the ‘male’ or ‘female’ category”, but that’s not an objectionable statement. It’s a true and uncontroversial statement. — I guess there’s some potential controversy about the exact meaning of the word “most”, e.g. is it 99.99%? Or 90%? Or something in the middle? I don’t know, and it would depend heavily on your exact classification criteria whose choice would necessarily be at least somewhat arbitrary.
Correction:
we pretendthey pretendMatauranga Māori, the indigenous way of knowing in New Zealand, is a mélange of empirical knowledge derived from trial and error … but also includes nonscientific areas such as theology, traditional lore, ideology, morality, and legend.
That kinda sounds like the early state of knowledge in ancient Greece, where empirical knowledge and reason had not yet grown apart from the other areas of their knowledge. They didn’t seem to have separate branches of sciences back then, everything was still lumped together as “philosophy” (which means “love/pursuit of knowledge”). So if we’re teaching about another “primitive” people like the Māori, it kinda does make sense to at least teach about this aspect of their state of knowledge and worldview.
Really find it baffling that certain skeptics/STEM people like Jerry Coyne and Sabine Hossenfelder are becoming more transphobic, just as much as their ultra-religious counterparts. Beyond just “biological realities”, why does transphobia actually exists among the STEM/skeptic at all, in spite of their openly hating the religious right?
@9- GerrardOfTitanServer
Maybe not the same thing but I went to school with someone who was traditionally male and was very patchy pigment wise, like my lily white state mixed with albino. Have no idea if he fused with a twin or what.
hemidactylus
Maybe. I’ve read some scientists wondering aloud if the rate of chimeraism is much higher than conventionally thought. You’d need two DNA tests to be sure.
Thornapple @12: I don’t know anything about Hossenfelder, but Coyne has for a long time been offended by the idea that the opinions of people who are not cis, white, hetrosexual men should be treated with equal validity as those of people who are. He started speaking positively about far-right wingnuts based purely on the fact that they were speaking out against women and queer people while ignoring that they were also speaking out against colleges and Jewish people (Coyne is ethnically Jewish).
I really wonder about what points the authors are actually in agreement. Because it really feels out of place in many points.
For example, this is what Marojas wrote for The Atlantic in 2019:
” […] In a classroom discussion, I noted that researchers have measured a large average difference in IQ between the inhabitants of the United States and those of my home country, Brazil. I challenged the supposed intelligence differential between Americans and Brazilians. I asked students to think about the limitations of the data, which do not control for environmental differences, and explained that the raw numbers say nothing about whether observed differences are indeed “inborn”—that is, genetic.
There is, of course, a long history of charlatans who have cited dubious “science” as proof that certain racial and ethnic groups are genetically superior to others. My approach has been to teach students how to see through those efforts, by explaining how scientists understand heritability today, and by discussing how to interpret intelligence data—and how not to.”
Funny, right? Maroja’s living experience make her challenge that data and assumptions about Brazilians, which she knows about their conditions, culture, history, economy, people etc. No informed person would factor the Brazilian problems very differently from this. Then she proceed to inform her students about limitations and how not to interpret it. She even mentions “charlatans”!
Great, right?
This is not much different from what we’re always asking! Let specialists talk about it – not some psychologist who read an article about genetics and thinks he’s an expert on it. Not a random blogger who knows how to run MatLab and says he found a correlation that explains the world. She may be worried she’s agreeing too much with “blank slatists” (which is the current buzz word for people who don’t put biology first in places where biology is clearly not first).
About the rest, I think you adressed it well. “The Left™” (trademark) has dominated everything but can’t actually make a party that would be considered left-wing anywhere in the world except in the US.
And ‘science’ didn’t become separate from philosophy (at least in the English language) until the 19th century (there was a time when it was called ‘natural philosophy’).
@12:
I think that’s an unfair characterization of Sabine and her video. She made a few mistakes but after viewing her video and the responses, I think it’s clear that they are simply mistakes. For example, she kept using “sex assigned at birth” phrasing that also Coyne complained about. A terf wouldn’t do it. Calling her transphobic seems to me to be the kind of attitude that leaves no room for mistakes.
Good answers.
All of the dead strawpeople killed by Coyne and Maroja would have appreciated it.
There are many problems with evo-psych that make it so far into at best pseudoscience.
One of their most common is simply assuming modern behaviors have a genetic basis.
A huge amount of our behavior is culturally determined and those culturally determined behaviors can and do change rapidly in Real Time.
If you actually look at the scientific literature, it is full of criticism by other scientists of specifically evo-psych. The field itself has a dubious reputation in evolutionary biology and psychology.
You don’t see that large quantity of open knowledgeable criticism of other scientific fields like chemistry, physisc, evolutionary biology itself, geology etc..
Once again, I will just mention that there really is a serious War on Science that Coyne and Maroja completely ignore while making up an army of Progressive strawpeople to slaughter.
It’s coming from the GOP and the fundie xians, and we all see it every day along with a lot of real victims. Repost
It’s a strawperson.
There is a War on Science and we see it everyday as well as the victims.
It’s been going on since the Bush II administration. It’s been said that the War on Science was the only war that George Bush won.
A few examples.
.1. Evolution.
The creationists have been attacking the Theory of Evolution since 1865 with some success.
It’s de facto not taught in a lot of grade and secondary schools because the teachers are either creationists or just don’t want to deal with death threats and trouble.
.2. Climate change.
There is big money in pretending climate change isn’t happening.
And it is always easier to do nothing than prepare for the future.
.3. Trans people.
The fundie xians/right wingnuts have been busy inventing imaginary diseases for Trans people such as Rapid Onset Gender Disorder and making up reasons to persecute them and deny children and adults medical care.
.4. Abortion.
The forced birthers/female slavers have a long list of lies about the harms of abortion, fertility, cancer, insanity, etc..
Their latest is just ignoring all the pregnancies that go wrong and end up making women very sick or killing them because they can’t terminate a failing pregnancy in time.
.5. Covid-19 virus deniers and Antivaxxers.
This was a serious problem during the latest pandemic.
It’s estimated that 330,000 US Antivaxxers died from the Covid-19 virus.
There is a War on Science but it is being fought by the right wingnuts, not Progressives.
PZ, thanks for this elaborate debunk of conservative myths. If you’re considering writing an abstract, I’d like to propose: “Coyne and Maroja are wrong. Being a decent human being does benefit science.”
@PZ #5 “One thing I forgot to mention: their entire article doesn’t use the word “woke” even once.” – I guess that means that a new buzzword is on the rise.
@18
It is absolutely fair to call Sabine Hossenfelder and her video “Is being trans a social fad among teenagers?” transphobic, Thornapple didn’t call her a terf and neither would I.
There is a lot to criticize in that video and I encourage you to watch this video on it by Rebecca Watson: https://skepchick.org/2023/05/physicist-sabine-hossenfelder-screws-up-on-trans-kids-care/
I do want to address the most damning point here though. She platformed ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’, a well-known pseudo scientific anti-trans ‘theory’, as if it was flawed but credible science.
Without exaggeration, this is as intellectually dishonest as if she had released a video called ‘Are vaccines safe for children?’ and then used Andrew Wakefield as a credible source who had just made a methodological error.
ROGD even uses the exact same methodology that Wakefield did in his original ‘study’.
The political arguments about trans biology aren’t about biology. They are either “it’s natural so we can’t discriminate”, or “it’s not natural so we can discriminate”.
But “natural” has nothing to do with morals. If it doesn’t hurt me or mine, the the state should not discriminate against it.
Too bad this won’t appear in Skeptical Inquirer. Maybe submit it even though it’s likely to be rejected for its length? Nothing ventured, and all that.
Sorry to have to tell you this but not only is Hossenfelder a fan of Jesse Singal, she is apparently a big fan of Quillette. She is the worst
https://www.pinkerite.com/2023/05/sabine-hossenfelder-quillette-racism.html
I just learned that there is an international beauty contest for trans women.
Somehow, this strikes me as ironic. I am sure that no trans hater would argue that trans women have an unfair benefit over cis women in a beauty contest.
rietpluim, they wouldn’t have to do so; if the contest is for trans women, then no cis women are part of it, so no unfair benefit could exist.
(They’d likely just characterise it as a men’s contest)
Hossenfelder or Coyne, the point still stands: There’s transphobia within the skeptic community, and those big names who express such beliefs need to answer for it.
The bigger question is: Why are they so preoccupied with trans people as much as their conservative counterparts? At least the conservatives are honest about why they hate, but skeptics who happened to be ‘phobes keep obfuscating their reasons behind their hate.
Further examples of transphobia within the skeptic community are the recent Jesus and Mo webcomics with their terrible takes on trans issues:
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/lives/
Thornapple, to take what may be a rhetorical question literally:
But best as I can tell, they’re striving to be scientific, logical and empirical (failing badly, of course, but that’s how they see it).
Once one buys into the narrative of the sex binary, everything follows, even with a token distinction between sex and gender.
And, I’m no psychologist, but I reckon there’s an element of rationalisation there; the whole thing is unnatural and subjective, let’s stick to nature and objectivity here type of thing.
More cynically, it works for them. They get notoriety and followers, they do the circuit, they get $$$ thereby. It’s the boogyman du jour, so they’ve moved on from the Muslims etc.
—
In passing, I personally don’t reckon Sabine is transphobic; I think she’s kinda trying (cf. her video on sport) but it’s certainly not her field of expertise. But yeah, it was not a good look.
[meta]
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/21168456/Peter+Gabriel/Not+One+of+Us
Take Ophelia; her Patreon and therefore her site is basically predicated on trans hating, no bones about it. I mean, she went all the way.
Not that I know of especially of Trans people.
AFAICT, the GOP and fundie xians just hate to hate.
Hate is its own reward and the bedrock basis of their philosophy.
They use it as a unifying tool to set up Us versus Them conflicts, i.e. Tribalism.
We all know what their evergrowing To Hate list is.
I’m sure we are all on it somewhere.
Women, children, gays, scientists, Muslims, nonxians, atheists, nonwhites, Trans, Progressives, the Enlightenment, Yankees, Social Justice warriors, public health workers, etc..
Take the hate out of fundie xians and the GOP and there wouldn’t be enough left to bury in a matchbox.
@Nancy McClernan:
That’s a source of concern so there could be more there. But I also don’t get why you call her the worst and also a fan of Quillette based on one tweet. But thanks for sharing the info.
[meta]
Well, I believe trans people often have rather sensitive antennae regarding transphobia, for obvious reason. More than once I have seen their accusations, premature as they seemed to me at the time, be vindicated in time.
So that’s food for thought.
Still, consilience and all that; it’s not like trans people are a single gestalt organism.
We’ll see.
Tell me about it. I was sure for so long that Ophelia couldn’t be a transphobe. I was so wrong.
@ 30 John Morales
Nah, you’re too charitable. Nobody starts from scientific/logical/empirical first principles and ends up with transphobia. They start with transphobia and try to reverse engineer a rational justification.
The best explanation of transphobia I’ve come across is the theory of “distinctiveness threat” from peer-reviewed psychology literature:
I recommend reading the whole thing.
Silentbob:
Um, we’re both basically making the very same claim here.
(Perhaps read what I wrote again, but less uncharitably)
In a nutshell, I think it’s similar to xenophobia of the “those foreigners are coming here and taking our jobs and changing our way of life” type.
If you’ve built your identity on being different to others, and then those others are treated the same as you, and claim the same identity as you, you can experience your identity as being “stolen”.
Transphobic rhetoric is often quite explicit about this – accusing trans women of wearing “womanface” and “appropriating womanhood” when they’re not actually doing anything different to any other woman.
I refer you to my #31.
(The concept of othering is not obscure)
“It’s only water
In a stranger’s tear
Looks are deceptive
But distinctions are clear
A foreign body
And a foreign mind
Never welcome
In the land of the blind
You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is
You’re not one of us
Not one of us
No you’re not one of us
Not one of us
Not one of us
No you’re not one of us”
[you know, Silentbob, it’s almost eerie how aligned our views are on this particular subject, no?]
Are liberals making death threats to conservative researchers because they said something they didn’t like? Ha, ha I kid, it’s the other way around.
But that’s the problem. People like Coyne insistently deny that they’re conservatives or right wing, despite the many conservatives and far right assholes they’ve platformed for the past many years. As mentioned, conservatives are honest about who they; Coyne and his ilk keeps playing us out like a fucking fiddle with their obfuscations and “scientific” reasons for hating certain minority groups.
This is self righteous and dishonest
1) Biological sex is a binary defining reproductive roles/potential. It doesn’t govern behaviour, it doesn’t tell you who you can sleep with, it doesn’t deny the existence of trans people. The day a testicle produces ova or an ovary produces sperm there may be an argument for rethinking it, but dishonestly claiming that it has any more relevance than that does not alter reality.
2) Yes I agree.
3) You cant just dismiss an entire field of science because you don’t like the results. I thought science denial was a bad thing?
4) Searching for correlations between things is a perfectly reasonable approach to science. These are then tested again and again to refine and hone the conclusions. Portraying this as a “fishing expedition” is dishonest. This is just the scientific method. That doesn’t mean you should unquestionably accept results, but it does mean that if you don’t like them you should make some genuine attempt to disprove them, not just dismiss them. That is how science works.
5) And yet another UScentric approach to race and racism. We, the citizens of the free world are tired of you exporting your problems. How about trying to fix them instead?
6) Its very easy to “be nice” when you take an outlying example that has probably happened once in recorded history – and very fortunately for you, it happened to you. 99.9% of native Americans are not offended by the sight of an owl, 99.9% of other people don’t care if an owl statue is there or not. 99.9% of people would agree that taking the owl statue down is no big deal that doesn’t make you uniquely nice! However, try and apply this strawman demonstration of your own virtue to something a bit more difficult – say an lgbt flag flying in front of a mosque, trans people in women’s sports, or something equally cultural but less inoffensive than Strigiformaphobia such as religiously-motivated honour killings. Maybe being nice isn’t always that easy when owls aren’t involved?
Finally, the constant description of people who don’t agree with you as extreme right, racist or fascist is just one more demonstration of the illiberality of the modern pseudo-liberal, you know the kind of liberal that claims to be open to dissenting opinion but cant address them honestly or without using slurs.
Why are Coyne’s defenders so incapable of reading for comprehension?
You might want to elaborate PZ Myers. I’m not defending Coyne. I have no idea who Coyne is. I am addressing the gotcha issues raised by this article, which are dishonest in the main.
You are an idiot.
The whole question with evo-psych is whether it is even science or not. It’s not.
To call it a pseudoscience is being polite. It doesn’t even rise to that level.
And what results?
There aren’t any.
It’s all a bunch of just so stories and claiming that all human behavior is identical to white college students in the USA in the last few decades because that is where they draw much of their data from.
I put “Is evo-psych a real science” into Google and got 66,000,000 hits.
.1. The problems with evo-psych would take pages to explain and you don’t have the background and mental ability to understand them.
Have your Thinking Brain service dog read the Wikipedia article to you.
.2. Many and probably most scientists in evolutionary biology and psychology would agree that evo-psych is pretty useless at best and mostly just wrong.
Obvious troll.
I read that and all I got out of it is that you undoubtedly a fascist racist troll.
It’s also obvious that you aren’t very bright or educated.
It’s too bad that you’ve given up on getting that grade school diploma.
This idiot troll is just flat out lying.
In fact, many American Indian tribes are uneasy about owls.
I’m sure among all the tribes, attitudes vary but it is a common one thoughout North America.
The tribe near me on the Pacific coast has the same belief about owls as the Lakota even though they are 1500 miles away.
Your response to the accusation of being unable to debate honestly without using slurs, and calling anybody who doesn’t agree with you “fascist” and “racist”, is to use slurs and call me fascist and racist? In the real world (outside of this apparent echo-chamber) that would be called proving my point would it not?
Naw.
They aren’t slurs.
They are the truth.
You’ve already shown that you are ignorant and lie a lot.
You also ignored the factual points I made about evo-psych because you don’t know anything about evo-psych or anything else.
I’m not wasting any more time on you.
You seem to be confusing ancestral tribal beliefs (ie. fear of owls) with the modern 21st Century person who happens to be native American but understands that an owl is just a bird. Is your assertion that native American people are not capable of assessing the validity of their ancestral beliefs for themselves (seems a bit racist)? Maybe let them decide for themselves?
And you also miss the point I was making. Taking the owl statue down is the decision that LITERALLY EVERYBODY would make in that situation. It is not really an unbiased example of a moral dilemma is it? So the author makes a strawman argument pretending that a very clear moral decision is somehow open to dispute in order to signal his/her virtuosity. Then makes the obvious (in this example) statement “its not hard to respect peoples beliefs”. However it sidesteps ALL of the much more well-known and contemporary examples where the moral choice is not so clear at all. In fact it CAN be hard to respect peoples beliefs when they clash and contradict each other. There is no clash at all in the owl example. Nobody is emotionally attached to owl statues staying in place, so there would be no objections to them being taken down. That is not the case for an lgbt flag in front of a mosque, or trans people in womens sports, or religious honour killings, where the issue is still cultural but the NOT CLEAR CUT. The example is thus dishonest.
faunap @51: We’ve done more than just call you names, and you know it. Your refusal to acknowledge a fact that’s obvious to the rest of us prove you’re way out of your depth here.
In fact, you sound kinda defensive. If seeing criticism of Coyne’s obvious nonsense makes you feel defensive, you should probably step back a bit and ask yourself what that says about you.
Sorry I missed the “factual points” you made about Evolutionary Psychology. All I saw was a Wikipedia link and you saying that explaining your case would “take pages” to explain (so you didnt), and then a slur telling me I dont have the “background or mental ability” to understand. (When you have no idea of my background). You then also used another slur against people who use service dogs and signed off with some angry and unfounded statement.
You seem to be confusing ancestral tribal beliefs (ie. fear of owls) with the modern 21st Century person who happens to be native American but understands that an owl is just a bird.
What, you think Native Americans of earlier times didn’t understand that owls were birds? YOU’RE the one who needs to reassess your ancestral belief that Native Americans were/are superstitious heathen savages.
Is your assertion that native American people are not capable of assessing the validity of their ancestral beliefs for themselves (seems a bit racist)?
No one here made any such assertion, dimwit. There have always been plenty of people, in all eras, who were perfectly capable of holding ancestral beliefs and honestly assessing their validity at the same time.
No Raging Bee, you haven’t. You’ve made one comment telling me that “we” (royal we) have done more than just call me names. Id argue that isn’t the case, and that calling names at all is out of place. To steal a phrase from the article its not hard to respect peoples beliefs”.
And what “fact” am I supposed to be acknowledging here? I’m not sure where you see defensiveness in what I have written. I have been polite and open to discussion, and I’ve not said anything that I cannot back up.
Sorry I missed the “factual points” you made about Evolutionary Psychology.
What, you’re admitting you didn’t read the OP before going off on a defensive tear? We’ll accept your apology, on the grounds that you stop commenting until you’ve actually taken the time to read and understand it.
Raging Bee, right so can we agree that an owl is not a harbinger of death then? And that any accommodation of that belief is an act of kindness not an obligation.
You’ve made one comment telling me that “we” (royal we) have done more than just call me names.
It’s not the royal “we,” moron, it’s the collective “we” — as in, we who have been responding to your flailing nonsense here.
And that any accommodation of that belief is an act of kindness not an obligation.
Actually, we do have an OBLIGATION to show at least some respect for others, as long as we do no harm in the process. Why is that so hard for you to grasp? Didn’t anyone teach you how to get along with others?
Raging Bee, what I read were opinions, not factual points. There seems to be an ongoing problem with unanalytical swallowing of anything that confirms the obvious biases here. How about not getting hung up on owls and addressing the point I made. Try the lgbt flag in front of a mosque one. They ask you to take it down because it offends their belief. What do you do? Go on, the author said its easy to be nice.
“Actually, we do have an OBLIGATION to show at least some respect for others”
You see the irony right?
In fact it CAN be hard to respect peoples beliefs when they clash and contradict each other.
Therefore…what? What’s your point here?
There seems to be an ongoing problem with unanalytical swallowing of anything that confirms the obvious biases here.
So go ahead and show SPECIFICALLY what we got wrong in our “unanalytical swallowing.” CAlling us “biased” doesn’t mean much if you can’t show what we got wrong.
How about not getting hung up on owls…
…says the troll who wrote several paragraphs about owls.
…and addressing the point I made. Try the lgbt flag in front of a mosque one. They ask you to take it down because it offends their belief.
If it’s on mosque property, then they have every right to take it down. If it’s being carried by a person on a public sidewalk near the mosque, or on someone else’s property across the street, then tough shit. Your point…?
My point is that it is not always easy to be nice – as you are demonstrating. Therefore the example provided by the author to show that it is “easy to be nice” is dishonest. I am glad we finally agree. Now if you would like to have a proper, honest discussion about difficult moral issues and the conflicts that arise when strong feelings are involved, and how to go about solving them in a civilised manner then I am open to it. Otherwise you can keep on calling me names and asking yourself why nobody is convinced by your arguments (outside of this weird corner of the internet where everybody is nice to each other, until you dissent).
Raging Bee, what I read were opinions, not factual points.
What I read was, at worst, opinions based on known facts and experience. Either show where they’re actually wrong, or admit they’re right.
My point is that it is not always easy to be nice – as you are demonstrating. Therefore the example provided by the author to show that it is “easy to be nice” is dishonest.
There’s nothing “dishonest” about recounting the incident. Seriously, go back and read about the FULL CONTEXT in which PZ places that incident, and figure out WHY he’s telling that story. Or is that too much reading for you?
Good, an attempt at answering the lgbt flag mosque problem. The “tough shit” approach to problem solving – it really is easy to be nice after all! I’m sure there would be no problems arising from that. You could for example ask why the flag needs to be in front of a mosque? Wouldn’t it be nicer to take it somewhere else to avoid problems? Note the emphasis on what is NICE, as we are trying to examine whether it really is easy to be nice, not decide who is right or wrong. “Tough shit” doesn’t quite fit the umbrella of being nice though does it? Because “tough shit” would be just as valid a response to the native Americans wanting the owls removed wouldn’t it?
Dude, what the fuck is your problem here? None of what you’ve said refutes any of PZ’s original points in response to Coyne’s and Maroja’s rubbish. Are you saying Coyne and Maroja are right about something? If so, what? Or are you saying PZ was wrong in his refutation? If so, none of your flailing defensive whataboutery actually refutes it.
There is no whataboutery here (look up what that means) and none of what I have said is defensive (look that up too). I made observations on the 6 points the author raised, one of which I agreed with and you responded aggressively, then you ask me what my problem is when I reply. Coyne and Maroja are right about some things (the biological sex binary for example), they are wrong about others, and other things are a matter of opinion. On the whole the authors refutation of C and Ms points are weak, designed for a peanut gallery of people with no critical thinking skills and the bullying and abuse doled out by people who “identify” as nice when faced with a difference of opinion is symptomatic of a movement that has lost its way.
It’s readily apparent that faunap has fundamentally misunderstood the OP. Those numbered statements in bold type are the gotcha statements of Coyne et. al..
But alas, faunup can’t read PZ’s paragraphs which explain why Coyne is wrong, even though they immediately follow each point.
<
blockquote> I’m not defending Coyne. I have no idea who Coyne is. I am addressing the gotcha issues raised by this article, which are dishonest in the main. ~ faunap 47
So, you agree that those points are dishonest, did not read or understand the reasons PZ listed as to why they are wrong, but by golly what about LGBTQ flags?
Are you from Berlin? Mosques don’t generally fly flags, but individual groups may choose to fly a LGBTQ pride flag in solidarity.
Love is halal.
No the gotchas I refer to are in the responses to the points. If you read my reply as carefully as you would like me to have read the article then you would realise that.
“Are you from Berlin? Mosques don’t generally fly flags, but individual groups may choose to fly a LGBTQ pride flag in solidarity.”
You see this is a perfect example of not having read things before commenting.
On the whole the authors refutation of C and Ms points are weak…
In other words, no specific rebuttals to any of PZ’s points. Got it.
faunap~ If you read my reply as carefully as you would like me to have read the article then you would realise that.
Your replies are literally, ‘Whatabout LGBTQ flags in front of Mosques.’
What about them? The Mosque in Berlin flying the LGBTQ flag for Pride is the only example of this happening in real life.
Of course, you’re obviously assuming that Muslims would disagree with LGBTQ pride flags, and are currently flailing on about flags because your example is entirely based in Islamophobia.
HI Faunap,
I have a few easy questions if that’s okay. You mentioned that sex was binary and in doing so, said this:
“Biological sex is a binary defining reproductive roles/potential.”
Are there any additional reproductive roles or potential(s) in humans that you can think of?
You also said:
“The day a testicle produces ova or an ovary produces sperm there may be an argument for rethinking it…”
Is this a defining aspect of the binary nature of sex in your opinion?
Are there any other defining aspects of the binary nature of sex, or does everything reduce to what gametes a specific organ produces?
Why does (for example) a testicle have to produce an ovum for there to be more than one sex?
Lastly, are there any determinants of sex other than the presence of specific organs and the gametes they produce?
Thanks.
Louis
Hmmm. Apologies the formatting of that didn’t work. There are 5 questions and they were meant to be number and separate for ease of reading. Mea culpa. I must have borked something.
Nice has nothing to do with reality.
faunap, I see you value your own expertise in these matters and consider yourself well-informed; so, I’m curious…
Care to state your stance regarding the reality of trans people?
Care to state whether in your estimation they actually do exist, or do you think it’s just a form of LARPing? You know, something to be tolerated by nice people, except when it comes to bathrooms and sport and that sort of thing?
(in passing, you do get this is a follow-up post, as noted in the very first sentence of the OP, right?)
[Louis, the list tag doesn’t work here, and there’s a subset of markdown which ignores lonely asterisks]
I’m hoping for some help here.
I was engaged in a way-too-long flame war on Twitter regarding sex not being a binary with the phobes incessantly demanding I produce “peer-reviewed papers by a reasearch biologist showing that sex is bimodal and not a binary.”
And knowing that that isn’t what biologists directly say because that’s a highly reductionist statement, I then proceded to bring forth papers on the development of morphology in humans, how a fetus has both Mullerian ducts which eventually develop into the uterus and Fallopian tubes as well as Wolffian ducts that eventually develop into the vas deferens and epidymis and thus the fetus is, in a sense, “hermaphroditic” until differentiation starts around day 56 (which led to a whole digression about how that term is considered offensive), and after repeated attempts to even get them to define what they mean by “sex,” the best they could come up with was gametes. If you produce big ones, you’re “female” and if you produce little ones, you’re “male.”
I pointed out that there are humans who produce both and humans who produce neither. What “sex” are they?
And they immediately pounced upon the idea that there was ever an example of anybody anywhere having produced both. And I produced papers that showed people who had gonads that showed both ovarian and testicular tissue. That was pooh-poohed as “But there’s only Sertoli cells in the testis, so they didn’t produce sperm!” and when shown a paper indicating someone who had fathered children and yet upon examination of a mass in their groin found it to have ovarian tissue that had histological evidence of having ovulated, claimed that it wasn’t a real case because supposedly none of the other papers that referenced it made mention of the ovulation, so clearly it didn’t happen. Not that those other papers denied that it happened but simply that they didn’t mention it.
And one even demanded evidence of “self-fertilization” insisting that producing both means you need to be able to reproduce using both, which I never claimed and none of the papers I mentioned ever claimed.
And when I pointed out that they’re conveniently ignoring people who don’t produce either gametes, they would insist that they’re just “defective” (yes, after complaining about other terms as offensive) but are still either “male” or “female.”
And yet despite my repeated requests for a definition of “sex” that divides the entire population without any exceptions (how can you be considered a “defective” member of a sex if you don’t have a definition for what that sex is?) for the existence of a single person that doesn’t fit in their binary framework indicates the binary doesn’t exist (leading to them claiming that I was somehow saying there was a third sex or third gamete), they all assiduously avoided giving one.
Now, in the end, I don’t put much truck in their opinions. When we were having the digression on what terms are considered “offensive,” I found a study of Australians people who would be considered “intersex” as to what term is preferred and I caught them outright lying about the cohort. Specifically, the study asked them to describe what it is about themselves that leads them to think of their sex as they do and some of them said their being trans was part of it.
The phobes took that to mean that “The study thinks trans people are intersex! They’re fake!” (and yes, that was the word used: “Fake.”)
I had to point out that the study specifically excluded people who were trans who didn’t also have some other condition that would qualify them as “intersex” (the study listed a panoply of conditions that they were using as being “intersex.”) After all, a person can have, say, mixed gonadal dysgenesis and also be trans and have their status as trans being a defining way in which they look at their being intersex.
So my question for the actual biologists is this: How far off am I? My underlying point is that “sex” is an aggregate of traits that we have divided into two categories of “female” and “male” including, but not limited to, chromosomes, morphology, hormones, tissues, and gametes for which there are quite a number of variations that can happen along each of the traits such that no matter where you draw the line, there will be people who fit one aspect of one “sex” but another aspect of the other “sex” as well as peole and thus, it is not binary. I even found the following chart to help visualize it:
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/File/051_sad0917MontA3p-01.png
This image was pooh-poohed because it was drawn by a graphics editor at Scientific American based upon information she was given by researchers into sex, that it wasn’t “peer-reviewed,” and so on and so forth.
Does anybody have any resources I might use to help? I know that in the end, nothing is going to change their minds, but I would like more resources.
Ah John, one day i shall remember the codes and ways of Pharyngula! Alas today was not that day.
And Lo! Did Louis weep for his formatting went all to cock and there was a wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Louis
@faunap 45
1. What binary? Specifically.
3. “You cant just dismiss an entire field of science because you don’t like the results.”
This is just an accusation. You quoted nothing
4. You appear to feel bad about the label “fishing expedition” , but you do no work to address the reasons given.
5. So what if you have feelings about something to do with race? Type for yourself, you aren’t the world.
6. You should have the stamina to apply your own example.
Incidentally, I’m trying to find where PZ said accommodating people re: the owl thing was being uniquely nice. Or even just nice. Or virtuous. Or that the “niceness” was even relevant to the point he was making. I mean, it just wasn’t.
There seem to be a few other examples of, charitably put, similar misreadings.
I am mildly disappointed.
Louis
@rrhain 82
TL;DR maybe hyperfocusing on breeding and not life’s actual existing variation.
All it takes is one exception, one intersex person (I applaud the desire to know all of that because it’s still useful). Then sex is literally not a binary. It’s not about breeding, it’s just about reality.
After your papers they moved the goalposts, “no you need this specific thing!”. Maybe it’s the weird idea that breeding must be possible, when it just about biology being varied.
Any attribution of the paper saying something is gossiping about the paper. I tend to point out that’s gossip without the part of the paper and start pressing.
General Comment: as a non-binary person I’ve been thinking of using the example of fuck.
Clearly there are intense feelings people can’t really explain well, and that part of our language is very anatomical. And I don’t feel anything but the sensitivity of others. (And good luck legislating against that).
rrhain, I’ve been through similar sessions, so your experience is familiar to me.
It’s less frustrating when one’s expectations are low.
Alas, PZ is an actual biologist, but then so is Coyne, and they obviously don’t share the same interpretation, though they also obviously share the same facts.
I mean come on, “the f-word”, society’s fragility about sex. The gender-null and tourette syndrome definitely have a thing together here.
John Morales of course trans people exist. I’m not sure where I said anything to suggest that they don’t.
No you didn’t.
Pharyngula has a bug in the text editor that drops numbers in front of sentences sometimes.
There is an easy work around though.
Just put a . (period) in front of the number.
I have no idea why it works but it just works.
Don’t do this.
1.
2.
3.
instead do this.
.1.
.2.
.3.
Excellent, faunap. Really!
So you yourself don’t have a problem regarding trans people or their participation in society as their gender. Your problem is that some dispute that biological sex is a binary defining reproductive roles/potential.
That’s correct, no? Not a problem with sports or bathrooms or women’s spaces or that sort of thing. Not a problem with gender affirmation via medical means.
Louis PZ said
So we moved them. It’s not hard to respect people’s beliefs, and it does no harm to the science.
Respecting beliefs would generally be considered being nice, but regardless its semantics. The example of it not allways being easy to respect beliefs still stands.
John Morales. If you were following tge conversation closely you would understand that the point is you talk about respecting beluefs (or being nice or whatever) but you dont really extend that courtesy to those who dont share your beliefs making it an exercise in narcissm. So if you really did resoect beliefs you would have more respect for the women who dont want to share their spaces with trans people. The complexity of the argument as to how you respect beliefs when they are mutually exclusive was the conversation I was trying to have. It seems clear that the solution everybody on this page has to that problem is that we all have to do as you say.
The obsession with sex as a binary here is weird. It is REQUIRED as a concept for trans and homosexual people to even exist. Your attempt to validate nonsense is totally unecessary. Your biological sex is a reproductive classification, nothing more. Just as your nationality just us what it is. Gender is something else altogether, but needn’t have anything to do with biological sex at all, just like it has nothing to do with your nationality or height. By rewriting reality you are driving people away from an important cause. Nobody has time for QAnon style reality deniers who care more about bullying people into silence than winning the fight they claim to be invested in.
It doesn’t look like you were discussing sex. You were discussing gamete production.
It’s not really very relevant when talking about Trans people.
The whole point of Trans people is that their sex assigned at birth doesn’t correspond to their gender identity.
Sex, gamete production, and gender identity are all different.
The Transphobes then either move the goal posts, ignore this fact, or claim like J.K. Rowling that gender identity doesn’t exist.
At that point, you know you are dealing with closed minded bigots and haters and you aren’t going to change their minds.
faunap, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘thanks’ or suchlike would have sufficed.
How am I not really (only sorta?) extend that courtesy to those who don’t share my beliefs?
The veil is slipping.
What about respect for the women who are happy to share their spaces with trans people? Don’t they merit that respect too, in your estimation?
But that’s not the post topic, is it?
(And it’s really not that complex)
Heh. What is it you imagine I say to do? Can you quote that part?
Breeding obsession.
Still wrong because gender identity and breeding are different. But also ants still exist despite workers not breeding.
Were that true, it would follow that, since you are someone and you evidently have time to discuss this matter here, this place is not one where QAnon style reality deniers who care more about bullying people into silence than winning the fight they claim to be invested in reside.
For those, you have no time — though evidently at least some people participate there, so it can’t actually be the case that nobody has the time for it.
(See, that right there is an unwarranted claim you made, easily falsifiable by counterexample. I thought I’d add that in, since it’s clearly the sort of intelligent, rational and fact-based discussion you claim to seek)
Faunap #92,
So you’re putting words into PZ’s mouth. The “niceness” wasn’t the point.
How does “niceness” or “respect” relate to PZ’s point about science?
The key point PZ was making in that paragraph in relation to Coyne’s arguments was to do with cultural beliefs and science.
Louis
Faunap #94,
The obsession with sex as a binary here is weird. It is REQUIRED as a concept for trans and homosexual people to even exist.”
What obsession? It’s a commonly used anti-trans argument, and you insist sex is a binary. Asking about that isn’t obsession. It’s conversation. BTW I asked you some questions about your views on this in #77, if you’d like to answer them of course. No obligation.
Louis
The example of it not allways being easy to respect beliefs still stands.
Your examples involving flags aren’t real. The anecdote about the owls actually happened.
I would also point out that respecting the traditional cultural beliefs of Indians as regards owls is not damaging science in any way.
As far as ‘nice’, PZ in fact said
No idea why faunap is obsessing over nice, since it was incidental to the point that respecting other peoples comfort is easy.
rrhain none of those things you cite indicate that sex is a spectrum. Just as the existence of polydactyly does not suggest that the number of fingers a person has is a spectrum. This is really basic stuff.
Faunap, #93,
“So if you really did resoect beliefs you would have more respect for the women who dont want to share their spaces with trans people.”
Where have I said I don’t respect the beliefs of these women? I think the issue of “spaces” is a highly context-dependent, knotty problem that even all trans people don’t agree on. I also think there are parallels with other “moral panics” in previous decades that were spurred by, if not identical in topic, identical in mechanism, bigotry. These two things (and others) exist simultaneously.
“The complexity of the argument as to how you respect beliefs when they are mutually exclusive was the conversation I was trying to have.”
It’s really not that complex, my old china. And entirely orthogonal to the point PZ was making.
“It seems clear that the solution everybody on this page has to that problem is that we all have to do as you say.”
Could you please point to where I have said this, implied this, or agreed with this. Thanks. You seem to be painting with a broad brush where you have no evidence to support its use.
Louis
raven,
While the trans part of it did come up, it wasn’t really the focus. While I did bring up the aspect of cancer survivors who have their gonads removed and how a common aspect is having to come to terms with what it means to be “be a woman” or “be a man” when you no longer have your gonads, the gamete production was only because that was the only thing they could think of when I asked them to define what “sex” meant. And as I pointed out to them, “female” embryos produce their oocytes while in the womb but spermatogenesis doesn’t start until puberty…does that mean XY fetuses don’t have a sex until then? It can’t be just gamete production. That’s certainly a factor, but it isn’t the end-all/be-all and it isn’t some superceding thing, either.
At one point, someone did try to claim I was confusing sex and gender and I had to remind them that I hadn’t mentioned anything about gender and again asked for what they mean by “sex” such that it can define the entire population without any exceptions.
All that said, I think that the experience of trans people does have something to say about the concept of sex. As I pointed out, my mother had a complete hysterectomy due to medical issues. Does that mean she was no longer “female”? I wouldn’t say that. The fact that she no longer had her ovaries or uterus wasn’t the sole factor. It’s not just the gametes.
But that attitude can also apply to the concept of gender: If a person can still be considered “female” without their ovaries, then surely we can still consider them a “woman” despite them no longer having them. And if that’s true, then why does it matter why a person doesn’t have their ovaries? That’s not the whole of it, I know, but it is something to think about. Intersex is not trans but the way in which we come to terms with one can help us understand how to come to terms with the other.
But yeah, I knew I was dealing with closed-minded bigots from the very beginning. And at this point, it’s more for my own edification. I’ve known that going from single cell to independent being is a long process with a lot of steps, all with a bunch of ways in which they can come out and I’m interested in learning more about the various way in which they do.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite not the ant thing please, that is yet another basic misunderstanding of biology. Nor does the existence of certain biological characteristics in taxonomically distinct species imply anything about human biology. Lions kill the cubs of other males when they take over a pride, ostriches are polygamous, bonobos settle their disputes with sex, ducks commit rape as a mating strategy. All of them are closer evolutionarily to humans than ants.
faunap
Functional gamete sex in humans is a strict binary. Human individuals do not fall into a strict sex binary. There are exceptions are outliers.
Is a person with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity a male or female? This woman is genetically male, phenotypically female, and infertile.
How about human chimeras? There are people out there where literally half the cells in their body are XY and the other half are XX. Have fun with that.
No one is saying there is a third kind of gamete. Everyone here is saying that human individuals cannot be classified in the same way. People here are objecting to the idea that all humans fit nicely into one of two boxes called “male” or “female”, or “man” or “woman”.
Louis yes and the key point about the lgbt flag in front of a mosque was the same, two cultures that might clash yet a solution needs to be found (we have had “tough shit” posited as a solution so far). So again semantics.
faunap
Also, Coyne complained about the term “assigned female at birth”. Well, for women with complete androgen insensitivity, they are genetically male, and they are assigned female at birth. It’s a very useful term, contra to Coyne’s idiocy.
Faunap #108,
You’re not answering the question I asked, which is unfortunate. Here it is again:
How does “niceness” or “respect” relate to PZ’s point about science?”
You seem keen to talk about your irrelevant comments re: flags and “more complex [LOL]” examples of where “niceness”, as you refer to it, is “difficult”. Simply none of which are related to the point PZ was making in that paragraph.
Can’t you answer the question?
Louis
GerrardOfTitanServer no what has happened is that there exists a sex binary that is and always was based on gametes and reproductive organs. Now people have conflated that with gender and extended the definition of the sexes to involve everything from cultural practices, to dress code, to social status, sexual preference and anything else that they can conflate to make the definition as hazy as possible. This does not mean that sex is not a binary. It means that you have redefined sex with the specific intention of making it not a binary. It is understandable why some people felt the need to do this, but it ultimately is self defeating as a tactic for winning trans rights because it requires people to ignore the evidence of their eyes. Now we can agree to disagree on that if you want, but you may as well try and argue that you are a bird because its ornithophobic to suggest that birds have feathers. Anybody can redefine the meaning of words and then tell people that don’t accept that definition they are bigoted.
Louis the “respect” comments were made in a section about culture, not about science. I don’t accept the premise that all culture must be respected, and anybody that does hasn’t thought about it properly. I don’t even accept the premise that all culture CAN be respected – which is the point of the lgbt flag and the mosque example. I respect religious freedoms, I respect gay rights. When they clash head on I have to pick a side, I cant respect both. This was the very simple point I am trying to make. Jesus you people even alienate people on your own side with your dogma.
faunap:
No.
This was a big problem in the nonsense I had to put with on Twitter: The fact that there are two ends of a spectrum doesn’t mean that there are only those two ends. And the fact that a person can recognize those ends and, for a specific purpose, only wish to engage with members on a particular end doesn’t mean they don’t understand that there is a spectrum in between.
A gay person generally prefers sexual activity with members of their own sex. But where does one draw the line? After all, a person who is what one would call a “muscle bear” is not the same as a person who is what one would call a “twink,” and yet both have the same “sex.” Thus, even in the context of a binary, there is a spectrum.
The fact that there is a spectrum doesn’t mean there aren’t poles at the ends of the spectrum. That doesn’t mean there aren’t clusters around those poles.
And congratulations, you just figured out that there are bisexual and pansexual people as well as non-binary and agender people, too.
Troll So if you really did resoect beliefs you would have more respect for the women who dont want to share their spaces with trans people.
Where are you getting the notion that anyone claimed that all beliefs are equally valid and deserve respect?
Nazis believed that they should exterminate trans people, gays, and then worked their way up to genocide against Jews.
I put the ‘hateful people who shriek about trans women in bathrooms’ in the same category as Nazi beliefs. Haters gotta hate.
I would sooner punch them than respect their irrational trans-panic.
faunap
By your definition, it appears that a person does not have a sex; only gametes do. Is this correct? If not, please tell me the sex of the 50 50 XY XX human chimeras, and please tell me the sex of the “assigned female at birth” XY person with complete androgen insensitivity.
faunap:
That’s an incoherent claim.
(Think about it)
And that’s a claim that contradicts itself.
(Think about it)
—
I know, I know… it’s hard to keep that veil in place while dancing around the issue.
we have had “tough shit” posited as a solution so far). So again semantics.
LGBTQ flags in front of Mosques is not actually a problem that exists anywhere but in fauntrolls mind, as is the supposed response of tough shit.
I noted that Islamophobia and projection underlies faunap’s flag example but apparently that just “semantics”.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite worker ants are non-reproductive females. Non-reproductive females exist in humans too. They are still female.
Faunap #122
Ah I see, you didn’t read it. Here’s the relevant part for you. Quoting PZ:
“The only experience I’ve had with our Indian students that comes even close is that, several years ago, some visitors commented on the fact that we had a display of mounted owls at the entrance to our atrium, which was mildly offensive to Native Americans who regarded owls as symbols of death. So we moved them. It’s not hard to respect people’s beliefs, and it does no harm to the science.
No one teaches that cultural preferences are equivalent to what we teach in physics, chemistry, and biology.”
Bolding mine. This is the important point because it directly addresses the claim made by Coyne:
“6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such. “
So, the error Coyne et al. are making is a common one. The essential claim is that other epistemological methods derived from a variety of global cultures are being inserted into scientific methodology, or held up as being epistemologically equal or equivalent, because of political/sociological considerations. This is not what is happening. These non-scientific epistemologies absolutely do not have the same explanatory power, epistemological rigour, structure or output as the scientific method.
PZ’s point about “respecting” the beliefs of other cultures was addressing this claim, and refuting it. A sociological appreciation of cultural epistemologies does not either by implication, effect, or any other mechanism equalise them with scientific rigour or method. The owls story is, in relation to this, very simple: Owls were moved to accommodate a cultural belief, the science remained unaffected. “Move owls” is irrelevant to “how science is done”. See?
I am surprised that, given the proximity of those sentences in the paragraph you were unable to read them for what amounts to basic comprehension. I apologise on PZ’s behalf for this being so complex a point.
Louis
Faunap, #118,
“Non-reproductive females exist in humans too. They are still female.”
How are they still female? Based on what criteria?
I ask because I am curious about YOUR views.
Louis
@faunap 103
“rrhain none of those things you cite indicate that sex is a spectrum. Just as the existence of polydactyly does not suggest that the number of fingers a person has is a spectrum. This is really basic stuff.”
So basic you don’t see that you undermined yourself and presented a spectrum.
@106
“Brony, Social Justice Cenobite not the ant thing please, that is yet another basic misunderstanding of biology. Nor does the existence of certain biological characteristics in taxonomically distinct species imply anything about human biology. Lions kill the cubs of other males when they take over a pride, ostriches are polygamous, bonobos settle their disputes with sex, ducks commit rape as a mating strategy. All of them are closer evolutionarily to humans than ants.”
No. You deal with the examples given. So humans aren’t ants? Your need to breed was refuted and you offer nothing about humans and choosing to breed. You made a species level observation and what are you calling female? Ants don’t have breasts.
Deal.
And yes I deliberately chose breasts knowing the gamete dance was a possibility. But again, literally not about breeding, about what is.
John Morales amigo you strike me as one of those people that everybody avoids at parties. There is no contradiction and no incoherence. That conclusion would be reached only by somebody who is intolerant of diverse opinion (ie. dogmatic) and has convinced themselves of their own infallibility – its a sign of inexperience, not wisdom. It is possible to hold two positions that sometimes require you to pick one over the other. You might believe murder is wrong, until you find somebody abusing your child. You might be anti-war, until the invading force reaches your town. You might believe culture should be respected, until that culture involves female genital mutilation. None of those are incoherent or contradictory positions. They are all justifiable in their own way.
Even better! Now they presented toes as a binary and lots of other things happen.
John Morales is a troll. Don’t mind him. I’d suggest just ignoring him.
All those feelings about John and parties. Maybe they shouldn’t have mentioned feelings earlier. That’s part of every human sentence.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite ok you don’t understand what a spectrum is, we have clarified that. Ants don’t have breasts? What is a gamete dance? John Morales, this here is an example of real incoherence if you are looking for it.
A gamete dance is something young people do at their discos.
Damn you, young people! With your music. And hair!
Louis
@faunap 127
I don’t see you explaining anything useful about spectra. And you can reply to the point behind the breast reference.
Louis: “No one teaches that cultural preferences are equivalent to what we teach in physics, chemistry, and biology.”
Except they do, so whether you bold it or not it does not make it true. Now you can quibble about the definiton of “equivalent” here, but if its taught in science class then it is taught as science. We have been through this with the insistence on teaching Creationism in science class on the basis that it is a “theory” as valid as any other.
See the pdfs below.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1218151.pdf
https://ethnobiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13002-020-00373-5
Actually there may be multiple spectra underlying foot morphology including polydactyly based on the underlying developmental processes. But that’s just a non-binary way of looking at it. Because feet are feet.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite only mammals have breasts. Ants aren’t mammals. So no ants don’t have breasts. I’m afraid I’m going to have to file you under not worth responding to if you are incapable of grasping that what goes for ants does not go for humans.
@faunap
Keep ignoring the stuff before that part of my comment. And the point behind the breasts. It shows your bad faith.
What are you calling female faunap? HA!
I think the “spectrum” thing is (a tiny bit) interesting. Do spectra have discrete values like quanta? For example, are the whole numbers a spectrum? Or are spectra characterised by being a series of continuous variables like in the original use of the word “spectrum” with wavelengths of light.
Of course we now know light is quantised, and therefore the spectrum contains discrete values. {Waggles eyebrows}
So how many discrete values makes a spectrum? Like a heap is it about 11? If so, 11 fingers is a spectrum!
(I am not entirely serious here)
Louis
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite consider yourself filed under crackpot.
Oh noes! A non-literal reference to broken pots!
I think I’ll make it.
Feelings attached to broken pots are just feelings. You can keep whatever instincts create that reliance.
Louis there is really no value to viewing biological sex on a spectrum. I seriously don’t understand why people think this is key to the argument. It literally undermines it by invalidating homosexuality. It is perfectly possible to respect diversity without redefining the entire world and then insisting everybody bow to it on pain of shrill screaming. There is an element of the North Korea to this approach. At some point if you continually attack people who refuse to accept your opinion, they will just reply in the affirmative to make you go away and leave them alone. You might think that is winning the argument, but when people get tired of it then you are going to send us all back to the Stone Age. Forced compliance is a very poor substitute for a solid argument that everybody can get behind. (eg. don’t mention ants!)
faunap
Still waiting for you to respond to my latest.
PS:
Apart from John, Brony is the only other person here that I would say outright trolls people sometimes. I’d just ignore them too.
Only gays have spectra? Someone should tell the other neurodivergent. I guess that’s appropriation now.
Lol, now the troll claims that science doesn’t include things like Anthropology or Sociology.
Notice how the value to those who don’t fit the binary don’t seem to exist to faunap? Or is it they actively want to exclude their value from the equation? No one is arguing against breeding existing.
Protip:
You can have a reasonable definition of homosexuality without a strict dichotomy of human individual sex. A spectra with two peaks is enough. Not everyone needs to fit into nice little simple categories. The goal of science is to simplify as much as possible while remaining correct but no further. You’re simplifying so much that it’s no longer correct.
And still waiting for you to respond to my challenges / questions.
Odd.
I don’t see a purpose to faunap’s behavior and I’m a troll. Other than society’s gossip about anatomy and behavior. faunap is boring typical there. I don’t see one thing they bring outside of their own opinion on human development.
Fortunately I can just keep doing.
GerrardOfTitanServer you can have a reasonable definition of homosexuality with two peaks until somebody between the peaks decides they are one or the other and accuses the homosexual person of transphobia. We know that is happening and we know invariably its lesbians who are the targets, so its really the exceptions here which prove the rule.
Regards ypur other points can you tepeat them please. You at least seem like a reasonable person willing to discuss things sincerely.
Faunap, #130,
I’m aware of creationists and their wily ways, thanks. I’m going out on a limb and thinking PZ is too! (Modest understatement). And I bolded that line for emphasis because you didn’t read it or understand it before. Obviously so. Formatting is not an epistemological methodology.
The point I was making was about your false and irrelevant claim that PZ’s point in that paragraph was about “niceness”, which it wasn’t. It was about how dealing with cultural beliefs is not the same thing as according them the same epistemological merit as the scientific method.
PZ and Coyne (and I) would all agree that creationists trying to teach creationism as science is…delicately put…an error. We’d also all agree that to varying degrees across the years, this has been dangerous for American (in particular) education, but not for science. As we would all agree that teaching cultural beliefs as science is an error. Coyne is still huffing and puffing about an essentially non-existent problem that poses no threat to science. Why? Because all this was done and dusted decades ago in the Postmodernism Wars. The odd whackaloon teaching something daft does not an existential threat to science make. Threats to science as an enterprise from pseudoscientists and assorted agenda driven persons wax and wane. As a scientist, a real one, not just one on the internet, the threats to science that concern me and my colleagues are not someone teaching creation myths.
Oh and this:
“Now you can quibble about the definiton of “equivalent” here, but if its taught in science class then it is taught as science”
Is flat out bullshit. No quibbling. It’s abject nonsense. HOW something is taught matters way more than WHERE it is taught. “People X believed Y, but actually all the best science we have to date disproves that, and actually Z is the case”, is not endorsing Y. In lectures the history of a particular scientific phenomenon is often used to contextualise it. No one believes in the plum pudding model of the atom any more, but it’s taught in chemistry and physics classes (or it was when I were a lad) as an example of ideas that eventually lead to a modern understanding of the atom. Swing and a miss my pedigree chum.
What is, ironically for Coyne and other sundry hand-wringers about those oh-so-terrible liberals, is that it is precisely the sort of “right-wing” people they are making apologetics for who ARE posing a real threat to science with their fact-free censorious nonsense, populist drivel, and exercising of real political power in the service of their various bigotries and denialism (e.g. pretending climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic).
If you’re going to be pedantic about PZ’s “no one” then you’ve already conceded you a) didn’t understand his original point, and b) you’ve essentially lost the argument re: “nice”. Why? Every single person on this blog, which originated in part as an anti-creationist blog, knows creationism is shoehorned into classrooms in some places. None of which changes the fact that Coyne’s claims about cultural beliefs being elevated to the same epistemological status as science are false. Like I said above, one swallow does not a summer…or an orgy…make.
Simply put, you’re nitpicking to escape the fact you’ve made an error re: “niceness” etc. Which is very funny in context.
Now, considering two very important things: a) your utter inability to answer politely asked questions, and b) it’s nearly 02:00 here in the most U of Ks, my very finite tolerance of obvious muppets has reached its terminus for the day.
Louis
Someone who practices not what they preach is called a hypocrite, Gerrard.
(Posting comments about me is hardly ignoring me, is it?)
—
Anyway, faunap’s grasp of simple logic and their stance regarding trans people is clear enough.
(Runty specimen of sealion)
By your definition, it appears that a person does not have a sex; only gametes do. Is this correct? If not, please tell me the sex of the 50 50 XY XX human chimeras, and please tell me the sex of the “assigned female at birth” XY person with complete androgen insensitivity.
I don’t see how lesbians are the target. I imagine that there might be a (very) small number of people in here that say it’s transphobic for a lesbian to refuse to date any trans-woman, but I think the large majority would say such demands are silly, and that one’s personal preferences on who you want to sex are a personal matter and we shouldn’t be calling people racist or transphobic about it. — However, if you go out of your way to advertise your preferences publicly, it can quickly become something that most of us here would condemn. Ex, imagine saying publicly at the diner that I don’t date black women because of reasons X. That’s racist and deplorable. For me, personally, I think it’s ok to list on dating profiles, but I imagine some here might disagree. I actually don’t know.
there is really no value to viewing biological sex on a spectrum.
Tell me you are cis without telling me you are cis.
redefining the entire world and then insisting everybody bow to it on pain of shrill screaming. There is an element of the North Korea to this approach.
Nobody is redefining biological sex. Nobody is making you bow to the biological reality that human sexual differentiation isn’t limited to two categories. Transgender and intersex people have always existed. Acknowledging that scientific fact is as simple as moving a display of owls.
North Korea? Hyperbole much, or are you just that much of a delicate snowflake that you need to resort to crying victimhood rather than attempting to present a coherent rational for your hateful opinions?
GerardTitan Biological sex is defined by reproductive potential nit solely by gametes. If you are one of the 100 or so cases amongst the 7 billion people on earth who is XX XY then a quick look between your legs will suffice to determine your sex. If you can carry a baby you are not male. I would be intetested to know how many of the tiny number of chimaeras identify with the opposite sex to their genitalia. Anomalies are not evidence of a spectrum. If the next point you are going to make is intersex people, then again anomalies are not evidence of a spectrum. An anomaly by definition contrasts with the norm, but there is no benefit at all in placing everything on skewed spectra purely to justify a geographically isolated ideology that has existed for less than a decade.
So why are breasts considered female? And estrogen. And XX…
And the deliberate need to exclude existing people. Such a dependence on tracking anatomy in language. Looks like a weakness to me.
Basically, special pleading. I think it’s closer to 1% that don’t fit nicely into one of the boxes compared to 0.0001% or whatever number you quoted. And even if it was that low, it’s still a spectrum. You can’t just ignore inconvenient data. That’s textbook special pleading.
The literal result of the natural human population is a spectrum. Sloppy human existence is always full of things that defy categories that require choices to exclude.
I’m watching someone choose to exclude because breeding , but they still exist. They didn’t go away and I want a competent language.
And, so, what? XY women with complete androgen insensitivity are male? Why? It’s not because of gametes because they don’t make any (not functional anyway). So, then, what about XXY and XYY people? Altogether, that’s way more than one out of a million.
Louis the distinction between niceness and respect is a very slender one. You are overblowing the semantics to flog a dead horse. I assume you didn’t read the attachments sent. Or perhaps you did which is why you went from “nobody” wanting to teach cultural beliefs in the science classroom to just a few cranks doing it (or words to that effect – Im not as pedantic regards direct quotation in fringe internet groups as you are).
Faunap #139,
That post addresses nothing I said, and is just your projection of a large quantity of drivel dredged from what I can only imagine passes for your “mind”. Big Yikes! Reading for basic comprehension seems to elude you. You also seem to have a penchant for being undeservingly patronising. Not good traits in an interlocutor. This means I shall move from being polite to mocking you. Sorry, you no longer deserve my seriousness.
.1) I’ve asked you questions about your claims regarding the biology of sex as a binary. You haven’t answered them. My suspicion is because you can’t.
.2) If sex is not a binary this does not invalidate homosexuality (or heterosexuality for that matter). Homosexuality observably exists. It’s not going to mysteriously vanish, nor does recognising the complexity of biology harm homosexuals in any manner. The existence of intersex people does not mean gay people don’t exist or that their sexual preferences are invalid. Neither does the existence of trans people. Heterogeneity in human biology, behaviour, and sociology exists. Nothing fits into a discreet box. So this is both a strawman and incoherent from you. Bravo, a twofer!
.3) No one is redefining the entire world. At the very “worst”, people are recognising the complexity of gender, the sociology of “man” and “woman” as descriptors and/or social phenomena, and the intricacies of biological sex. These are different phenomena. No redefinitions needed. Just because you are ignorant, it doesn’t follow everyone else is. Another strawman from you.
.4) Please point to where I have insisted everybody bow to anything on the pain of shrill screaming. I haven’t. Projection and misattribution. You are clearly borderline incoherent.
.5) North Korea? My dude, you’re off your tiny chump!
.6) I haven’t attacked you (well now I AM taking the absolute piss, but frankly, you’ve earned it and more). You don’t know what MY opinions are. I’ve asked you a series of, as yet, unanswered questions that you clearly don’t understand.
.7) If my desire was to make you go away, how’s that worked? Not well!
.8) I don’t think you or anyone going away is winning any argument. I’m also certain that making you go away, even if I could, would not send anyone back to the Stone Age. You’re just not that important, son. Your potential exit does remind me of a song though. “Girl, don’t go away mad. Girl, just go away!”. Ahh Motley Crue. So wise. So so wise.
.9) What forced compliance have I asked for or enacted? Oh it’s none. I haven’t done this. Excellent. More projection from you.
.10) I faithfully promise not to mention ants. Wait, does that count as mentioning ants? Does that!? OH MY GOD I AM MENTIONING ANTS!?
Enjoy your hair.
Louis
.
.
It’s much more messy than what you think. It is much more of a spectrum than what you think. There are way more outliers than what you think. A lot of people don’t nearly fit into boxes based on gamete production (because a lot of people will never product functional gametes), nor genetics (see chimeras, XXY, XYY), and because the simple sex chromosome test fails for a lot of people (e.g. XY women with complete androgen insensitivity).
So, you’re wrong about the number of outliers, and you would still be wrong ala special pleading if the number of outliers was as small as you thought.
Sex is still pretty complicated biologically in humans.
Faunap #156,
I read the links, not that I needed to. I’m aware of creationism etc. No one but you has been arguing about niceness, respect or otherwise. The point PZ was making above was to do with dealing with other cultures reasonably as it relates to science and “threats” to science. Per the overblown claims of Coyne.
You had to point to PZ’s “no one” because that kind of prevarication is all you have.
Sweetie, you got nuthin’. You’re just making shit up.
Louis
I could offer the story of a cow, who despite having all the anatomy normally associated with being a cow, insisted on spending breeding season mounting all the other cows, and consequently aborting her own pregnancies.
Since that doesn’t result in milk, the dairy farmer sold her for meat.
Transgender and homosexual traits are not limited to humans, or even mammals.
Both phenomena are widely observed in animals. Plants require an even wider spectrum to account for the possible variations between male and female reproductive organs.
A true gem, that is. :)
Where are the genes for the characteristics we conceptually tie to gametes faunap? Are they all on the X or the Y? Or is it more complex than that?
How does female relate to that? Have you seen people online that refer to “females”? That’s another version of this.
Did they know chromosomes, or obsess about genitals in the past?
Gerard 1 in 2000 people is born with a limb reduction. Having arms is not on a spectrum. 1 in 100,000 people is a Siamese Twin. Again this is not a spectrum. Nobody denies the existence of anomalies or that such people should be treated with respect, but their anomalies shpuldn’t be utilised to push an anti-science ideological agenda.
Louis I didn’t reply to you because your comments were long and boring. A lot of people are demanding I answer them you may have noticed. You were obe of the less interesting, along with the ant breast person. You can go to bed now, I don’t want to keep you up.under the pretence that I’m reading ypur comments.
Tethys nobody here is denying the existence of transgender or homosexuality as perfectly normal. Nor would it require a gay cow to make that point valid.
Tourette syndrome is 1:200. The personality type isn’t compatible with being ignored. And that and the resistance to symbolically negative feeling language is probably the point to the species.
And a species wide fraction is still a natural part of what we are. Even the smaller numbers.
And we don’t individually have to justify our existence to faunap. We can choose what we want to do with these characteristics and instinct sets.
[meta]
Louis: “You also seem to have a penchant for being undeservingly patronising.
“You can go to bed now, I don’t want to keep you up.under the pretence that I’m reading ypur comments.
faunap: “You can go to bed now, I don’t want to keep you up.under the pretence that I’m reading ypur comments.”
—
Anyway. Remember how you wrote this, faunapee?
“I have been polite and open to discussion”
We can certainly see that.
Mind you, I personally think telling someone you’re not reading their comments is less than an optimal mode of discussion. Clearly, you don’t.
(Wimpy sealion pee is wimpy)
It’s weird how faunap totally ignores the non-binary angle with numbers. Is it a strategic thing?
You’d think they would have pursued that profanity point if they actually cared.
Brony I really struggle to understand your messages. I’m.sure you are making some great points but I’m not understanding any of them.
John Morales you have a good night mate. I’m just going to go talk to somebody oooooover there now, ok?
That crackpot thing didn’t do anything to me but an urge to dissect another useless political non-literalism. Should I be understanding when it comes to people who need politeness?
Look at all of the quoting of things faunap doesn’t understand.
BTW, faunap: regarding your “Tethys nobody here is denying the existence of transgender or homosexuality as perfectly normal.”
See, the term you should have used for grammatical concordance was ‘transgenderism’ in parallel with ‘homosexuality’, or else ‘homosexual’ likewise with ‘transgender’.
There are many examples of this sort of thing sprinkled throughout your effusions, such as “a spectra”. Little solecisms that are indicative.
All that aside, your efforts at a pretending to a consistent narrative are kinda patchy; you worry about women worrying about transgender people, without realising that some transgender people are women.
Face it, you can’t both hold that transgender people are real (because the set of women then must includes trans women) and that women worry about trans women in women’s spaces.
The obvious hidden premise here is that trans women are actually men and thus don’t belong in women’s spaces.
I get that you don’t see that, of course.
This was established above, when you imagined “Jesus you people even alienate people on your own side with your dogma.” makes sense.
Let me help you think about it:
‘you people’ refers to the set of people with whom you are interacting in this thread; and
‘with your dogma’ means that all members of that set share a dogma; and
‘alienate people on your own side with your dogma’ means members of that set alienate each other by virtue of that dogma.
Again: perhaps actually think about it.
(It’s really not complicated)
No worries, mate. Some number of hours hence, when darkness falls and the crepuscular light bathes my visage, I shall begin the process of having a good night. Thanks for the suggestion.
(Shame, I thought you came here for an argument. :) )
[oops, that was Gerrard. Sorry, a misattribution. Same sort of thing, but not you in this case, faunap. ]
165
Odd then that you shrilly insist that defining human gender as a spectrum is not scientifically correct.
Intersex births are not identical with transgender, but the two categories overlap as far as statistics are concerned. Being born intersex isn’t always apparent just by looking at an infants genitals. Some conditions do not manifest until the human undergoes puberty, and others are simply never diagnosed without genetic testing because they look exactly like all the other perfectly normal human infants.
Science says the percentage of humans who don’t fit into either the male or female gender ends of the spectrum is between 3% and 7%, depending on criteria. 1 in 1000 births isn’t all that rare, though obviously it’s a minority of the human population.
I mean, it’s transparent. Obvious as fuck.
Take .
Some people don’t see how that claim is metaphorically a klaxon hollering .
“Don’t mention the war!”
huh.
Quietude has descended.
It wasn’t one tweet – did you even read my post? She retweeted two separate articles from Quillette directly and she retweeted Dawkins and Krauss retweeting two different Quillette articles. That’s four Quillette articles that I know of. There are probably more. Clearly she has no qualms about promoting Quillette no matter how right-wing and racist it is.
Oh wait, I just found another Quillette article she retweeted directly.
https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1368422287217729539
We also know she has no problem hobnobbing with Michael Shermer, a long-time (even longer than Pinker) promoter of the race pseudoscience BS invented by J. P. Rushton. And she thinks Pinker’s reactionary politics/evolutonary psychology screed The Blank Slate is “one of the most important books of the century.”
https://www.pinkerite.com/2023/05/sabine-hossenfelder-and-intellectual.html
She is, indisputably, the worst.
So if you really did resoect beliefs you would have more respect for the women who dont want to share their spaces with trans people.
God’s balls, faunap, you’re still spouting that old “you can’t call yourselves tolerant if you don’t tolerate intolerance” bullshit? PRATTs dismissed.
Biological sex is defined by reproductive potential nit solely by gametes.
No, it’s not — other factors having nothing to do with “reproductive potential” also play a role in defining one’s sex. Also, to the extent that “look between your legs” is how you figure out what sex you are (as you alleged), it doesn’t really matter if what you find there actually has “reproductive potential.” Your comments are starting to sound like that long-disproven essentialist thinking that underlies early Christian “Natural Law Theory.” Another PRATT dismissed.
Why did this thread put the Bevis and Butthead sex education scene in my head?
Any person who objects to sharing space with trans people can fuck right off out of that space if they don’t like it. You don’t get to force trans people out just to make bigots comfortable.
@163.faunap :
1) What makes you think they are pushing such a supposed agenda?
2) Who exactly is pushing this agenda doing this and what specifically is it?
3) How is it anti-Science given the pro-Trans people side has science on their side and the transphobic side does not?
Have you read PZ Myers – a qualified biologist and thus expert remember – posts on what the science says here?
Like this one?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/11/22/mrpeterlmorris-demands-that-i-explain-gender-and-all-of-biology-to-him/
Plus this one :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/12/23/a-science-writer-who-doesnt-understand-the-difference-between-binary-and-bimodal/
In addition to this one :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/18/the-idea-of-two-sexes-is-simplistic-biologists-now-think-there-is-a-wider-spectrum-than-that/
Among many more. FYI, this blog like other FTB ones has a search bar and function. Top right hand side of screen magnifying glass icon. You know how to use it I presume?
I failed to address this ridiculous part of faunap’s claim.
Multiple ancient Mesopotamian cultures and the later Greek and Roman societies had an awareness that gender was a spectrum, rather than being limited to male or female. Transgender humans are represented in art and literature nearly as far back as human art and literature exists.
Acknowledging reality is in no way an ideology, difficult, new, or geographically isolated. The geographically isolated bit is especially bizarre, considering that the commentariat in this thread is an international group.
These gamete obsessives are so dogmatically obtuse!
Things existing outside of a binary model show that a binary model does not accurately reflect reality. Instead of declaring everything outside of your binary model an “anomaly”, have you ever thought of getting a better model?
Also, google “quigley scale”.
Human sexual differentiation is binary!
What about these people who don’t fit the binary?
They’re anomalies!
What makes them anomalies?
Because human sexual differentiation is binary!
As for the claim human sexual differentiation has only been conceived as more than a binary for less than a decade – don’t make me tap my Dworkin quote from 1974:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/08/30/a-good-analysis-even-with-the-wittgenstein/#comment-2147344
Oh no! Some random on the internet thinks my comments are long and boring!* However will I survive such trenchant criticism?
Somehow, I will struggle on.
Louis
*Even the short ones with interesting questions this muppet can’t answer are long and boring**…. Hmmm MAKE YOU THINK!
**What’s more long and boring than someone who trots out well disproven drivel, insists by assertion alone that what he/she is saying is true and doesn’t engage with anything anyone has actually said? This is a shit chew toy. Bring me a better one.
[throws Louis a catnip-stuffed mouse]
John, #167
This particular new interlocutor was/is pretty weak sauce.
Can’t answer simple questions, asserts without evidence, can’t read for basic comprehension, LOVES a strawman, vomits forth the usual kindergarten understanding of biology etc. I demand better from my morons. I have higher standards nowadays, dontcher know
{sips tea with pinky extended}
I was nice for at least eight and a half posts too. That’s, like, a personal record.
Louis
A huge number of cultures going back as far as we have history have had a third gender or multiple genders.
If anything, the ancient (1950s) American Midwest culture is the outlier.
A few examples from a quick Google search.
.1. Faʻafafine Wikipedia
Faʻafafine are people who identify themselves as having a third gender or non-binary role in Samoa, American Samoa and the Samoan diaspora.
.2. In French Polynesia, there is a sociological and anthropological condition called RaeRae or Mahu. A RaeRae is a man who behaves as and considers himself to be a woman.
.3. Muxes, a group long recognized within the indigenous Zapotec people of Mexico, are often referred to as a third gender. Embodying characteristics of both men and women, their existence challenges the gender binary that is so deeply entrenched in Western society.Apr 7, 2023
.4. Many indigenous communities recognize at least four genders (feminine female, masculine female, feminine male, masculine male), and most indigenous communities and tribes have specific terms for sexual and gender fluid members. The Two-Spirit tradition is primarily a question of gender, not sexual orientation.
.5. Hijras are officially recognised as a third gender throughout countries in the Indian Subcontinent, being considered neither completely male nor female.
This is BTW, one of those Indigenous ways of knowing that Coyne dismissed because he is an ideologically driven creep.
It’s also one of the many areas where evo-psych just fails big time.
There are hundreds of cultures in the world, only one of which is the modern Western one.
And cultures change rapidly in Real Time.
Evo-psych often uses white middle class American college students from a few decades ago as their subjects and then tries to pretend this is universal, genetically programmed behavior that was adaptive to our cave person ancestors in the Paleolithic.
Lous, indeed. This one had no stamina, either.
—
Notable is how actual trans people didn’t bother to engage the sealion; they’re understandably tired of it, and being talked about as a sort of abstract issue by cis people surely gets rather annoying quickly enough.
Thing is, if they told me to stop, I probably would.
Because it’s their lives that are under discussion.
Anyway.
OP is a rebuttal to Coyne’s claims, and it still stands.
John,
Yeah, playing with sealions is universally pointless except for shits and giggles. Even that has limited fun potential and can, arguably, be seen as harmful. I totally get why trans people NOPE the hell out of these discussions. I normally do nowadays. I’ve done my time in the tranches with the pathologically bad faith interlocutors.
Once in a while it’s worth surfacing to ask a question and watch the hyperventilating and evasion. Mockery is one of the British values I treasure the most.
Louis
@45. & then various # faunap :
Seriously has anyone seen anyone use “biological sex” in a non-transphobic way? Rule of thumb and possible exceptions but in general..
Quite so. OTOH, dismissing a pseudoscience that isn’t real science but is masquerading as science when it isn’t science is a whole other different thing. That’s what’s happeneing here. Also the irony of someone saying that you can’t dismiss science for disliking its results on this issue since science says that, yeah, gender is a continuum and gender isn’t binary.
Emphasis added. Did people here say it was “always easy” to be nice? Don’t think so. Anyhow your bait’n”switch noted when it comes to trans PEOPLE in women’s sport. Deceptive framing much? How about trans men in in women’s sport & trans women in men’s sport- Oh wait, that’s what the transphobes insist upon. Better, how about transwomen are women and thus belong in women’s sport since women’s sport is for women cis and trans alike? Oh & I think you meant “more” offensive rather than “less” there too.
(The Islamophobia in your questions has already been nicely deconstructed by others here.)
PS. its actually capitalised beingan acronymn and all – LGBT(QUIA+)
@faunap :
&
&
I could swear I saw the old “echo chamber” cliche thrown up by our latest troll here too but yeah.. So, who comes in doing the name-calling and bullying again?
In faunap ‘s first (I think?) comment here at that.
One side of this topic wants to be allowed to live and not face bullying, harrassment and yes, worse. The other tranphobic side openly wants trans people exterminated so .. yeah.
@faunap: You have big “Notice me, senpai” energy and I hate to tell you but senpai ain’t gonna notice you or freaking care.
Also: no one here is gonna debate you. You’re wrong.
Lastly: no one here is going to be nice to you. Bigots don’t deserve nice things. “Off” is the general direction in which you should fuck.
@faunap:
No.
This is what happens when you only read the headline and don’t read the actual paper. From your second source:
Local and scientific knowledge in the school context: characterization and content of published works
Here’s what it actually said:
Hmmm…seems like it’s saying that there is a difference between the two.
And look, it even defines it:
So does that mean they’re endorsing the teaching of what is termed “local knowledge” as scientific?
Nope.
Instead, this study is dealing with how to use local knowledge to teach scientific concepts. It gives, as an example, a class where “students were encouraged to interview local elderly people about plants that could be used as food. A recipe contest was then held using those plants as a reference. Thus, in this way, cultural information on the use of food plants was recovered and organized. Scientific learning was also fostered through the establishment of a herbarium.”
It’s essentially saying that when teaching science, it’s good to have ways to show how the knowledge can be applied to your day-to-day life rather than just as abstract concepts. And look! It says so outright:
Are you really complaining that a curriculum that seeks to use the science being taught in a practical application that has cultural significance to the students is a bad thing?
Your first source is similar, but let’s have you do your own homework and read it.
@faunap:
No.
We’ve been through this. The existence of a spectrum does not make the poles that define the ends of the spectrum irrelevant. By this logic, nobody can have a favorite color because color is a spectrum. And yet, people have favorite colors, proving your assertion false.
It is impossible to respect diversity without recognizing it. And to whine about being called out for your bigotry when you’re caught simply compounds your failure. You might think that stamping your precious little foot is winning the argument, but when people keep seeing you present yourself as a garbage person then you are going to wind up alone. See, we can pontificate and bluster just as easily as you.
The irony of you whining about “forced compliance” is palpable.
@faunap:
Which doesn’t happen.
Oh, I’m sure you can find some YouTube yahoo saying it, but idiots exist everywhere. Look at you, for example. You took this notion seriously. For every YouTube yahoo you can find, I can show you dozens more trans people calling them out.
We know that this doesn’t happen and we know that trolls pretend that it does.
@18. lotharloo & #23.a tired raccoon & #26 Nancy McClernan pplus well everyone here really :
Regarding Sabine Hossenfelder here – this clip by
eigenchris & lasting 53 minutes might be worthwhile viewing perhaps?
I suspect Brave Sir Faunap’s run away, boldly run away away. After all we’re such bullies what with the talking and the deconstructing and demolishing their transphobic lies and all.. not like we’re advocating actual extermination of whole groups of people (See : https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-speaker-transgender-people-eradicated-1234690924/ ) or actually threatening physical violence and murder .. ( See : https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-nonbinary-community-in-2023 ) yeah. Obvs content WARNINGS.
John Morales:
I was doing the dishes. And fixing the mower. And spending time with people who love me. Speaking only for myself, of course; others’ mileage may vary.
The time and attention he spends here is time and attention he doesn’t spend elsewhere, maybe someplace where it would add to trans people’s load than this does. Good on ya. Carry on.
Grace
It is a good video – demonstrating Hossenfelder’s selective use of sources or use of bad sources, which I believe is the result of her own political/ideological leanings. But Hossenfelder, like so many others associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” appears to have the conviction that her views are pure objective rationality, while those who disagree with her are purely ideological/political, as revealed in one of her tweets.
https://www.pinkerite.com/2023/05/sabine-hossenfelder-quillette-racism.html
Which is straight out of the Anna Krylov playbook.
https://www.pinkerite.com/2021/08/anna-krylov-and-perils-of-bullshit-part.html
WMDKitty #189.
I hope that’s nip-free catnip. I’m trying to cut back. I had a small….nip problem.
Okay that sounds WAY worse than I meant it.
Louis
Grace, I hear you.
Obs, I am only speaking for myself and about my own perceptions, too.
Kinda amuses me people often think (and have called me) a trans activist when I engage them on the topic. I’m not, other than in those circumstances in a functional sense. Just saying what I think.
Living life. Not bad.
faunap
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. I have explained to you how the conception of “the sex of individual humans” cannot be distilled down into the size of the gametes, or the chromosomes, or any other overly reductionistic criteria, without special-pleading to ignore large swathes of real humans, like 1% of the total population. It’s not just gametes because there’s plenty of people that will never produce functional gametes. It’s not just sex-chromosomes because there’s women with XY chromosomes, and there’s people with XXY and XYY chromosomes, and there’s people (human chimeras) that don’t have just a single set of sex-chromosomes. Also, the truth of the matter is that “assigned female at birth” is a very useful term that is distinct from “chromosomal sex” such as in the case of women with XY chromosomes plus complete androgen insensitivity.
I don’t know why this is such a big issue for you. Do you feel you need to deny the science because you feel unsafe in shared spaces with trans-women? Or because you feel pressured into dating trans-women in order to avoid being called a bigot? Or do you really care that much about trans-women in sports? I don’t believe you’re a troll, but I believe you’re not being fully honest with us about your motivations and your reasons for being here.